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Episode Description
What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day.
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Script |426
Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes.
And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time.
Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days).
Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work.
I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office.
Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home.
I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s.
In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen.
It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you.
If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot.
Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus?
Hi Judy, thank you for your question.
There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication.
Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done.
Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do.
Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics.
Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists.
All great features.
And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do.
Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you.
With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two.
With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer.
Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise.
But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.
When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day.
For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete.
If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do.
However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work.
Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have.
One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task.
Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday.
On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day.
I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates.
Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day.
This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work.
With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted.
Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier.
I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45.
I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did.
So where should a task list fit into your overall system?
Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it.
If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month.
On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin.
Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work.
That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes.
This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you.
If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable.
The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work.
I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away.
This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else.
I hope that has helped, Judy. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.