Smart Scheduling: How To Manage Calendar Requests, Free up Hours, and Achieve High-Impact Wins

Amidst the many responsibilities that busy executives face, mastering the art of time management becomes nothing short of imperative to keep burnout at bay.?

That’s why we recommend nailing how you manage calendar requests and scheduling by leveraging an Executive Assistant (EA) or Engagement Manager (EM).?

Using time efficiently and effectively is a non-negotiable for successful leadership. Without this critical skill, you may well be selling yourself, your EM, and your team short.

For this reason, managing an executive's calendar is one of the most critical aspects of an EA or EM’s role. It's more than just setting up meetings - it's a game plan for boosting productivity, investing in your reputation, and achieving those high-impact wins.?

Read on to find out how to efficiently manage calendar requests and free up massive time through an EA or EM to achieve success without sacrificing what matters most.?

What Is the Role of an Executive Assistant to a CEO?

It's common for executives to feel frazzled, pulled in too many directions, and stretched too thin. However, we’ve yet to come across a leader who believes they can still perform at their best in these conditions.?

Not only that, but you also risk neglecting and even harming the relationships you’ve worked hard to build in the pursuit of your company’s vision.

That’s what makes the decision to work with an EA a pivotal moment in any leader’s journey, and it is, in our opinion, truly one of the most valuable hires you can make.?

At Mindmaven, we’ve created a new role that transforms EAs into rockstar Engagement Managers (EM). An EM is a hybrid between a skilled EA and a Chief of Staff, whose primary responsibility is empowering you to reach your fullest potential as a leader.

An EM helps you achieve two primary objectives: Freeing up massive amounts of time in your schedule and increasing the quality of your interactions.?

The result is an invaluable partner who plays an integral role in enabling you to be the leader your organization needs to reach its fullest potential.

How Do You Identify a Bottleneck in Business?

Your time is your most valuable asset. Yet it’s so easy to repeatedly mis-invest that resource in what’s urgent rather than what truly moves the needle.?

Your time becomes spent on tactical, low-impact aspects of being an executive, such as managing an overcapacity inbox, booking back-to-back meetings, and arranging undefined travel details. And you begin to experience increasingly-longer hours while feeling increasingly less productive.?

The result is that you begin to act as a bottleneck, coming at the expense of your direct reports’ needs.?

How To Break Free From Being Your Business’s Bottleneck

As a leader, your time is as valuable as it is scarce. You’re never going to find time to work on those important-but-not-urgent projects you’ve been waiting to make progress on.?

For that reason, you have to make the time by investing it only in proactive tasks that matter most. Of course, continuously categorizing what projects, tasks, and meetings need your attention most is time-consuming in itself. That’s where an EM comes into play.?

An EM helps by tracking your commitments and scheduling your day based on your most important priorities - resulting in skyrocketing productivity that revolves around Intent.?

How To Successfully Manage Calendar Requests and Scheduling

Calendar management is no walk in the park. While scheduling might appear simple at a glance, just like any multi-layered puzzle, they hold complex challenges (another reason we believe EM’s are worth their weight in gold).?

The traditional approach to scheduling is like juggling thoughts in your mind without a safety net. Our brains weren’t built for this overload, leading to things inevitably slipping through the cracks.?

As time passes, the pressure grows, as does the stress. So, it would be fair to say that successfully managing your calendar is more than avoiding mistakes of overlooked details and unmanaged schedules - it’s about lightening the mental load for executives like yourself. (And you might not realize just how heavy that burden is until it’s gone.)

Effective scheduling is the foundation of a successful EA/exec partnership.?

• It clarifies your purpose and lets you easily identify how and where you want to use your time.
• Maintaining a well-managed calendar allows your EA and yourself to be more productive and gives you the resources to focus on what matters most.
• It provides a clear view of how you are spending your time.
• Allowing you and your EA to identify and review.
• Avoid scheduling more calls/meetings than necessary.
• It frees up massive time and mental load to help you achieve a much greater work-life balance.?

Therefore, calendar management is far more than inputting events on a calendar; it’s about developing your Intent Superpower - creating clarity and purpose. A well-managed calendar is the key to boosting productivity and ensuring that you are set to tackle what truly matters.

Reduce Pressure on Your Calendar With Improved Time Management?

Could your schedule do with freeing up some much-needed space for strategic planning and creative thinking? One of the best places to start is to reduce the time your calendar gives to unproductive meetings and other reactive activities.??

Because of our reactive nature, we often don’t want to upset people, so we say “yes” to attending more meetings than we explicitly need to. But there is a simple way around this …?

Try This Simple Exercise To Reduce Pressure on Your Calendar?

Here’s a quick exercise to instantly reduce pressure on your calendar:?

1. List three to five types of meetings that typically don’t yield much value.?
2. Create a series of rules around how to deal with each of them.
3. Decide which you wish to say “no” to and which you can push back or delay.

Alternatively, at the end of every week, look at next week’s calendar and determine which meeting will be your least productive. Then, simply cancel it and replace it with Whitespace Time.?

What Is a Whitespace Meeting???

Plotting Whitespace Time in your calendar is all about blocking out space to be used either for the best thinking you’ve ever done or activities that help you to reduce mental stress.?

When you’re in meetings all day, your brain is conditioned to be reactive. But when you're doing deep thinking, you need to be proactive. Reactive thinking is actually easier because it’s natural to react to things. Whereas proactive thinking requires effort, and that’s why a lot of people don’t end up engaging in it.?

Whitespace Time allows you to create space for proactive thinking on important tasks that truly move the needle rather than what’s reactive and urgent.?

It’s ideal to incorporate Whitespace Time into your schedule on a specific day every week to help you remain consistent and turn this into a routine habit. If this consistency doesn’t fit your schedule, you can adapt to it, but the aim is to protect this time as much as possible.?

Check Out The Toolbox?

To continue unleashing your Leverage, Intent, and Fellowship Superpowers, we invite you to explore The Toolbox - a treasure trove of curated content and resources.?

Inside The Toolbox, you'll discover a wealth of pragmatic tools and expert guidance to help you free up 12+ hours a week, maximize your productivity, and magnify your impact. Including, The Complete Guide to Scheduling in Asana and our Whitespace Time eBook - helping you proactively master your priorities and increase the velocity of your high-impact wins.?

Click here to access The Toolbox and start exploring our ever-growing database of superpowered resources for free today.?

Cheers!?