The Best To-Do List Is Actually Your Calendar
Follow this secret advice to better manage your schedule and time.
Some of us yearn to get everything on our to-do lists done. We pride ourselves on your amazing lists. And then we add things to them faster than we can possibly do them. The mountain of tasks grows, bursting out of our office like a new volcano rising from the North Pacific—only instead of being populated with Palm trees and indigenous peoples, our mountain is populated with checkboxes and blinking “past due” dates.
This isn’t how life has to be. Consider entrepreneur Richard Giles Whiting. He doesn’t have an English accent, but he should. He’s chill. Very, very chill. Although he pretends to be an American businessman, I’m convinced he’s a Secret Agent in real life. Only a secret agent could stay so serene and composed while battling nefarious evil masterminds, running his own company, and maintaining a relationship with his very own shmoopie. I asked him recently how he manages to get it all done without the olives sloshing out of his martini.
Everything Takes Time
Richard began by explaining that everything takes time. Well, duh! I knew that. Even if you’re falling into the event horizon of the gigantic black hole in the center of our galaxy, you appear to freeze forever, but from your point of view, time keeps ticking.
If everything takes time, he says, then you’ll actually end up doing it during a block of time. (So far, I’m enthralled with the brilliance of his explanation.) And since everything belongs in a time block, Richard puts it on his calendar the moment he decides to do something. By deciding in advance which time block he’ll use for a task, he makes sure everything fits in his schedule.
Scheduling Forces Discipline
This is how he looks so serene. Since he has to find a time block before he can say “Yes” to something, if his schedule is filling up, he sees it immediately. When someone asks him to please be on the board of a non-profit devoted to saving flightless waterfowl that live beneath bridges on the Thames, he can immediately see that there are no free time blocks in his schedule. He knows he’s full, and “no” is the only viable answer. This is very unlike many people’s strategy, which is to say “yes” and then spend the next several years feeling horrible about not being able to give the job the commitment it deserves.
If everything takes time, he says, then you’ll actually end up doing it during a block of time.
Schedule Personal Time
It’s not just professional time that gets scheduled. What else takes time? Pondering, daydreaming, and letting your brain be wildly creative. Rather than leaving open spaces on the calendar, Richard fills every minute with an appointment, even if it’s an appointment with himself to think, read, or clip his toenails. His personal life—which apparently still takes time—also ends up being subject to the same discipline as his professional life, and his toenail are smashing.
I think it must be awfully stressful to schedule every waking minute. But no. He assures me that this way is actually less stressful, since he knows he has built-in time for the things that are important to him in more than just his work life.
Only Limited Pro Bono Time
Forcing himself to identify time blocks to do stuff means that he limits how much work he does for free. He’s happy to help out a friend or colleague pro bono (after all, Secret Agents have great instincts for tracking down criminals, kidnappers, and lost library books). But he only schedules two hours a week as his pro bono time block. If you ask him for help, he’ll say “Sure!” and then he’ll say, “My first free pro bono time slot is in February 2023.” This lets him do volunteer work and work that’s motivated by pure altruism and values, while insuring that it doesn’t take over a disproportionate amount of his life.
Schedule Back-to-Back
Richard takes special care to schedule meetings back-to-back. At each meeting, his colleagues know he has a hard stop at the agreed-upon time. That forces them to use their time well. It also gives him an excuse to duck out when the meeting was scheduled to end. “I have a prior meeting which I must respect, even as I respected this one,” he can always say. This means he can always be on time, too. When you’re meeting a shadowy figure at 1:23 am in downtown London to exchange a mysterious briefcase for “the papers,” only back-to-back meeting discipline can insure you’ll make it on time.
If a meeting does run unavoidably long, Richard immediately reschedules the meeting that got delayed. This way there’s no mysterious, unaccounted-for time-owed-to-someone-else hanging over his head.
To-Dos Are for Less Than 3 minutes
This seemed reasonable. Suspiciously reasonable. And then I spotted the flaw: did Mr. Whiting seriously expect me to believe he scheduled his time all the way down to returning a quick phone call, or dashing off a handwritten memo to Natasha, giving her the location of the sinister blueprints? Indeed, he did not. Tasks that would take less than 3 to 5 minutes, he adds to his To-Do list. Unlike my To-Do list, however, he keeps his short and immediately actionable. Then he schedules a block of time to work his way through it, confidently secure that he can zip through the whole list.
If you wanted to live life as cool as double-oh seven with a chilled martini (shaken, never stirred), use your calendar as your to-do list. You’ll never overbook your self again, and we’ll exhibit the kind of steely discipline that will make you a Secret Agent in no time.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow Get-It-Done Guy on Twitter and Facebook.
I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
