It will not be an overstatement, if I say that the calendar Apps have become the lifeline of our work. Calendar frees our mind from remembering the future events that we have committed to and helps tracking our availability for other commitments. Here are a couple of tips that will make your calendar more useful to you.
You should be able to distinguish between the two types of tasks:
A. Tasks that must be done on a specific day and time – Attending a meeting, attending a webinar, or your flight time are the examples of this type. If you miss them, you miss them forever. let’s call them time sensitive tasks.
B. Tasks that must be done ASAP – All the work that you do alone are good examples of this type, say, preparing a proposal, reviewing a document, or preparing a project plan. They are important but you have some room to negotiate the schedule with yourself.
The calendar should be used to record only time sensitive tasks (Type A, above). If you are planning to do an important task that is not time sensitive, calendar is not the right place to put it into. Although the task is important, it has nothing to do with a specific time slot and it can be done flexibly at some other time, as well. If you put such a task in calendar, you would end up snoozing that task, multiple times. This would have been just fine, but the real issue is that you start believing that calendar reminders are not always serious. Instead, a reminder from your Calendar should be a serious call to action to maintain trust in it. Adding tasks that are not time sensitive dilutes that seriousness and so the trust in the calendar. Losing trust in calendar will make you miss important appointments.
You should try to maintain a “single version of truth” about your schedule. If you are using more than one email client application, it’s quite likely that you have appointments spread into more than one place. Ensure that you integrate all your calendars into one, which is also accessible on all your devices. This will help you to have just one App to review all your appointments and avoid conflicting appointments. Calendars Apps like, Outlook, Google Calendar provide this integration feature and you could checkout respective product documentation for more information.
