Daily tasks can pile up quickly and create what seems like a never-ending to-do list. If only there were a tool that could help you manage your tasks and, in turn, boost your productivity. Enter calendar software. Too often, calendars are just seen as tools to help us keep track of big events. Meetings, birthdays, and work events might be saved in your calendar.
But calendars can and should be used for more than that. You can add day-to-day tasks to your calendar as well. When utilizing calendar tasks, these five tips will help you make the most of your time and maximize productivity.
1. Make Use of Integrations
When you initially decide to add tasks to your calendar, you’re now faced with an entirely new challenge. How should you go about doing so? If you choose to add tasks to your calendar manually, it can take quite a bit of time. You’ll feel stressed and overwhelmed, which is the opposite effect that a calendar should have. When utilized properly, your calendar should reduce stress and make your workload more manageable.
One quick way to add tasks to your calendar is by integrating task management software with your calendar software. An integration can save you time if you already use a tool like Asana or Todoist to manage tasks. And since so many tasks correlate with deadlines for larger projects, having both in one place will maximize productivity.
Even if you don’t use task management software, look into what other integrations might be possible. Calendar software like Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and Google Calendar have the ability to integrate with various types of software. For example, many calendars can integrate with popular project management software. Your project management tool of choice often already has many of your work tasks. So, by combining your project management software, you’re sort of adding your to-do list to your calendar.
2. Coordinate Tasks With Events
Once you’ve added your tasks or integrated your to-do list with your calendar, you can do so much more. Now is the time to reach your true productivity potential. With your tasks, meetings, and other calendar events in a single view, feeling more organized is just the beginning. You’ll also realize how seamlessly your tasks work together with calendar events.
If you think about it, every event on a calendar has tasks attached to it. If you have a work meeting, there might be something you need to prepare beforehand. If you have a big work project, you probably have several tasks that you need to complete before the deadline. Even personal events such as friend’s birthday dinners involve tasks. For example, a task can be a helpful reminder to buy a birthday gift.
Adding tasks to your calendar lets you easily see which ones coordinate different events, projects, and meetings. This can help you understand how you should be prioritizing tasks. Let’s say that you look at your calendar at the beginning of the week. If you see that you have a project due on Friday, tasks related to that project should be your highest priority. Other tasks might correlate with events the following week or have the flexibility to be moved. If you can prioritize items on your to-do list, it will reduce stress and increase productivity.
3. Clean Up Your Tasks
It is important to prioritize tasks once you put them in your calendar. But even though many of the tasks in your calendar correlate with events, not all do. You must take the time to look at your tasks holistically to enhance productivity. Figure out how you should prioritize all tasks (not just the ones that correlate with events). Determine which tasks are causing you to lose your focus and where you can make up for inefficiencies.
Every task holds some importance; otherwise, you wouldn’t put it on your calendar in the first place. But it’s good to look at all of your tasks monthly, weekly, or even daily and prioritize. You can use the Eisenhower Matrix to determine which tasks are urgent and important and which aren’t, either. Then, you know which tasks to focus on now and which to eliminate. The other two categories are important but not urgent (scheduled for later) and urgent but not essential (delegate it to someone). Using this matrix helps you prioritize tasks and clean up what might otherwise be an overly crowded calendar.
Another great way to ensure that you’re spending your time wisely is by using automation. By automating certain tasks on your calendar, you can avoid monotonous work and make time for what’s really important. By sharing your calendar with others or sending out meeting links, you can avoid back-and-forth when scheduling meetings. You can also automate various sales-related tasks, like automated emails to prospects. You can also use sorting rules to declutter your inbox.
4. See How You’re Spending Time
Once you’ve had tasks on your calendar for a few months, you’ll notice things. Adding tasks to your calendar means truly having every aspect of your day mapped out. You’ll better understand how you’re spending the hours in your day. When you can see, down to the minute, how your day is being spent, you can make positive changes.
You might feel exhausted and notice that most of your days are filled with meetings and repetitive tasks. If this is the case, change how your days are structured. No matter how you spend your day, make sure each part of it is scheduled. Time blocking is a highly effective strategy, even if you’re just planning a one-hour break for yourself. Knowing when you should be resting vs. when you should be working will ensure you’re always on task.
Aside from just the day-by-day, you can also start analyzing what you accomplish in a week and a month. Looking at your achievements and setting goals can help you immensely. If you’re already making strides and hitting your goals, understand which tasks contribute. Make sure you keep up with those behaviors. If there’s a goal you want to achieve, figure out how your calendar can help you achieve it.
5. Utilize All Features
Lastly, make sure you’re using all the features available. Simply creating a checklist of tasks is far from the only thing you can do when using calendar software. First, any time you add a task, you can also add details. When you have a busy schedule, keeping up with everything becomes overwhelming. Any notes or details you can add to a task can be useful.
You can also make some tasks recurring. Maybe you want to email your boss at the end of every week detailing your progress on work tasks. Or, perhaps, you want to dedicate time to cleaning up your inbox every month. Whether you need a task to be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, all of this is possible with a digital calendar.
You can also color code just about anything in your calendar. Typically, events and tasks will automatically be assigned a different color. But if you want even more organization, you can color code just your tasks. Use one color for work tasks and one for personal tasks. Or, group things into even more categories: tasks related to projects, recurring tasks, personal tasks, and miscellaneous tasks.
Take control of your to-do list; don’t let it control you. When you have an astonishing number of daily tasks, it can feel overwhelming. You may not know where to start. Or, you might feel as if you’ll never get through everything. But with the right tool, such as a properly utilized calendar, you can be in control of your days. Goodbye, stressful days. Hello, manageable workload.
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