My calendar is one of my favourite apps, ever. It keeps me organised, prepared, and as stress-free as can be when juggling priorities from all aspects of life. Today, I want to share 12 ways to make your calendar shine.

🪩 Keep it organised.

🌈 Colour code it!

Take advantage of the colour-coding ability to make your calendar more useful. 3 styles you can consider:

Topic/team: this works well if you're working across multiple teams or have project work. Keep all the work for the same team the same colour so you can see where you're spending your time.
Importance: if you want to see how long you're spending on reactive fires, you could colour code "urgent/high priority" and "low priority" events.
Energy: if you want to see what sucks up your energy vs what restores it, try colour coding by high focus, collaboration, or admin. (This post covers energy levels in a bit more detail.)

🗓️ Use separate calendars.

You can create separate calendars in Google Calendar, and they can be shared or private. These are great for keeping extra planning events separate, or making sure you all have access to a shared set of events without worrying about invites.

For example, on my personal account I have a separate calendar called "Planning," which is where I put things like what I'm making for dinner, rough plans, and travel time.

(Caveat: I have no idea how Outlook works, so it's possible this isn't a thing there.)

💘 Keep your calendars together.

If your work and personal calendars are on the same system and your security settings allow for it, it's great to have them both open at the same time. It helps you see your entire day at a glance, and you might notice potential clashes earlier.

🗓️ Schedule better.

📝 Block out everything that repeats.

If you do something regularly, put it in your calendar. This has the double benefit of: a) making sure you have time for it, but also b) reminding you to do it!

Some examples from my calendar:

📝 Planning for next week – every Friday at 4:30pm
🎨 Prepare slides – once a month before the Town Hall
📈 Analytics check-in – daily reminder
🎂 Order cake – once a month
🍔 Lunch – every day!

🚗 Remember to plan for travel.

If you ever leave your office/house, this is for you: make sure to block in travel time so that nobody tries to book meetings on top of it. Once you book a meeting in another location, get a safe estimate for travel time and block it in immediately, on either side. So it'll look like:

Go to meeting
Have the meeting
Leave meeting

👀 Check your coworkers' calendars.

Most work calendars have an ability to display your coworkers' calendars, either the events or just the blocks. It saves you so much time trying to find a time to meet because you can just check if people are free in advance.

💡 Plan for meetings when you book them.

When you schedule a future meeting that requires prep work, block in time to do the prep immediately! This means you're never caught out being unprepared and you're not scrambling last minute.

📖 Keep it (fairly) accurate.

Your calendar should be an accurate reflection of how you spent your time over the week. That means declining meetings you don't attend, making sure surprise meetings are in there, and adjusting the length of meetings if something runs way under/over time.

It's a little bit of extra admin, but it means that you can rely on your calendar as a record. If you ever want to audit how you're spending your time, or refer back to it for a project, you can trust that it's accurate.

✨ Make it yours.

🧠 Don't just block out "focus time."

A lot of people have standing blocks of time in their calendar for "focus time." This doesn't work, because:

You haven't set a clear priority during that time, so it doesn't seem important, and
(If people can see the names of your events) they'll just book over it.

Instead of having generic standing "focus time," pick 1-2 priorities for the week and block out events for those specifically. It gives your focus time a purpose, you pick your priorities out in advance, and it's easier to see what you're giving up when trying to work around a clash.

✏️ Add descriptions for yourself.

When you're scheduling focus time or prep time for meetings, add all the notes, links, and everything you'd need to do that prep in the calendar event description. That way when you pick it up, you don't have to then go looking for everything.

✅ Schedule your tasks.

While you might also need to maintain a to-do list, the most practical way to make sure you get through it is to schedule your tasks. Consider roughly how long they'll take (just use blocks like 15, 30 minutes, etc) and then plan them in like you would your meetings.

🌻 Look ahead at next week.

On Fridays, take a moment to plan for the week ahead. Choose your focus priorities and block them in, look at any tasks you need to schedule, and make sure you know what's coming up. It's so much less stressful if you know what you're in for!