The blog

Does your agen­da have a ten­den­cy to quick­ly fill up with meetings?

Do you tend to sched­ule too many meet­ings dur­ing the day and per­haps even have col­leagues who ​“help you out” by call­ing you to meet­ings when they know you are not due some­where else?

Does this result in that you do not have time left over to do all the oth­er things which need to be done and you end up work­ing late nights to catch up?

Sched­ule time for to-do-tasks 

Make sure to also reserve time in your agen­da for the tasks which real­ly need to be com­plet­ed before a cer­tain due date. 

If you don’t, meet­ings auto­mat­i­cal­ly get the high­est pri­or­i­ty since both you and oth­ers set time off for them; time which is seem­ing­ly free, but which actu­al­ly sim­ply is unde­fined. But, don’t sched­ule all your time and don’t por­tion out all the to-do-tasks in the agen­da, only those which have a due date.

Do this

1. In your week­ly run-through (that is the time you set aside each week to go through your vision, to-do-list, wait­ing-for-list, ongo­ing projects et c), high­light and skim through the to-do-tasks which have a dead­line in the next cou­ple of months. 
2. Set aside time in your agen­da for those tasks which have a dead­line you real­ly need to stick to. 
3. If you have a ten­den­cy to be an exag­ger­at­ed opti­mist, give your­self some extra time to work with, that is 
   • set aside an addi­tion­al 50% of more time than you think you will need, and
   • sched­ule the task to be com­plet­ed a few days ahead of its actu­al deadline.

Focus on the urgent with­out stress

If you do this kind of time man­age­ment, you can work on all the oth­er more urgent tasks today, safe­ly know­ing that you will have time to do those which are due in a while – well ahead of their deadlines.

How do you do it?

How do you make sure to hold dead­lines with­out work­ing over-time too much? 

Com­ment below and share your mag­ic recipe.