Using a Calendar for Better Time Management: What I do (Part 1)

 I use Trello to keep track of everything I have to do, as seen by my multiple blog posts on it (task tracking for a big class, personally, and a conference and a whole board about podcasts I listen to). However, I also use my calendar to help me manage my time, so I actually get most of it done. I use my calendar to plan out when I will work on certain tasks and to force myself to actually recognize what is a reasonable task list.

[Also posted on medium.]

Confession time: I’ve always struggled with planning more tasks than I actually have time for. This is due to many of the usual suspects: not time-boxing strongly enough, having more tasks than will fit in a 40-hour work week, and the planning fallacy of underestimating how long something will take me.

Over the years, I’ve fiddled, gotten rid of, and layered different strategies for managing my time and task list such that things are much less messy and I’m overworking myself less. And since reflection is useful, I decided to start a blog post series on my strategies. Perhaps it will be useful for this blog’s readers to see what I do and my general approach to managing my time, and how my calendar is a useful tool.

However, I will be the first to tell you that I don’t think everything I do is for everyone. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all. And I know that some of what I do is a bit extra, but it helps me, and your mileage will vary. Instead, I hope to share enough detail of what I do, why I do it, and why it works for me, that it’ll be helpful enough for others to lift it and interpolate for their situation.

This post will focus on the basics of what an event in my calendar means, and then later posts will be additions and upgrades to that basic meaning.

A calendar event is a time commitment

All time commitments are events on my calendar. When someone first thinks of a calendar event, they likely think it represents a time and place they have to be, even if that place is a video conference. A long time ago, I read of the idea of time boxing, where I block out times on my calendar for work sessions, and I love this technique. It reframes calendar events not as actual time+place specific events but as time commitments.

Time commitments are anything and everything when it comes to demands on your time. In my case, it’s work sessions on teaching tasks (grading, content prep, writing exams, lecture prep, etc.), writing a blog post, working on my podcast, etc. They aren’t tied to a specific place and time (except for some constraints like must do during work hours on my computer). However, they are still things I have to spend time on, and therefore, they belong on the calendar just as much as meetings.

The calendar becomes the hub for all time commitments

These calendar events help me because they visually show how little work time I have every week for new requests on my time. My current commitments require a certain amount of time, and I can’t “squeeze in” or “make time for” another thing. Though, currently, I’ve swung a bit too far in this direction that if I do see a gap, I always fill it with something rather than just work less or leave it blank as a buffer, but that will be a later blog post.

An integral part of making blocking out time useful is always consulting my calendar before committing to more work. Whenever a new time commitment arises, I consult my calendar to see if it will fit. Usually, I discover it won’t, which gives me a strong reason to say no or negotiate when I have the meeting or the deadline for this new thing.

When I do agree to this new time demand, it goes into my task tracker and calendar immediately, including for commitments months in the future (like reviewing for a venue). This process is key to ensuring I don’t overbook myself. This segues to one other aspect of this before I close this post.

Use recurring events

Just like there are recurring meetings, there are recurring work sessions. Therefore, create them! I create recurring work sessions wherever possible. It removes the overhead of making those work sessions every day/week and re-deciding when I’ll do them. It also frees me from worrying whether I’ll get something done. I already know when I’ll work on it. Therefore, that worry can happen when I’m working on it and not now.

Here are some of the recurring events I have on my calendar:

  • Email — Twice daily for 30 minutes (Monday morning is 45 minutes). Once in the morning after I’ve done about one hour’s worth of work and once about 1.5 hours before I plan to stop working for the day. The former is to ensure I get something done before my email might derail me. The latter is to make sure I have some buffer and don’t “rabbit hole” into “just one more email before I stop” and therefore am really late to get home.
  • Reading/Writing time — Every day, usually before I do my morning email, I spend 30 minutes reading something and another 30 minutes working on some project. This time is not for teaching or things with deadlines that are soon. They are more for things that have a far-away deadline or are important but have no urgency attached to them.
  • Lecture updating — Once a week for 3 hours, the day(s) before my first lecture of the week.
  • Content update — Once a week for 1 hour, plan out what changes need to be made to my course materials, delegate what I can to teaching staff, confirm the changes I asked for last week, etc.
  • Monthly check-in — Once a month for 1.5 hours, I check in with my big-picture career plans, update my CV, and look a few months ahead to see what is coming up that I should start planning for.
  • Travel — Twice a day to and from campus. This is to remind me that commuting takes time, and I really do need to stop at a certain time if I want to get home in time for my family.

An Every Week Day Event Should Be Five Separate Weekly Events

For daily events, create five weekly events, one for each day of the week, instead of a recurring event that is weekly and Monday through Friday. I use Google Calendar, and when I move a recurring event, my options are to change it once, for all recurring events after the one I’ve moved, or all the recurring events in that series. Therefore, I find it easier to go through the upfront extra effort to create five weekly events.

I do this because each day of the week sometimes looks different. Like, a weekly meeting may only happen at 9 am on Wednesday one semester, which means while I normally would want to have my reading/writing time then, I can’t. So I need to shift those to later in the day and leave my email time at 10 am, in case anything is urgent. It’s a lot easier to do that if the events are weekly on a specific day of the week rather than shifting that event every week and not extrapolating that change to all later events.

Variation: Using Large Blocks

A less detailed variation of this process that I used to do is blocking out large blocks to do all the things for a given project. For example, I blocked out Tuesday and Thursday mornings for all tasks for teaching, while Friday afternoon could be all about research. I found this useful initially because I didn’t yet have a good sense of how long things take me (I track how I spend my work time, so I have much better estimates now, but that’s a blog post for another day). But simple large blocks are a nice way to get started, and all it needs is paying attention to whether those blocks are sufficient time to actually finish all of the tasks for that project.

Conclusion

So that’s it for my first post of this series. Was this helpful? The overall philosophy here is to visually represent how much time I have devoted to what and use that to be realistic about my time constraints and not over-commit. Then, there are some tips on how to do this to make it easier.

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