Managing calendars, especially executive calendars can be challenging.
Many people and tasks vie for your time, and you want to make the most of every day. Staying on schedule is essential. Lateness or missed meetings can send a message to clients and employees that they are not valued, and over time, this can erode your reputation.
At the same time, creating time and space for everything and staying on track can make your life and your work much more manageable.
Here are 13 executive calendar management tips to help you maximize productivity and time management.
1. Prioritizing Calendar Management
The first step in executive calendar management is prioritizing people and tasks in your business. Who are the people you need to spend time with directly? What meetings or duties are not worth your time?
A valuable tool for prioritizing is the Eisenhower Matrix, named for the famous former general and president who said, "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
The Eisenhower Matrix divides priorities into four segments:
- Urgent and Important: These are priorities that only you can address and require immediate attention. Examples include board meetings or investor calls. These should be at the top of your inbox and on your calendar immediately.
- Important but not urgent: These priorities require your attention, but you can schedule them for later, within a week or so. For example, you can schedule a meeting request from a direct report or a check-in with a critical customer for a later date.
- Urgent but not important: These are priorities that others can do, and you delegate them to someone else. For example, if you have an executive assistant, you can offload scheduling meetings, planning travel, and preparing documents.
- Neither important nor urgent: You should not do these priorities at all. You can save time by removing busy work from your inbox and calendar. If you ask yourself, "Why am I in this meeting?" Skip the next one.
It can be helpful to build out this matrix and keep it handy when you are bombarded with requests and need to prioritize. You create four quadrants:
- Urgent and important in the top left quadrant
- Important but not urgent in the top right quadrant
- Urgent but not important in the bottom left quadrant
- Neither urgent nor important in the bottom right quadrant
2. Document Your Meeting Preferences
Everyone works differently and has different tolerances for meetings. It is helpful to document your meeting preferences to make the best use of your time. You can share these preferences with your team so that you are all on the same page—especially when you share your calendar with others to facilitate scheduling.
- Times of day: What times of day do you like to meet?
- Meeting duration for diverse types of meetings: Not all meetings need to last an hour. Shorter sessions can save a lot of time.
- Meeting locations: If meeting at restaurants or coffee shops, which are preferred? Do you prefer video meetings or in-person meetings? This preference may vary depending on the contact and the nature of the meeting.
- Buffer time between meetings: Frequent back-to-back meetings often get executives behind schedule. Transitioning from one call to another takes time, and a break between sessions can work wonders for your focus and attention. Five to 15-minute buffers between meetings work wonders.
- Restricted times: Blocking off time for "deep" work like strategy and planning is an effective way to ensure that you can focus on key projects.
- Out-of-office notifications: some executives are happy to stay connected while out of the office for work or personal reasons, while others are not. If you are out of the office and others can see that on your calendar, clarify whether you will respond and what kind of response expectations people should have.
- Meeting Preparation time: Do you need to schedule time before certain meetings to prepare? Add it to the calendar.
3. Calendar More than Meetings
Executive calendar management is more than just business meetings. In many cases, it's your entire schedule. Having your entire schedule in one place will make it easier for you to stay on track and avoid missing events or double booking.
Non-meeting tasks that you can add to your calendar include:
- Exercise
- Personal appointments
- Deadlines
- Family commitments
- Networking with colleagues
- Meals
- Time for important tasks
4. Color Code Meetings in Your Calendar
Calendar management can be as visual as it is workflow-oriented. Color-coding calendar events (easily done in both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar apps) can provide a quicker view of your schedule and make it easier to rearrange meetings and commitments when needed. For example, since a deadline is not a meeting, you can quickly see that you are available at the time scheduled as a deadline. You can color-code events by:
- Type of activity (business, personal, health, deadline, etc.)
- Priority level
- Internal or external
- Onsite or off-site
- Recurring meeting
5. Send Reminders and Confirmations
One of the most powerful ways to save time is sending reminders about upcoming meetings and meeting confirmations to attendees. Attendance no-shows can be a huge time drain and demoralizing, especially when you travel to a meeting.
In most calendar platforms, you can automate sending reminders to yourself, defining when and how many to send. For example, you may want to send yourself a reminder 24 hours in advance and 15 minutes in advance.
Also, it is best to send a confirmation request at least one day before a meeting to make sure it is on the radars of all the attendees.
6. Create Templates for Calendar Invitations and Confirmations
Your life will be much easier if you develop templates for calendar invitations and confirmations. If you have a template, you will not have to start over every time you send a confirmation email, and you will not forget to include valuable information.
A confirmation template can consist of:
- A message that says you are looking forward to your meeting.
- The day and time
- Location
- Any phone numbers or video call links
- A request to respond to confirm or change plans
7. Gather Documents for Executive Meetings
Another way to improve your efficiency is to make sure any required documents and information will be ready for the meeting. You can use the meeting invitation or confirmation to note anything attendees should bring. Meeting documents include:
- Minutes from the previous meetings (if recurring)
- Profiles of the attendees that are unfamiliar to you
- Agendas
- Financial or committee reports
Trying to get this information on the fly during the meeting will waste time and slow you down.
8. Review Your Executive Calendar Daily
Review a summary of tomorrow's schedule at the end of the day.
Reviewing the next day's schedule in the afternoon is recommended because it allows you time to notify people if your plans have changed and a meeting needs to be rescheduled or canceled.
9. Privacy in Shared Executive Calendars
If you share your executive calendar with others, be careful about any meetings you don't want others to see. For example, if you are securing loans and other financial transactions, you can be vague about an individual or firm involved.
If you are traveling, there are personal security issues to consider. Do you want people to know when you are away from your home and your family? At the very least, make sure anyone you share your calendar with knows your preferences for your location information.
Both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar have plenty of options for setting your privacy. If you're unsure how to optimize your sharing settings in your calendar apps, a quick Google search will be worth your time investment.
You can also create multiple calendars so you can share just the details you want to with others.
10. Delegate Wisely and Kindly
In earlier times, executives had secretaries and receptions as gatekeepers. The gatekeepers were the ones who were managing calendars and saying "no" to requests for an executive's time. If you are the one saying "no," use delegation to help requesters get what they need.
You can do this by:
- Redirecting the person to a more appropriate resource as a starting point
- Offer help connecting them with a more appropriate resource
- Explain how the person will get better results with a more appropriate resource
- Offer support if the person hits roadblocks with the resource you recommend
11. Create Meeting-Free Blocks in Your Calendar
Calendar management is all about striking a balance, maintaining a complex calendar made up of meetings and consciously scheduled meeting-free blocks.
Research from Atlassian found that the average employee attends sixty-two meetings a month, about half of which are considered a waste of time, either because the meeting is not necessary for the topic discussed or because it consumes far more time than it needs to.
All of this wasted time prevents people from focusing on the deep work that drives their success.
One way to limit this productivity killer is to create meeting-free blocks on your calendar and resolve more conversations through asynchronous methods like email and chat.
Depending on your role, you can adjust this productivity strategy in two ways:
- Determine if your meeting-free block should have zero meetings or if you'll allow ones that are tied directly to your success, such as prospect presentations if you're a salesperson, and disallow internal meetings.
- Decide how much time you need for deep work. If you're in a highly collaborative role, one or two mornings a week may be enough to make significant progress on your independent projects. However, if you're a creator, strive for an entire day or two of new meetings to fully focus on your projects.
Once you've determined how much meeting-free time you need to amplify your productivity, add blocks to your calendar for deep work and inform the people you work with closely.
You'll have to make exceptions if an urgent issue arises and you need to connect with your team to solve it. These meetings at least align with your goal of dedicating time to your most critical tasks.
12. Schedule Time to Handle New Requests
No matter how well you plan your days, unexpected problems and requests will threaten your productivity. To ensure you stay on track even on chaotic days, put time on your calendar to address sudden tasks.
The length of time you block off and at what frequency depends on how unpredictable your workload is. If your responsibilities are generally stable, you may only need an hour every two or three days to tackle unexpected tasks.
However, if solving urgent issues is a vital part of your role, you may want to leave two or three hours a day free to tackle them. You can use any extra time to get ahead on projects.
Blocking off time also lets you set expectations with people regarding when you'll complete their requests, which prevents you from holding them back.
13. Hire a Virtual Assistant For Calendar Management
Calendar management can be a paradox because it requires a significant time investment to save time. Suppose you develop processes and habits that allow you to quickly plan out your optimal schedule. In that case, you'll easily net positive and experience the psychological benefits of a well-organized calendar.
However, if you struggle to stick with this kind of time management system, attempting to optimize your calendar can be stressful and even hurt your productivity.
Offload complex calendar management to a virtual assistant to yield the benefits without investing time.
Once you share your preferences for activities like focus time, meetings, task-batching (or not), etc., they'll ensure that every appointment is scheduled at the optimal time and prevent you from ever being double-booked again.
A talented executive assistant will be able to manage multiple calendars and to-do lists, allowing you to manage your precious time efficiently.
Read More: How to Benefit from Virtual Assistant Calendar Management Services
The Value of Executive Calendar Management
Managing your calendar may seem like a headache, but "flying by the seat of your pants" is not a good operating model. Some front-end organizing and standardization will go a long way toward boosting your productivity and relieving stress.
You will have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that everything is under control--as much as possible.
If it all seems like too much, consider outsourcing your executive calendar management. Prialto has provided virtual executive assistants to U.S. executives since 2008 and has mastered calendar management and a host of administrative tasks.
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