Your Calendar is a sacred space
“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”
—Robert J. Sawyer
As the CEO/Boss/Supreme Leader/Head Honcho of a company, you will experience constant demands for your attention, time, and energy: sales calls, meetings with your team, admin work, family time, running errands, checking your social media, content creation, coaching clients, self-care time; the list can seem endless.
We’ve heard that multitasking has gone the way of the dodo (read: extinct) and that switching back and forth between tasks can actually decrease productivity, but the question remains: how do you set yourself up for success? How do you stay focused and in momentum? How do you say “no” to people or opportunities with grace?
Learning how to use intelligent filters in your decision making is an animal unto itself, but one of the first steps you can take to save yourself from burnout and exhaustion is to believe that your time is sacred and finite. We’ve heard the saying that you “can’t fill from an empty cup”, but how do you protect your cup?
You must believe that your time, and thus your calendar, is a sacred thing that must be protected. By creating guardrails around your time, you will:
- Increase productivity
- Reduce burnout & stress
- Build a predictable work flow
What follows is not a fully detailed look into how you integrate calendars and the tactics behind choosing and building scheduling softwares (there are some great resources out in the interwebs that you can google). Rather it will be an overview of how these tools can be effective at creating peace, predictability, and productivity so you can answer your call to service, while still serving yourself and your energy.
The 3 Steps to Taking Back Control of Your Calendar
#1 Create Your Ideal Schedule
Your first step is to outline your ideal calendar and identify what types of things or events could go in your calendar. Dream a little! What do you love doing? What do you dread? When are you the most creative and/or energized? When do you always find yourself reaching for another espresso?
Food for thought:
- What are the days that you just want to spend on relationship building and meeting up with people for coffee and conversation?
- When are you typically the most focused and organized to do admin work?
- When is your energy the highest for sales calls, or your creativity at its peak or marketing?
- What sort of meetings do you have to have with your team?
Brainstorm and begin crafting some boundaries. This DOES NOT mean you are going to schedule every single minute of every single day and you are NEVER allowed to change your mind.
Your goal is to bring an AWARENESS to how you would like to live on a daily basis, and how you can OPTIMIZE what you do by harnessing your natural rhythm and preferences.
As an example, I might create boundaries like these:
- Every Monday morning I’m going to allocate two hours to do my weekly planning.
- I am going to do sales calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays for no more than five hours, and I like having at least a 10 min break in between calls so I can stretch and a bathroom break.
- Wednesday afternoons I like to reserve for relationship building and professional development because seeing people mid-week is a great “pick me up”
- Fridays are my content creation days for the next week because I feel creative and energized
- I want to allocate Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings for team meeting so that we start off the week with the right attitude, and can make sure we’re in momentum by mid week
Here is the important part: Once I have decided on these boundaries, this is what I will live by; these are the rules.
Will there be exceptions? Of course! Don’t get scared that you have no room to move or change – your goal is to create a framework to play within and have visibility to what exceptions you can make. At the end of the day, you are still the boss of your own time!
#2 Commit to a Calendar
Once you’ve come up with those boundaries and really take ownership and direction of these, the second thing you have to do is actually have a calendar. Thanks to the availability of technology, you have tons of options: Apple’s iCal, Outlook Calendar, your Gmail calendar, etc. An easy way to choose one is to go with whatever matches up with your email service (if you use G-suite, use a google calendar; if you use Apple Mail, use iCal, etc).
Once you’ve chosen a calendar service, your next step is to make sure everything goes into it: business appointments, personal errands, family time, travel plans. This needs to be your be all-end all.
#3 Choose a Booking App
Once you’ve created your ideal calendar and now have a calendar you’re putting everything into, you need to create the gatekeeper: a mystical device that controls who receives the gift of your time and energy. This is also known as a booking, or scheduling, software. Using a scheduling service cuts down on any back and forth to book a time with someone – you just send them your link and they will find a time that works for them based on the guidelines you have created for yourself in step #1.
There are plenty of booking software integrations on the market, both free and paid, but here are some of the most popular ones:
Within each of those scheduling softwares, you have the ability to:
- Put boundaries on what people can get on your calendar for (sales calls, connection calls, etc)
- Create predictable frameworks around those interactions (how long the calls or meetings last, buffer time in between, a maximum number you will do per day, etc)
- Maximize your energy by only allowing people to engage with you when you choose
- Allow yourself to say “no” to people or opportunities that don’t serve your highest self
Making It All Come Together
All of this work is only effective if you use it consistently. If this is a new concept for you, there will be a learning curve, and that’s ok! When you want to be of service and help people, it can feel cringy to say no to people, or to say that you don’t have time. The powerful aspect of this process is that it gives you the ability to say yes or no without making it about the other person. It’s not them; you are honoring a promise you made to yourself, your energy, and your time by working within guardrails so that you can be of your highest self.
When someone asks you for a chat ——> send them your booking link.
When you want to schedule a sales call with a prospect ——> send them your booking link.
When you receive a request for an interview ——> send them your booking link.
What you have to remember is that YOU are the most important person in your business, and you need to stay happy, healthy, and energized in order to serve your people and create magic everyday.
