Have you read the introduction, Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3?? If not, read those first and then come back.
Step 4: Becoming super proactive and stressless with this agenda system
Many people only have meetings and events in their agendas, which is a major time management mistake.
If you don’t have your tasks planned, you don’t know what you are not doing what you actually should be doing to reach your goals. Compounded over a lifetime it will make a huge, yes HUGE difference in performance.
First choose a good agenda platform. Many people use the Outlook agenda or google agenda. Both are good examples, but google agenda allows most flexibility and is easiest to set up. Start with making a separate agenda for each of your roles, with clearly different colors. Additionally, make 4 extra agenda’s for short tasks with varying importance (based on Stephen Covey’s excellent suggestions):
- A-priorities: if you don’t do it that day, it will have a negative impact
- B-priorities: if you don’t do it that day, it might have a negative impact
- C-priorities: if you don’t complete this, you can complete it another day
- D-priorities: delegate! Don’t do this yourself
Meetings, events and tasks should then be scheduled according to their corresponding role. E.g. I will schedule ‘Running’ as ‘Personal’ and ‘Make proposal for client X’ as ‘Sales’. I always schedule the ABC priorities at 4am just to put them somewhere so I can complete them somwhere during the day. Now you will probably start noticing the connection between your role-oriented inbox, todo lists and your schedule. That’s what it’s all about. We’re almost there! My agenda system looks like this, with every color representing a role or priority:
How do you know you are scheduling the right way? Your agenda should tell you what to do without you being the slave. How luxury if someone (your agenda) tells you what to do all the time, while leaving flexibility.
Still your head above the water? What are the problems you face, comments/questions you have??? Now very curious about your comments! 👇👇👇
Are you equally persistent as a wasp and ready for the last Step? Go to Step 5
Hi Wim, a bit confused for using the priorities. How do you decide whether a task that comes in is scheduled using a priority one of your roles (since it seems it’s the one or the other)? I.e. “prepare strategic meeting” is arguably an important task with a certain priority, however you schedule it according to a role instead of a priority?
Hi Iason! Thanks for your question. The ‘A-D’ priorities are small little things that take a little time. More kind of reminders for things you take in between the scheduled tasks during the day. They are so short you don’t plan them in. So in fact, the task blocks that are planned in are very important (because you plan them in) but don’t conflict with eg the A priorities as the A takes too little time to conflict. If I would schedule in ‘prepare strategic meeting’ as one of those priorities, I would not have reserved the time for it. The rule is: focus on the scheduled blocks and take priorities in between, and never shift A priorities to the other day.
Clear enough, thanks for the quick reply! 🙂