I’m still thinking about something that came up a lot during a virtual retreat I recently did with some clients.
The broader topic was setting up your office for success with time management and productivity. But we also ended up talking quite a bit about setting up your virtual calendar for success.
Making your calendar work for you is imperative. After all, it’s unique to you. It’s a powerful asset that’s yours to control and shape. If it’s not going to work for your life and your business, and actually make time management easier every day, something needs fixing.
Having a mismanaged, dysfunctional, overwhelming calendar is a problem for a lot of professionals, but in this recent client session, it was clear that calendar challenges are especially common among one group: lawyers. Particularly those lawyers who work in large firms. They’ve described the frustrations and inefficiencies of the dreaded shared calendar.
How are lawyers supposed to work productively when they can’t even negotiate their own calendars?
This conundrum is familiar to anyone whose work involves shared calendars. Every inch of the week is covered with colored boxes telling you not only what you’re supposed to be doing, but everything that your co-workers and collaborators are doing too. The calendar becomes so cluttered that you have to take a minute to get your bearings every time you open it up.
I remember one particular lawyer client describing his frustrations to me. His work calendar was packed with entries, many of them items that were being shared across the entire legal team. He needed to stay aware of what was going on with all that shared work but might only have to actually take action on a particular client or project occasionally.
It was obviously important for him to have access to all that shared information and be able to track the progress of his team’s work. He needed to remain current on things that were happening company-wide. But he didn’t need to have it clog up his thinking all day as he tried to navigate how best to spend his time.
All that company-wide stuff was hogging his calendar so he couldn’t really see what space was open for him to use, and which space was a call or meeting that he actually needed to attend.
Your calendar is one of the most important time management tools you have—if not the most important time management tool.
That’s true for all industries, but attorneys truly can’t afford to let calendar inefficiencies steal their time. Even if just takes one minute to flip and scroll through to find the task you’re looking for, that’s a minute you could be spending on billable activities. How many times a day do you refer to your calendar? Those minutes add up.
Calendar confusion also pulls you out of your focus, like when you’re deep into some client work and need to confirm some piece of information about a prior meeting. If it takes you a few minutes to find what you’re looking for, how long will it take for you to pull yourself back into focusing on your current task?
Finally, your calendar matters so much because we all need to be clear about exactly what is ours to do, vs. what is outside our control. Planning your time map is one way to exert some control over your day. That’s what a calendar is, after all 😉. This, in and of itself, is one way to reduce stress.
Your calendar should be a tangible time management resource that maps the best use of your time during the day. You should be able to:
- look at it and know when you have meetings
- view opportunities for open space that you can use to schedule your most important tasks
- and see where you can leave open space available for the unpredictable stuff that always comes up
That way you’re able to get your billable activities done and still have time to tackle the wildcard requests as they come up—without working into the night to get everything done.
3 Action Steps to Resolve a Cluttered Calendar
1. Keep a calendar that’s just for things that actually need your attention.
Basically the idea here is to maintain two calendars:
- The one you and your team use to communicate about shared activities.
- A separate calendar that displays only the meetings and tasks requiring your attention or attendance.
An easy way to do that is to keep a Google calendar separate from your work calendar system. Any time something pops up in the shared work calendar that you need to attend, add your Google self to the meeting invite. That item will show up on your “just for me” calendar without you having to remember to add it, and without rewriting any details.
2. Layer your Google calendar.
This is such a simple but brilliant time management hack. Google (and some other calendar systems) has a layering feature that lets you maintain separate calendars for business and personal things. So you can get all the soccer games, cookouts, weekend trips and other personal stuff into your calendar, but you can turn that layer off during your work day and just focus on what’s on your work calendar. And then when the work day is done, you can turn on that personal calendar layer and look at what you have coming up on the personal side, without all the clutter of work tasks. There are a lot of genius ways to customize a layered calendar to work for your specific life and business.
3. Spread the word.
Send a note to anyone who routinely sends you meeting invites or other calendar items to briefly explain your new system. Ask these frequent collaborators to include your Google self when sending invites to things that you actually need to participate in. Invites for things that you need to keep an eye on can be sent to your work calendar self only.
Need more help with time management tips for lawyers?
Join me on Wednesday, July 31st at 12p ET for Unlocking Productivity for Attorneys! This free webinar is designed specifically for attorneys and other legal professionals. Come and learn how to overcome distractions, build structure, and grow your business. You can actually spend your days thriving instead of scrambling.
Click here to join this free webinar!
Be well,
Sarah
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