Session 7 – Fast Action Step #4 – Setup Your Calendar For Success

Fast Action Steps

1. Who could help you review or manage your calendar? (i.e. spouse, assistant, mentor, coach, friend, etc.)
2. What boundaries, priorities, and expectations should guide how you shape your calendar?
3. Add the items from your Annual Plan into your calendar.
4. Add the items from your Best Week into your calendar. The weekly repeatable items can be set to repeat automatically.

Session Transcript

We’ve been looking at, What do you do when there’s not enough time for leadership development? In the last session, we looked at Fast Action Step #3 – How to Create Your Best Week.

We’ve looked at 3 Fast Action Steps as we moved through Module 1…

Fast Action Step #1 – Take Control of Your Schedule to help you with the mindset – the mind shift – for managing your time and focus.

Fast Action Tip #2 – Create an Annual Plan to help you get your most important people and events in place first so you can effectively plan the rest of your schedule to make time for what matters most.

Fast Action Step #3 – Complete the Best Week tool to help you be most intentional with how you use your time.

In this session, I am going to show you Fast Action Step #4 – How to Use these tools now that you’ve completed them to setup your calendar. This is where we bring it all together.

Take just a moment right now and download the Worksheet for this session so you can follow along.

Your Best Week that you’ve created the last session can paste right into your calendar.

One of the top 4 questions that business leaders ask us on a regular basis is, how can I increase efficiency and effectiveness? They ask this because time is limited as we talked about before and, consequently, has great value.

Those who maximize their influence and effectiveness, do so because they have a very intentional plan for life and a bold, compelling vision for their work.

This session is all about your actual calendar which you use on a daily basis so whether you do that on Outlook, Google, Apple, written calendar on your desk, if it’s on the fridge – however you do it. We’re going to give you 4 tips for managing your calendar more effectively.

A couple of these are a bit of review and a couple of them will be new for you. But I want to give them all to you all in the same place so that you have them together and you can use them to make progress as quickly as possible. There are few things which dramatically improved how I spend my time at work, at home, and my leisure time, and I’ve picked these up from a number of organizational leaders over the years and compiled them together into a list that works for me, and I know that’s going to make a big difference for you.

Let’s look at the 4 tips for managing your calendar more effectively: Number 1, which we’ve already completed:

1. Create an Annual Plan
2. Complete the Best Week tool
3. Get some help
4. Only one person manages the calendar

I want to share with you five simple practices that will help you as you set up your calendar:

1. Only the assistant sets appointments.
2. Responses go to the assistant.
3. Schedule a weekly meeting.
4. Assistant tracks how I spend my time.
5. Setup procedures for calendar activities.

a) How travel and accommodations notes and appointments are added to my calendar,
b) Appointments are set for the actual time I will spend at an event or conference rather than setting a “full-day” appointment,
c) How meetings are added to the calendar and what details go in the notes to help me prepare for the meeting.

Notice, that we have started putting small procedures in place that help us to even simplify our day-to-day activities, even down to the micro level of managing the calendar. This idea of simple leadership and simplifying the chaos that we all live and work in, is part of our DNA. And the more that you get comfortable, and the more that you get familiar with how to do this,  the easier it’s going to become for you.

As you make progress, you can decide what procedures or practices are important for you and what works best for you.

If you haven’t already, take a moment right now to download the Worksheet on this page and complete the action steps for this session.

A couple of challenges you will run into is, How much time should I be spending on certain activities? And, how much time am I spending on them right now?

Next Session

In the next session, I am going to show you a simple process so you can know how you are spending your time and a simple tool that you can use to help you with this. And we will wrap up our Fast Action Steps and bring it all together.

In the meantime, remember, you don’t have to get it perfect, you just need to take the next step.

I’ll see you the next session![/text_block]