Don’t Forget Downtime

Part of cleaning up your schedule is finding strategies to prevent it from getting cluttered again.

Block chunks of time on your calendar when you won’t be available to answer emails or phone calls or to attend meetings. This will prevent other things from accumulating and occupying ...

... and put them in one of four quadrants:

• Quadrant I: Important, Urgent (crises, last-minute meetings for important deadlines)
• Quadrant II: Important, Not Urgent (strategic planning, long-term goal setting)
• Quadrant III: Not Important, Urgent (cert...

You can’t really clean up your schedule if you don’t know what’s in it—and that includes all the things on your literal and official calendar and all the things that aren’t. 

Once you know what’s on your calendar, ask yourself: “What is the purpose of each thing on here? Are we accomplishing that or does something need to change?” 

Question each task. Start with recurring meetings, which can very easily build up and take over your calendar.

We tend to overestimate our time and energy in the future and so we fill our calendars with tasks we think we'll be able to complete.

When you’re thinking about something in the future, ask yourself if you’d do it tomorrow. You know how much energy you have now and presume it’ll be p...