Habits - Live by the calendar

A calendar can be your best friend

By Jordan Peterson

The first thing is, you should develop a long term plan. You have to set up your vision. Like Jepetto, when he is looking at the star, before Pinoccio’s transformation takes place. You have to develop a long term vision. Some vision of the good towards which you are working. And some vision of the hell that perhaps you are avoiding. Once you set up that vision and you know how to orient yourself, then you should start designing your days and you can do that very effectively with a calendar like Google calendar. Many people say, I hate using a schedule or I hate using a calendar. What I would say to that is, if you hate using a schedule or a calendar, then you are probably using it wrong. What you are doing is using the calendar as an external tyrant that is telling you what you should do if you are going to be a conventionally good person each day. So you load yourself up with arbitrary responsibilities. But thats not really how you should use a schedule. What you should use a schedule to do is to design a day that you would most like to have. And obviously, that is going to include accepting some responsibility and undertaking to make progress on those things that you have to make progress on to keep your life from collapsing into chaos. But it should also mean that you schedule in activities that make you actually want to have that day. So if you are using a schedule properly, it can be your friend. And that can also be something that can help increase your capacity to concentrate. If you are very scattered, then you can start to train yourself. You can say, I need to learn to read without distraction. So you say, for the next one week, I am going to read ten minutes a day, and I am going to try to limit the distractions. And if you are successful at that, you could try twelve minutes a day. If you are successful at that, you could try fifteen minutes a day. The trick is to set yourself a goal that is slightly beyond your current level of performance, enough to be challenging, enough to be worthwhile if you accomplish but not so difficult that you are like to fail.

Planning your schedule obsessively down to each hour, down to each minute can lead to productivity. Place them in your calendar. Use the calendar as your friend. Use the calendar to design a day that would be good for you. A day that would be good for you is one on which, when you end the day, you moved yourself towards your valued goals; that you kept chaos under control and one that enables you to sleep soundly and with a good conscience and to know that the next day is not going to be at least not worse than that day. Planning is unbelievably useful. You need to know what it is that you are aiming at and why. And you need to know how you are going to break that down over the months and the weeks and the days.

Approach your calendar like your best friend. Design a week that you really want to have. Design it to schedule time to do the things that you want to do and that is what you absolutely should do. Learning to plan, to schedule your life, is unbelievably useful. Because, thats your life. But schedule a life that you want. That means, you have to schedule your responsibilities obviously because responsibilities are those things that ruin your life if you don’t fulfil them.

A calendar is not a prison; its not a tyrant if you use it properly. It keeps anxiety at bay. Make sure that you do what you need to do, which is important because, otherwise, you fall behind. And if you use it properly, it also helps you do what you want to do. It is a good way to start being more industrious. Make a plan. You need a plan for three years. You need a plan for the next year. You need a plan for the next six months. You need a plan for the next three months. You need a plan for the week. You need a plan for the day. You need a plan for the hour.

Habits - Live by the calendar

“As part of my preparation for each week, I transfer tasks from my to-do list to my calendar. This means that meetings, errands, events, and specific work tasks each get their own block of time. It helps me to be more efficient in the use of my scheduled and free time, gives me a higher chance of getting things done, and helps me be more accountable to myself and others.”

–Tomide Awe, founder of Olori, a brand that offers high quality handbags which showcase the African cultures, and has served hundreds of customers across the globe, doubling revenue by 100% in the past year

Ditch Your To-Do List and use the calendar as the To-Do list

Sam Corcos | The Tim Ferriss Show

There isn’t enough time for all the items today or this week

People usually have long to-do lists. If they take everything on their to-do lists with the dates that they think they’ll get done by, which is usually this week or next week, and if they just put them on their calendars with the amount of time they think the tasks are going to take, they will realize that the process doesn’t work; Why is that? Because, in that exercise of moving tasks onto their calendars, they will find that there isn’t enough space in their week to fit all these items.

The point of th exercise is to make them realize that, there literally is not enough time. Your time is finite and the number of digital items you can add to a to-do list is infinite. You are working with the wrong constraints - which is the amount of items you can fit in a database row, as opposed to the number of things that you can fit in your finite time of your calendar.

You need extra space on your calendar

You probably need slack during the course of the day, usually like 50% is a good target. Extra space, you need extra space in the day. You need to have 50% of your time on your calendar open. 50%, open fully.

And as you get better at it, you can reduce that percentage of extra space, for example, to 25%. Because, you would’ve been doing this for a long time, to the point where you can estimate how long it will take you to do something with maybe 90% accuracy. For example, if you need to write a memo on something, you will know that it is going to take you three and a half hours. And you would just know, because you had written so many of these; you just know how long it’s going to take.

It takes time to hone that calibration skill. For example, if you ask most people how many calories they eat at lunch, or how long it will take them to do a certain task, I don’t know. But then, over time, you can calibrate; especially, if you retroactively update your calendar as well - which is, noting down how long did it actually take you to do a task. And when you realize that your estimates were off or they were they were right, you can start to hone that skill.

So, always try to put your calendar at 50% open space; because something’s going to come up; a friend calls you; something happens during the day; you get a message that kind of throws you off.

The problem is that, it’s way easier to pull something in from tomorrow into today, because you had extra space. The alternative is to plan a super tight schedule. If something doesn’t get done, you will have a cascading problem. It is disastrous. For example, I have to push this task to this day; then, next thing that happens is, you have this Tetris game that you’re playing a month out because one thing changed in your schedule and everything around it breaks.

These concepts come from manufacturing - where you have the assembly line. You need to have slack in the system in order to be able to operate effectively. Because something will come up and if there’s one thing that comes up that breaks everything downstream, that’s a real problem. Over time, as you get better, you can reduce that amount of slack. But 50% is a pretty good goal to begin with. So you can be like, my goal for today, I’m gonna have a four hour block where I’m gonna do X and then I have some time for me. I know I need to process email or communications broadly for at least two hours a day. That will depend on your situation, it is unique for every person. So, just have those blocks every day. They’re just repeated. When you start scheduling things, you will know that you can’t actually fit this in for that day, because it’s not like you can’t do the tasks related to your work. Your role requires you to do those work-related tasks. So it’s just clear as day that you cannot do this on that specific day; But you know that you can do it next week.

Skip the to-do list step entirely. The calendar is the to-do list.

From a process perspective, let’s just say you’re looking at next week, you have these recurring blocks of email that are already in there, you may have other repeating blocks. So when a new task comes in, what to do with it? Put it into a to-do list and later move it to the calendar?

The answer is you just skip the to-do list step entirely. When I get a new task, it just immediately goes into my calendar. So if somebody was to say, hey, can you write a memo on this topic or do something for them, you can say, sure, how soon do you need it? If they say, can you have it to me by Wednesday? go to your calendar and block off two hours, (or how long you think that task will take), block off two hours on Tuesday that you have open. And you can say, I’ll have it to you by Tuesday night. And that’s it. The calendar is the to-do list.

Don’t use your email as a to-do list

Sometimes, tasks come in through emails. Some people really struggle with email. The thing they struggle with is using their email as a to-do list, which is a very common thing that people do. The problem is it creates a lot of anxiety. When you have this stack of uncategorized things to-do in your email, it could be 15 minutes, it could be 50 hours. You have no idea until you open up each one individually to figure out how much work it is.

So the same process of translating your to-do list into your calendar, you can do the same thing with email - which is, open each email, how long is this going to take you to respond to. These are like the chunkier ones. 30 minutes. Great. Mark it done. Copy the link and put that link in your calendar. So you’re going to spend this 30 minute block responding to this email. What’s the next one? That’s going to take me a full hour because I have to write something for them.

So, the clearing of the inbox is really scheduling the proper amount of time to reply to these things. So, you’re not looking at this undifferentiated stack of crap that you are opening multiple times, marking them unread, going back to forgetting what you read, reading at the 17th time or whatever that might be.

It is stressful. It is very stressful to have this list of things. It’s just an ambiguous amount of effort. It is stress-relieving to say, all right, I will do that on Thursday of next week. And I have nothing pending right now. I have not dropped any balls. Because I know that anything that is time sensitive that needed to be done today is already done. And there’s nothing, there’s no ambiguous deadlines looming that I’m not aware of, because they’re in my calendar.

What if you have to change something on your calendar? This is where closing the loop with the sender of the email is a helpful factor. If you say I’m going to block this off for Thursday, you can tell that person, hey I’ll get back to you on Thursday. And then if you have to move it, you now know that you can say, hey something came up I’ll get it to you on Monday. You can just keep them in the loop on that, as opposed to just ambiguously dropping the ball.

Scheduling

• from the article “Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets for Insane Success”

Running three companies is no small feat, which means time is of the essence for Elon Musk. He is constantly trying to optimize his time using feedback loops.

Like many other ultra-productive and successful people, he follows a very detailed and specific daily schedule. He breaks his calendar into five-minute slots and finding your way into one of those openings is tough work.

He prioritizes engineering, design, and manufacturing, spending 80 percent of his time at work on those areas.

“I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” - Elon Musk

By splitting his day into 5-minute chunks, Musk manages to get more tasks scheduled into his work.

Application in daily life

The most productive people work from their calendar instead of a to-do list. Calendars are finite and give you a better sense of time, making it easier to determine how much time you have to complete projects during your week.

Breaking your days into small chunks and scheduling tasks on your calendar can boost your productivity. But you don’t have to use 5-minute chunks. Some poeple find that the most efficient way of organizing work is to break the days into 30-minute slots. Find a timing that works best for you and your work.

And make sure that you schedule everything: checking email, calling clients, lunch, and meetings. Everything goes on your calendar.

Rip to-do lists and instead work from your calendar.