This is the last post in the series of posts dedicated to efficient management of your busy schedule. This time I’ll talk about Coloring Your Calendar:
- With a pile of back-to-back meetings, your calendar looks like a wall filled with text boxes. They’re all look the same and you have to dig deeper into each one to see more details to determine if you can either move it to another day, cancel it or delegate if you need to squeeze another one in.
Here a PRACTICAL TIP for this one.
TIP #1: When adding an Appointment or a Meeting in your calendar always assign a specific Category, so all items in your calendar have a color code assigned. If you use Microsoft Outlook, the Category setting might look like the one below.
In other words, if the event is Urgent for you to attend, - mark it as “Urgent” and it will become Red colored in your calendar. If it is just Important, - assign to an “Important” category. It will become orange. As so on.
Each meeting or an appointment in your calendar must have a respective category assigned. This is a definitive requirement, if you want this tip to be efficient and effective.
This simple process will allow you to quickly determine how your next (or a current one) week will look like, - what days will be the most important ones (so you can start preparation early), what days are packed with conversations and tasks to do, how many and when you have personal events to attend, what day is the most suitable to shuffle your meetings around and squeeze a more important one, etc.
