4 Simple Reasons Your Calendar is Out of Control
Time management isn’t about time. It’s about you.
Your calendar is out of control because you lack the character traits to control it.
4 reasons your calendar is out of control:
#1. Lack of humility.
Running around like a chicken with its head cut off seduces people who need to feel important. Your calendar is out of control because arrogance drives you.
Arrogance warns, “Anyone who has enough time must be a loser.”
You underestimate how long projects take because you overestimate your abilities.
Humility accepts capacity and ability while aspiring to improve at the same time.
Solution:
Embrace humanity. Accept limitations. Live a big rock life.
#2. People pleasing.
People pleasers do things they don’t want to do.
People pleasers can’t set boundaries. A person without boundaries is controlled by others.
Solution:
Practice setting boundaries. Begin small. Say no with kindness.
#3. Distraction.
Multitasking is only effective when work is brainless. Meaningful work requires concentration.
How much meaningful work are you doing in the average day? You can’t do two meaningful things well at the same time.
Solution:
Choose one meaningful job every day. Block out time to complete it. Include a few minutes to mentally prepare – turn off notifications, breathe, determine what success looks like, get busy.
#4. Indecisiveness.
A person who can’t decide wastes time exploring options.
Solution:
- Determine the reason for making a decision.
- Reflect on the benefit if you make the right decision. How will life be better if the decision goes well?
- Consider the worst that could happen.
- Explore three options, no more.
- Decide to decide. “I’m going to spend 30 minutes exploring options before I make a choice.”
- Break one big decision into several small decisions.
- Be willing to change your mind. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy.
What do you notice about people whose calendar is out of control?
How might leaders get better control of their calendar?
I don’t always fully agree with your posts but they often make me think which I enjoy…however this post is 100% on point. Fully booked calendars due to these four reasons causes so much organizational stress and poor performance. It is one of the main contributors to teams under performing as they never “have time” to develop as a team. Thank you for this post!
Thanks Dan. As time passes and I look back at things I’ve written, I don’t always agree with myself. It’s a pleasure to be useful.
What do you notice about people whose calendar is out of control?
They lack clear priorities. Everything is important.
Dan–a lot of great points in your post. I love these points.
–You underestimate how long projects take because you overestimate your abilities.
–People pleasers can’t set boundaries. A person without boundaries is controlled by others.
–Multitasking is only effective when work is brainless. Meaningful work requires concentration.
Thanks Paul. I’m glad you brought up priorities. In a short post, more things are left out than included. Establishing priorities is essential to managing our calendar.
I am learning how to manage my calendar and priorities. How would you suggest I manage the calendar and still continue to practice an open door policy. I feel that limiting available time to “office hours” would then be perceived as limited openness and availability to personnel.
An open door policy where the person who comes in feels they aren’t getting your full attention is worse than an open door policy with clearly stated boundaries. Tell your people that they can always drop by. And if they are going to need more than five minutes of your undivided attention, they should come by during “office hours”.
For example, we are mostly working remotely, using MS Teams. If I need to reach out via Chat, I send the following: “Good morning/afternoon. Is now a good time for you to discuss X? I think it will take about X minutes.”
Conversely, if someone reaches out to me, I respond “I am in the middle of something. Give me until X to wrap that up.”
I do the same in person: if someone stops by and I am in the middle of something, I let them know now is not a good time.
Brilliant Jennifer. Love how there are no excuses or apologies in your approach.
Hi Jasmine. I think we’re always learning to manage our calendars.
I see your point about being available. It’s important. A couple thoughts come to mind that might be useful.
#1. Train everyone on how deep work gets done. We all need uninterrupted time to focus on important work. It sounds good to be available to anyone at the drop of a hat, but it’s not effective. It gives too much power to others.
The exception to closing the door once in a while is someone who’s job requires constant availability. When a doctor is on-call, for example.
#2. Allow people to establish closed-door times. These are times you’re going to focus on deep work.
#3. No rule is unbreakable. If the house is on fire, go ahead and barge in. But, how frequently is the house on fire.
#4. Establish open-door hours. Suppose every morning from 10 to 11 and 2 to 3 is pop-in-time. Enable people to work around the best times to pop in.
#5. Model healthy time management for your team/organization. You want the people on your team to take care of themselves. Why would you treat yourself otherwise? It’s OK to value yourself.
When a leader says one thing, “take care of yourself,” but does take care of her/himself, people ignore what they say and follow what they do.
Just some thoughts.
You ask a great question. It’s a journey. Perhapps the simpliest thing to do is to have some honest conversations with the team about time, calendars, and self-care would be in order.