The podcast “calender changes and your admin” was indeed an eye opener to me, especially the part about only putting meetings in your calender means that it’s nothing more than a meeting list. However, translating this into practice is a completely different thing for me. Any advice on how to utilize the calendar to it's full extent is very much appretiated.
Working as a middle manager I’m not clear on how to actually define my priorities. I’m fairly clear about what I need in order to enable the people I manage to perform but to boil it down to things to put on my calendar (apart from meetings) is far from obvious to me. It does feel embarrassing to admit but this is one of the key areas where I struggle at the moment (to effectively manage my time - I am working very reactively at the moment). To me a example calendar or two would help greatly. How does a proper calendar look? How are priorities defined and how specifically can they be calendarized? Do you put priority areas or specific tasks on the calendar?
thanks
Rasmus
Roles and Goals
Rasmus, I’ve had success with the roles and goals approach:
Your priorities are based on your roles (your responsibilities) and your goals (what you want). Make a list from both and ask yourself what’s the most effective thing you can do towards each item on that list. Block off time on your calendar weekly to accomplish the actions you came up with. Track your progress over time.
Hope that helps - Sam
Sam, thank you for your
Sam, thank you for your swift reply.
My problem when trying this approach is that I fairly quickly end up with a 300+ items long list of things that would further me on my way to professional Nirvana. Obviously this is way to detailed to put in a calendar but I can't really figure out what would be effective?
Would it be to put projects (in the GTD sense) or do you use even "higher levels" of work to define your priorities? Such as "development", "administration" (I work part time with managing 5 teamleaders who themselves manage 4-8 staff, part time with administrating our sales, timesheets and salaries) and a bunch of meetings ofc?
Analyse, Summarise, Score, Decide
Realistically you can only concentrate on one or two things. Your best bet would be to anlyse your list of 300 items and try to summarise by grouping connected items together.
Look at your summarised list in conunction with your performance review, team/group goals, your manager's performance review goals (where you have access to them) and corporate goals. Anything that doesn't serve the goals in your performance review or your team and corporate goals gets dropped now unless it is a legal or corporate goverance requirement. There should always be a link between the major goals of any employee and the corporate goals.
Out of what's left score the goals on the basis of value to your team/corporation goals and your performance review, look at what it delivers and if you'd get in trouble for it not being done (and if you can come up with a reasonable justification for not doing it if you did get in trouble). Anything that doesn't deliver much value and you wouldn't get in trouble for not delivering gets dropped or at least put on the "Would be nice if we had time" list. You might want to read up on MoSCoW analysis/prioritiseation for help on scoring.
Look at what's left and ask yourself "Does it have to be me who does this? Could I delegate it?". If you can delegate, do so.
Look at the things you scored highly, the top two should be your top priorities, the things that will get you sacked if you don't do them. Everything else should be things you can drop, delegate or put on the "Would be nice if we had the time" list. If there's performance review stuff in the lower priority parts of the list then maybe you need to re-asess their priority or discuss with your manager why you're being measured on something that doesn't stack up against your other goals in terms of priority.
In at least one cast (probably many) Mark has said that no-one gets to achieve all their goals, everyone has work that doesn't get done. The important thing is to manage your priorities correctly so the important stuff, the stuff that delivers the important goals that are going to move your company, your team and yourself forward gets delivered and what gets dropped is the low value stuff. In connection to this you may want to listen to the Juggling Koan cast adn those on Time Management (remembering you cannot manage time, just what you do in that time) and Delegation.
Stephen
--
Skype: stephenbooth_uk (Please note I'm on UK time)
DiSC: 6137
Experience is how you avoid failure, failure is what gives you experience.
Stephen's discussion of how
Stephen's discussion of how to set priorities is valuable - study that!
To answer the specific question of what to put on the calendar in GTD terms (recognizing that some GTD followers will claim this approach is heresy), I reserve time at the 20,000 foot "Area of Responsibility" level. When the time arrives, I consider what's the best thing in that area to work on for the reserved block of time. Since my 20kft areas map pretty closely to or contain my work goals, this has been pretty effective for me.
--
Dennis Sherman
6-1-2-7
What goes on my calendar and how
As part of my weekly review, I review the past 2 weeks of my calendar and the upcoming 4-8 weeks and (roughly) compare that against the top 3 priorities on my performance plan. I reserve time on my calendar for a) weekly reviews, b) key meetings that support those priorities, and c) time to work on substantial deliverables associated with those priorities. One part of the review is to ask myself what percentage of my time is aligned with those top 3 priorities.
When I first started with GTD, my understanding was that only things had to be done a particular day should be on the calendar, and it sounded like scheduling time for substantial tasks was not what they recommended. I've since asked about that on a webinar with Mr. Allen, and his clarification was much like what Mark and Mike talk about. Particularly for people with busy calendars, scheduling time on the hard landscape to ensure that deliverables get done is a very reasonable thing to do. My example was a long report due to a sponsor, which I knew was going to take at least 10 hours of my time to complete and which is part of my #1 responsibility. I evaluated whether this should be delegated (and did delegate parts of the work) and schedule the time to work on this during what are peak productivity times for me during the day for 3 days over the following two weeks.