Citizens often ask how I personally organize my work. I use a lot of tools for personal efficiency. Today we’ll talk about the calendar.
Last time we talked about the task list: Personal Effectiveness: a Task List Most often, tasks in a task list are not tied to a specific time and place. So a task list won’t help plan your time for a day or a week. That’s what a calendar is for. You can write the task “Buy tickets to Kyiv” or “Pack a suitcase for the trip” in a task list, but the train’s departure time is better put in the calendar.
I have two calendars: personal and work. Though with experience I realized that just one is enough, so both of these calendars sync into each other.
For software, I use Google Calendar:
The calendar’s job is to show that there are only 24 hours in a day and thereby bring me back down to earth. It won’t work to meet people and hold a dozen meetings in one day. If I manage to do 5-6, that’s already a very good result. But usually it’s only 3-4 meetings.
With a calendar you can plan meetings not just for the week, but for several weeks, or even months, ahead. I have acquaintances who don’t know what they’ll be doing a week from now. With a calendar, I know what I’ll be doing a month from now, or two or three.
Google Calendar syncs with the iPhone. Ten minutes before an event in the calendar, the iPhone starts vibrating. That means it’s time to get ready and go to the meeting. But what about meetings you can’t get to in ten minutes? First, in Google Calendar I set how far in advance I need to be warned (and sometimes twice). Second, if I need to get to the meeting place, I put the travel time into the calendar as a separate event, called exactly that: “On the Road.”
Every day at five in the morning Google sends me an email with the meetings waiting for me that day. Another useful thing: Google can parse email and insert events into the calendar automatically. For example, when electronic plane tickets arrive, Google adds all the flights to the calendar automatically.
How people live without a calendar, I don’t know. I strictly recommend getting one.