Calendars give your life the clarity and organization that everyone wants–but first, you need to make sure your calendar fits your lifestyle.
Are you on your phone constantly? Use your mobile calendar. Do you sit at a desk all day? Maybe a desk calendar is right for you. If you have a lot of notes to take, consider a daily planner.
Choosing Your System
Pick what system makes the most sense to you–whether that’s a key system, color coding, or whatever you understand the most. At Chores, we love color coding–it’s easy to tell at a glance what kind of event it is (and it has the added bonus of looking nice!).
You can also choose to separate your work and personal calendars. This has two benefits. One, you know just by looking at the calendar that it’s a personal or work event, and two, it helps clear your mind of work once you’re off the clock.
Planning Ahead of Time
Take some time each weekend and plan the week out ahead of you. This can be general planning that lays out the framework for your week, with any mandatory events put in and tasks you think you want to get done as a guideline.
Every night, you should take 15 minutes to plan for the next day. Put notes into each event on your calendar to remind yourself what you accomplished the previous day so you can be as efficient as possible each and every day.
Build In Free Time
When you take up every hour of your day with an event, meeting, or task, you don’t allow for the unexpected “what-ifs” that most of us get every day. Do your best to schedule some unstructured time into your calendar and simply mark it as “Busy” or something along those lines to ensure you have time to take care of anything you couldn’t have planned for.
If you don’t use that time, great! You have more time than you thought to work on other things that you had planned.
Break Down Tasks
Staring at large chunks of work on your calendar can be daunting. To prevent that, try breaking up your larger tasks into smaller ones that you can check off along the way. Turn that 3-hour block of work into 6 30-minute blocks of work, and all of a sudden it looks a lot more conquerable when you open your calendar to begin the day.
Assign Times To Each Task
A calendar should be so much more than just a list of things you need to do. When you keep it unstructured within a bulleted list, you can end up spending far too much time on one task. Blocking out time for a task can help structure your day better and keep you on track to get everything done that you need to.
When you hire Chores as a personal assistant, you’ll never have to worry about how your calendar looks. Let us organize your life so you can just live it!