Optimizing your time: do you give it a thought?

Learnings over two decades of being very busy

I read a book a while back which had nothing to do with calendar management, but it taught me a lesson for life: your time is your most precious resource. There's nothing else as clear as the currency of time, and it is in fact the only real currency that exists.

We trade time for money and then money for things all the time, and even then most people seem not to treat their time with the preciosity that they should. I am likely one of these people, but over time I tried to be more conscious of it and try to stay as organized with my time as possible and as a result I can spend my time on things that make me happy at work and in my personal life.

My calendar is likely the first and last thing I look at on my phone every day. I absolutely have no brain cycles to keep my appointments in my head. This is a statement and a confession, as I was writing this just as I pinged my German teacher telling him that the next day I could not make my lesson: I had a work trip but didn't realize this was coming so soon, and I forgot to organize my agenda (ironic, I know given the title of this post).

As someone who has a very busy calendar and very little time to waste around, thinking about ways to optimize the use of time was always a hot topic in my mind. Over time, I learned to make sure my calendar matches how my brain functions. Here are some lessons and things I've learned:

1. Align your calendar with your style and with how your brain functions

Here are mine for reference, figure out what works for yours.

Larger recurring meetings in the mornings

That's how I like starting my work days. Those meetings are usually anchors in my schedule, and they ensure my days start very predictably. I spread those through the week in my mornings.

When working in a more organized team, it can also help to keep meetings with smaller more senior groups at the start of the week, and widen your audience later in the week. This is of huge help when you need to work waterfall communications for a given project/theme. It is also hard to achieve if you're not in a high level position at the company and because of that you're not in charge of most of your meetings as you're not the organizer, but worth coordinating with your colleagues if possible. If you decide to have some default arrangement, at least you'll always gravitate to that and of course there will be exceptions. That's just part of working in a team vs isolated.

Practical example:

• Its budgetting time! Everyone loves planning budget (ok, joking!). You work with your counterparts in other teams to have a budget 0.1v. At the beggining of the week the executive team approves the budget and messaging, and by Tuesday you spoke with your directs, they spoke to theirs on Wednesday or Thursday, and the whole company knows it by Friday. Voilá!

1:1s in the afternoons

I keep those to the afternoons: at the start of the afternoons with my directs, and the later it gets in the day, then with busier people. Why? Because they are more likely to be unavailable and cancel once in a while, and then by the end of my day, my calendar gets a bit more unpredictable, but there are usually work items to resolve and having a suprise 30 minutes reclaimed at my calendar by 4pm is gold.

I do not like to stack all the 1:1s in the same day. Why not? Because then I do too much context switching in a day, and that for me is a brain grinder. By 4pm I will be hating my life, even though I do not actually hate my life.

2. Keep track of all your meetings

I have a sheet with all my meetings listed in it, the frequency and the duration. I categorize those. For 1:1s I usually use: direct report, peer, client, interview, mentoring, and so on. This way I can keep track of where I am spending my time, and assess if there are meetings I should be canceling. If at some point I see I have a weekly commitment of 30 hours of meetings, I know I am doing something wrong, because its unlikely I am getting any other work done than talking to people.

For project meetings, I create categories for them based on my objectives for the next three months. As an example: at the moment I am working a lot on Alfredo's pitch deck. So everything related to this pitch deck will be categorized as such.

3. Implode your calendar every 3 months

This is a way to keep my calendar current to my priorities. There's no space for meetings that I do not remember what they are for. If 1:1s with peers, for instance, stop being relevant, I kindly remove them from my schedule and let people know we'll book ad-hoc from there on.

Every 3 months your priorities will probably have slightly changed, and your calendar should change too, otherwise you'll spend time doing busy work instead of the very things you've decided that were importan

t.

4. Build in breaks and focus time

If you do not schedule, it won't happen, so figure out how long you can keep your brain “on” and make sure you take breaks. If you work from home, those are specially important because otherwise you'll literally seat at your desk without moving the whole day. Movement is important to keep. yourself healthy.

Practical examples:

• I avoid scheduling two 60 minutes meetings back to back. For me, it is hard to stay focused, or even to digest the first meeting before getting to the second, which means I will be thinking about what just happened instead of paying attention to what is in front of me. I generally avoid hour-long meetings, but if they need to happen, they do not happen all back to back.

• I am one of those annoying people who do stop to have lunch. That is not negotiable, in particular at an office setup. Usually my lunchs at my office past lives were booked for 12 or 12:30. At that point I was already 4-4.5 hours into my work day and it was important to chance scenery, walk to a restaurant/caffee and give my eyes a break from the screen. I rarely had lunch meetings.

• I avoid scheduling more than 90 minutes in sequence (unless its for focus time). I know I need to move, and I need to pee, and I need to refill my water. I use these breaks as a way to keep up with messages, emails and what not throughout the day. If I do not do that, when I will likely multitask, which is a beautiful way to say “not pay attention to anything, really”.

Have you ever thought about any of these topics I mentioned in detail? If not, what about you block 2 hours in your calendar in the next week and do a calendar review? If you'd like my Google Sheet template, and if so I will clean it up and share.