Effective Calendar Management

We all have 24 hours available to each of us in any given day. Yet, you often hear people complaining about how little time they have, with so many of us wishing that we could add more hours to our day.

So, how is it for you? Do you find that you just do not have enough hours in the day? Do deadlines catch up with you before you know it? Do you feel like you spend too much time in meetings? Do you get constant interruptions during your work hours? If your answer to any of these questions is YES, then this blog may be just for you.

1. Start with a Plan

It is important to always start with a plan for your day, week, month and even year. This is the best way to kickstart your journey for effective calendar management.

To start with, you need to set aside time, preferably at the beginning or end of each week, to plan how you want your calendar to look like. It may seem ironic that you need to take time out to make time, however, it is all about initially investing in a small amount of time in the beginning in order to get more time back later down the line.

Adopting the below planning practices is key to helping you achieve your goal of effective calendar management.

• Identify the time available to you in the week

• Prioritise and schedule your activities by taking note of the highly essential ones versus the not so essential ones.

• Review the time allotted to each activity.

2. Make Use of a Meeting Setup Platform

Setting up meetings can be quite tedious, and you can easily underestimate the amount of time that goes into it. It involves combing through your calendar to find available dates and times to align to another person’s schedules. This activity can take most of your time if not done smartly.

Nevertheless, technology has made life easier by introducing meeting scheduling platforms like Calendly. Calendly helps you to send your available slots to your clients, members or colleagues for meetings in just one clickable link.

To start, you will need to add any meetings, events and scheduled recurring meetings into your calendar so that they show you as being unavailable in your calendar. Once you have done that, it is a straightforward operation to proceed to automate your calendar with Calendly.

This helps to reduce the stress of combing through your calendar for meeting times, and going back and forth trying to find available dates with clients, members or colleagues.

3. Consider Transitions

In scheduling, it is imperative to keep an eye on transitions between meetings. Take time to review action items of the previous meeting immediately so that it remains fresh in your mind. You also need to allow time to prepare for upcoming meetings.

Please be reminded that physical meetings at different locations require travel and therefore, you will need to factor in travel time for physical meetings (before and after the meeting).

Although the next point can be often overlooked, care must also be taken to have small breaks between meetings. This helps to reduce stress and burn out.

4. Merge All Calendars 

Working with different calendars can become quite unmanageable and confusing especially if you sit on different boards. It can be brain draining trying to remember which calendar has the event you are looking for. There is also a possibility of easily missing meetings or events when managing multiple calendars.

Merging all calendars to one is the recommended approach. It saves you a lot of time and makes life simpler. This also gives the advantage of having a centralized calendar reminder to remind you of upcoming meetings/events.

You can easily find a simple guide on how to merge all calendars on Google.

5. Audit Past Calendars

In conclusion, there are several points that need to be taken into consideration in order to manage your calendar, and therefore your time more effectively and efficiently to get back time to focus on more important things.

However, if you are a lead pastor, a director or CEO, then you should not be managing your calendar yourself. This is one of those jobs that an assistant can do for you.

One example of working well with your assistant to manage your calendar is whenever you get a request for a meeting, reply to say that your assistant will be able to schedule in time for that meeting. You would then copy your assistant into that reply, with a ref number from 1-5. With 1 meaning, this is an urgent meeting that needs to be scheduled straight away, and 5 meaning, this is not an urgent meeting, so it can be scheduled within the month. It would also be helpful to add to that reference number, the length of time that you think is needed for the meeting. (e.g. 2-30 – This would be interpreted as a standard meeting which could be scheduled within the next 2 weeks for 30 mins).

If you are a leader who spends a lot of time scheduling meetings, then this approach will genuinely save you a lot of time.

I hope that these guidelines will help you to manage your calendar more effectively, giving you that much needed and precious extra time in your day.