Calendarizing Works

If you’re a fan of my approach called calendarizing, an essential first step is determining what percentage of time each week you can allocate to larger, more time-consumptive activities/projects that cannot be completed in between meetings, answering emails and carrying out other important components of our job.

If you determine that you can dedicate 50% of your typical week to these larger projects and to following up on requests that take more than two minutes, and that you cannot delegate, that sets a framework for managing your time.  For some people, the percentage of time available for calendarizing may be much less than 50%.

There are times where your time may be totally devoted to responding to the more urgent and important activities associated with your job, and for those weeks you simply may not be able to calendarize much of anything.  That’s OK.  If you work with the weeks each month where your ability to calendarize is more predictable, you will still benefit greatly from this approach to managing your time.

If I look at my schedule, there are several days a week where I am teaching or coaching, and I therefore know that those times are not available for calendarized projects.  I simply work around the reality of my schedule, and I maximize my use of the rest of my time so that I continue to make provisions for the bigger projects I want to attend to.

With calendarizing, we look for the next available space on our calendar, given our other commitments, and based on the priority of the projects we are seeking to calendarize, and we commit to a time where we will get these more time-consumptive projects completed despite our busy schedule.

For more information on calendarizing commitments, check out Chapter 32 in my book, The Fit Leader’s Companion: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Sustainable Leadership Success.