Calendarization to Set your Rhythm

Want to know my little secret to never missing appointments, events, birthdays, and other big dates? I timebox my stellar to-do-lists across my calendar and set reminders.

Your time and attention are valuable resources which shouldn’t go waste. You need to choose how you spend your time making room for what’s important and filtering out the rest. Calendars are functional little tools to organize your super busy life and derive maximum benefit from the day. Providing a quick glance through your appointments, they keep your focus on the top tasks to accomplish and remind you of free slots to pursue long-cherished hobbies. Calendarization is a pre-planned process of organizing your activities in order to utilize time in an efficient manner and get into a disciplined routine.

In a digitized era, a lot of calendar apps are available to pen down your priorities and gain control over tasks. I list down the steps to help you with calendarized timeboxing:

• Note down your list of regular activities and record them in multiple columns of periodic frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, or semi-annually).
• Use a calendar app to schedule your routine tasks by setting date, time and duration for your daily tasks. Use the recurring mode to spread repetitive tasks over the year depending on their frequency of occurrence.
• Non-recurring tasks can be accommodated as and when they arise. You could block certain free slots in your calendar for accommodating unplanned schedules such as end-moment requests or adhoc tasks.
• Set online calendar reminders to appear at specified intervals may be hours or a day prior the appointment.
• Stick to your pre-set calendar daily and you will be able to comfortably accomplish much more.

Calendaring time offers a myriad of benefits and as a modern professional you can simply develop this straightforward practice to accomplish more at no cost.

• Calendarization helps you strike a balance between personal and professional life. It allows you to “get real” about how much you can accomplish in a day or week and ensures you don’t miss out on important commitments while spacing time for family, leisure travel and entertainment.
• A stringent timetable enhances your productivity and allows better collaboration with teams.
• Unplanned activities and interruptions to time make us less productive and unhappy. Hence timeboxing is the proper antidote to this as it gives control over your life and forces us to commit time beforehand to avoid end-moment rush.
• With a comprehensive overview record, can visualize the larger picture of how you’re spending your time to not only become more productive, but also appreciate time at your disposal.

All I can assure you is that when you box your time for what really matters, you will see your life change for the better!