Managing Your Calendar

With work, family, appointments, travel and all sorts of other things going on in our lives, many of us find it challenging to manage it all. I always recommend to my clients that they keep one calendar in order to avoid double-booking or overlooking an appointment as a result of trying to manage more than one calendar and not having the most up-to-date information on hand.

Here are some helpful tips for managing your calendars effectively:

1. Always enter your meetings, appointments, etc right away. Never try to remember them and tell you self you'll come back and enter them later. Also, never write appointments and engagements on a separate piece of paper for entering later. Many people now have some kind of electronic device that holds your calendar. If you do not own a Blackberry or other handheld device, many cell phones now come with a calendar feature. Consider using your cell phone's calendar feature. The good thing about this is that you will always have it with you. However, your calendar doesn't have to be electronic. For those of you who still do not feel comfortable keeping all of your information in an electronic device, a paper calendar still does the job.
2. Whenever you encounter a conflict in scheduling, tackle it right away. If you need to move a meeting, reach out to those meeting participants as soon as possible. They may have other engagements they can attend at the original time of your meeting, in which case the change can actually work out better for them.
3. If you've got regular meetings that you attend most of the time, enter them into your calendar as recurring events, and as time goes on, just delete the ones that you are not going to attend. This will save you a ton of time.
4. Whenever there are multiple meeting participants, especially if its a large number of them, email the participants and get their availability first before attempting to set up the meeting. This limits the amount of emails and invite changes that have to go back and forth as a result of people not being available.
5. Lastly, always take a look at your calendar a week ahead (I always take a quick look at the upcoming week over the weekend before), just so you have an idea of what the week ahead will look like. This way, as you speak to others about possible meetings and events that need to be scheduled within a particular timeframe, you've got an idea of what you're up against in terms of whether or not you can get that event booked over the next week.