How to Schedule Your Week with a Calendar - 20 Basics to Advanced Tips

I’ve gone from a forgetful, always late and overly stressed person to someone who is punctual, confident about what I am working on every day, doubling my productivity to 70+ tasks per week and is very disciplined when it comes to managing my time. The calendar is a key tool that has helped me along the way. 

The calendar is the most fundamental tool for personal time management. Managing time is really about planning our time, investing our attention and completing commitments that will make progress on our goals. 

This article is a best practices guide on how to use a digital calendar effectively, from basics to advanced tips. You can start with Google Calendar. 

But first, let’s look at the top three mistakes that (I’ve made myself and) I see people generally make when using a calendar, from my middle management experience of up to 30-people teams in various startups. Then I’ll share a list of basics to advanced tactics to help you set up your calendar effectively.

Top 3 Mistakes People Make When Using a Calendar:

Mistake #1: Not Using a Calendar at All 

I used to be the most forgetful person I know. I was constantly late to meetings or forgetting them, and had things blow up in my face due to failed commitments, missed deadlines. I was constantly stressed and this impacted my self-esteem a lot. 

Then I began to use the calendar to block time for appointments, set tasks or other types of reminders/commitments like flight information, personal errands, birthdays. 

Trying to remember all these things is a mistake. It’s a waste of time and of memory. Because it’s widely proven how limited our short-term, active memory is i.e we can only remember about 4-7 items in active memory before we start to forget. Delegating the remembering to our calendar will make room for us to actually engage fully with the things we planned. Perhaps even gaining some moral superiority over forgetful people like you once were.  

We can then use our attention to focus on more value-added tasks like actually doing the work that will produce results, not be concerned about all the logistical details of how, when to do the work. Given the amount and velocity of new information coming at us daily as tasks, appointments, new projects, ideas, events etc., keeping it in our heads is almost a sure way to be stressed, burned out, scatter our focus and risk consistently missing important commitments. 

Mistake #2: Not Having Discipline and Integrity with The Calendar 

If you are using a calendar (which is great!), the most important thing is keeping the integrity of the calendar. This simply means, actually complete what you plan to do on your calendar (YES!). The psychology of this is by completing tasks consistently, not only will you get work done but more importantly, you create an ongoing accountability with yourself, which will help you be more disciplined, more likely to continue to momentum in the future. Sort of like gamifying productivity to your own benefit.   

If you cannot meet the appointment or task, re-negotiate it with yourself and others and approach with the same rigor as with a new task. This preserves integrity and also gives us some buffer for interruptions, unplanned emergencies. But do not make it a habit to always postpone things on your calendar, this is procrastination and it will make your calendar a nice-to-have or nice-to-do list instead of a series of must dos to progress towards your goals on a daily basis. This difference in mindset is night and day. 

Mistake #3: Letting The Calendar Be An Inbox for Other People’s Priorities Instead of a Proactive Tool to Manage Your Most Important Agendas

If you use a calendar only to accept invites from other people for meetings, this is for you. The key question after you are using a calendar consistently, with integrity is: What (should) goes on your calendar? This is a strategic question because what goes on your calendar will typically get done. Aligning what you put on your calendar on a weekly basis with key tasks required to get done to make progress on key projects, goals is a master skill of execution, on a personal and team basis.

Therefore, for you personally, don’t let your calendar be crowded by blocks of time that reflect other people’s agendas. Your calendar should be a place to plan and get the most important things done for you, first and foremost. If you don’t take charge of where your time goes, other people will and they are not responsible for you achieving your goals or not.

In short, use a calendar, keep the integrity of your calendar and use it to schedule most important tasks for your goals in advance. These are the critical habits that solve most problems you’ll ever have about managing your time in a proactive, intentional and effective way.

Next, a specific deep-dive into how to do that:

Key Tips on Scheduling with Google Calendar:

These are strategies and tactics on how to schedule your time on a calendar. For how-tos of GCal features, you can check out the resource here.

Ten Basics Tips for Blocking Time on Your Calendar:

• Tip #1: Start planning from a week-view, not a day-view: This will give you an overview of key activities and focus for each day, which is critical for prioritization. It helps you answer when the going gets tough, what you can focus that will be most important
• Tip #2: Plan in the redundant/logistical things first: like travel, eating, bed time etc. This is not so you forget to go to work, eat or sleep. It is to give you an accurate account of how much time you have left to do other things (it is often less than you think. It also gives you a sense of structure and boundaries)

(Examples like morning routines, travel time to & from work, workouts etc.)

• Tip #3: Always give you an actionable title for your event or task: to suggest what you need to do so you can do it right away (e.g. go to gym for workout A or draft proposal for boss on ABC client)
• Tip #4: Choose “Event” for time-specific meetings, choose “Tasks” for work. Event means you have to be there for the full duration, tasks are flexible and can be completed within the day. Also set in recurring periods like once per day, week or month for routines or regular appointments. You won’t have to reschedule them every week
• Tip #5: Set the default meeting/task duration to 15 minutes. This correlates to a famous law Parkinson’s Law states that work tends to expand to fill in allocated time you’re setting yourself up to complete tasks as fast as possible. You can always spend more time on the task

(Go to settings ??> Event settings)

• Tip #6: Set a 30 minutes reminder option for all events so you can be notified of coming events throughout your day. 30 minutes allows enough time to prepare or travel to most places for meetings from where you are. Also enable notification reminders on all your phone, watch, tablet
• Tip #7: Add all needed information for an event when you block it, such as meeting notes, travel itinerary or other notes as to make it frictionless for you to do the event or task

• Tip #8: Let your calendar add in meeting events from emails or travel itinerary tickets. This automates scheduling once you receive an email with the information
• Tip #9: Subscribe to other calendars for special schedules like your co-workers’, shared calendar for projects, class timetables. This lets you fill in your calendar quickly and create a filter on your personal calendar
• Tip #10: Color-coding blocks based on projects or priorities helps to have an overview of the amount of time allocated per week and balance it as your priority. Block more time for priorities and cut back on low priority work

(An example of how I use about 2-3 color for special projects, routine and exercise)

Five Advanced Tips for Blocking Time on Your Calendar:

• Tip #1: Always block time for Most Important Tasks (MITs) in 50 minute blocks, at least twice per day, at your peak performance hours (whenever you feel most alert). This is commonly 9am - 11am and 2pm to 4pm daily, for most people, are the peaks of their ultradian rhythm
• Tip #2: Plan your week ahead, ideally on Sunday or every 7-day interval. This allows you time to reflect on past week’s performance and time to schedule in MITs for the coming week. If you plan your week on Wednesdays, you lose the overall perspective of what’s important as you’ll likely be caught up in the week’s urgent and immediate demands
• Tip #3: Reschedule all items from the previous week before planning the new week. This ensure you don’t miss any pending deadlines or emergencies that came up during your last week
• Tip #4: Review your calendar at the end of day, replan for the next day & keep things current. You’ll often realize there are things you did on schedule, and there are things you didn’t and there are new things that came up. All of these must be reprioritized given what’s most important, in your own assessment, actions to be taken in coming days to make progress on your projects, goals. Delegate, delete non-essential items and focus on MITs
• Tip #5: Plan in play time and other essentials like learning, errands. This ensures you don’t dread looking at your calendar and it should remain you to have balance of work/place in your week. A good rule is one hour for relationships like dates, family, for learning like reading, online courses, events and for self-care like meditation, workouts

(Here’s a personal checklist I use on Todoist to schedule in essential activities)

Five Super Tips for Blocking Time on Your Calendar:

• Tip#1: Sync your calendar with a to do list application (suggest: Todoist) for task/time management. You can input tasks in Todoist with a set time limit, due dates, attach files and it will sync and add into your calendar. I have personally doubled my productivity from an average of 30 tasks completed per week to about 70+ tasks

(Go to Todoist > Settings > Integrations > Sync your Google Calendar)

• Tip#2: Select a few commitments and make a serious effort to keep your commitment. When you review your schedule regularly, you’ll get a sense of how many things you can actually do within a week. Commit to 70% of that and no more. This ensures you overdeliver, hit your targets and keep your momentum constantly on. This is important to avoid motivational slumps or burning out. You’ll soon develop a self-image as a productive person and this create an ongoing positively-reinforcing cycle
• Tip#3: Treat personal appointments as seriously as work appointments, e.g. workouts, errands or personal projects. This is key as you’ll tend to slack off on your personal commitments. Your mind doesn’t know the difference and you would be much better off just completely everything as scheduled
• Tip#4: Always ensure you have a minimum of 3 key blocks planned for your most important projects every week. This is a simple practice that requires discipline. It is very easy to fill the calendar with low-value meetings all day versus doing the hard work required to move projects forward. Make sure you lock it in, otherwise your time will be consumed by daily busy work
• Tip#5: Adopt a weekly review practice like the Weekly GTD Review. I have consistently done this practice for 3 years without fail and it has given me tremendous clarity, reduced my stress and ensure I maximize my time working on important goals, for most of the time

(My personal weekly review checklist on Sunday morning, usually takes 1-3 hours to review my week)

Call to Action: Setup Your Calendar for This Week (Time Required: 45 minutes)

Step one: Start from Monday. Schedule all your logistical, everyday must-do-anyways tasks (10 minutes to do)

• Block your awake time & morning routine (suggest: 30 minutes)
• Block your bed time & night routine (suggest: 30 minutes)
• Block breakfast, lunch, dinner (3o minutes/meal)

You can add emoticons to your daily activities for fun here. Just copy & paste it in.

Step 2: Schedule the most important tasks (limit to 3-4 per day) (15 minutes to do)

• 50 minutes of uninterrupted focus per task, minimum 2 tasks/day
• Color these blocks red to visual remind it’s a top priority in the calendar

Step 3: Set all day-specific event-specific reminders, events for each day on the top bar of the calendar like deadline, travel information etc. (5 minutes to do)

Step 4: Ensure about roughly 30% or ? of calendar is unscheduled time (account for emergencies, slacking off time so you feel stressed for time or guilty you can’t finish all tasks all the time) (5 minutes to do)

Step 5: Review calendar at the end of week on Sunday. (10 minutes to do)

1. Ask yourself ‘What did I get done, on schedule this week?’
2. Ask yourself ‘What didn’t I get done, on schedule this week?’
3. Ask yourself ‘What can I learn/improve to schedule better next week?

I hope you will try out all the tips and see results for yourself. If you find the article useful, let me know:

• What tips have you found most valuable?
• Your suggestions on other topics I can share in the future?

Thanks and have a productive #workfromhome!

Long.