Control Your Time: 6 Steps for Your Calendar

There is never enough time. Julie Zhuo shares her 6 most useful tips to rule your calendar.

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Time is precious, it’s the one thing we can never get more of.

A greater portion of our waking hours is devoted to the pursuit of productivity, of creating something useful for the world.

There is always the sense that there is never enough time. Or maybe there is, but we spend it recklessly, paying large sums for little return only to find ourselves coming up short for what’s truly important.

The most challenging and worthwhile task is good time management. This is what productivity boils down to.

Here are Julie Zhuo most useful tips to rule your calendar:

1. Schedule enough large chunks of time on your calendar to focus on the work. Makers should aim to have at least six chunks of three-plus hours of uninterrupted work time on their calendar every week

2. Go through your calendar at the beginning of every week and write out your top 3 priorities. Block off 30 minutes every Monday morning to study your calendar. Start by identifying the three most important things you want to accomplish that week and make sure there is time blocked out for those things

3. Question if you truly need to be at this meeting. You should attend a meeting when: a) you believe your presence will change the outcome in a leveraged manner, or b) you will be much more effective as a result of being there. If a meeting does not fulfill one of these two criteria, then take it as a sign that maybe you don’t need to be there

4. Ask if the meeting can be made more efficient. Is there a clear agenda or purpose for the meeting? Are there unengaged people in the meeting? Can a big meeting be split into smaller and more focused meetings? Is the discussion in the meeting going off-track?

5. Create time for learning and inspiration. Not everything that is important is urgent, and there is no better example of this than taking the time to invest in ourselves. If the training makes you even 1% more effective in your job over the next year, it will be worth the 2 days spent

6. Be conscientious of which things you are doing because you love it, and which you are doing because it is important. Balance your time. Some things on your work calendar are there because you love doing them, they resonate with you and give you energy. This is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with the job you are hired to do

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