Scheduling Actions in Your Calendar
"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule but to schedule your priorities." - Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The strategy is simple: Schedule your key actions for the day in your calendar for a specific start and end time.
This Productivity strategy can be extremely effective, depending on your circumstances. Indeed, many productivity experts tout this as THE most important technique in all of time management, but I know from personal experience that it can be challenging to implement. Not because it’s complicated or difficult to implement, but simply because almost every day, unexpected things arise that throw off a meticulous schedule.
There are two benefits to this strategy:
Estimating time and having to place these timed actions in your calendar helps you to be more realistic about what you can accomplish in the day. After making the estimates, you may find you have to eliminate some planned actions or be able to add some.
Both the time estimates and putting them in your calendar serve to give you mini-deadlines, so you are more likely to follow the 80/20 Rule and stop working on something when it hits the point of diminishing returns, instead of continuing to tinker with something trying for perfection. Parkinson’s Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", and there is some truth to that. Setting time limits on each task is your best way to fight against Parkinson’s Law.
Personally, sometimes it works great for me, and sometimes not so well. It always helps me to put an estimated time for each task, to ensure I’m being realistic about what I can get done during the day. Since I’m an optimist by nature, once I add the time estimates, I often find my initial thoughts for what I’ll accomplish during the day were not realistic so I eliminate the lowest priority items, preventing frustration at the end of the day.
As with everything in Happiful, I recommend that instead of rejecting it, try it to see if it works for you.
Here’s the best way to do it:
Of course, I strongly recommend you create your plan for each day, the day before.
Fill out your Happiful Planner as usual with your MVPs (Most Vital Priorities) and other planned actions, as well as your scheduled commitments. (If you’re not using the Happiful Planner, just do this with your to-do list.) Number them in order of importance.
Then, estimate how long it will take to complete each action on your Planner or to-do list, and then write the number of the action in the calendar section of your Happiful Planner identifying when you plan to work on that action. (If you’re not using the Happiful Planner, put the numbers in whatever calendar you’re using, but the paper Happiful Planner makes this much faster than actually putting all of them into your online calendar.)
Give it a try every day for a week and see if it improves your productivity.
