Why your calendar is so important
- Is your calendar helping you to be more productive or is it more of an obstacle as a part of your week? Well, in today's video I wanna show you how to prioritize your calendar and get so much more out of your schedule.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And I honestly feel like our calendars are the bedrock or the foundation of any productivity system.
It all starts with our schedule because this is not only where people are inviting us to different events and appointments and meetings but it's where we create time for ourselves. So let me show you how you can do that.
And in today's video we're gonna be using Woven as our calendar. So here within Woven we are actually viewing my Google Calendar
How to analyze your scheduled time
but Woven gives me a lot of extra superpowers. And one of those things is allowing me to see where I am actually spending my time. Here on the left-hand side you can see that I've got a bunch of great analytical data that I can analyze or I can review from time to time to make sure that I'm being the most efficient with the time that I have.
So for example here, I can see that I've got 10 events scheduled for this week a total of just over 10 hours I've got 34 hours available of focus time. Meaning if you subtract out all of these events my working hours are going to allow me for a 34 additional hours.
That seems like a lot of time but we know that that can get eaten up pretty quickly. And then I can also see here at a glance that I've got a total of three hours of video calls which let's be honest in today's environment
is very, very little. But down below it gets even better here I've got a variety of different tags actually telling me where I am spending my time. So for example, I've got three hours worth of education, two hours worth of personal appointments or personal meetings,
Using event tags with Woven
I've got something called management and team. So let's dive into this a little bit deeper. Let's say I need to schedule an event here later today on Tuesday. So I'm going to click here to open up a new event.
And let's say this is a meeting with Jen, okay? So I'm going to schedule a meeting here and I can choose more options or I can come back and choose this a little bit later.
So what I like about Woven here is that I can add additional tags like you just saw in my analytics area so I can categorize this particular meeting. So if I click on private tags, I can say well this is team related because Jen's a part of my team.
I can start just typing in the first few letters. And yeah, I've already created that tag so I can put team. I can add additional tags if I like but in this example I'm just going to leave it with this one. Why I like this over other calendars or basic calendar features is that yeah you can color code any of your other calendars. Google Calendar is a very good example of this
but you can't get a nice summary of those different calendars and you have to toggle through them at all times. Here I can add tags directly to my meeting events themselves and now I can see where I'm spending or where I'm a lot in my time here.
Viewing the Busy Bar in Month view
Now, another feature that I love here about Woven that helps me especially identify if I have conflicts or if someone calls me up out of the blue and say, "Scott, when can you meet later this week?" Is something called the busy bar. So let me show you this,
I'm going to convert to my monthly view here for a moment. And here you can see, I don't have a lot scheduled for the remainder of this month but for this week you can see that I've got this little bar at the top of each day. It's actually giving me a summary of my time. So for example,
I'm free early in the morning and later in the evening and between eight and five, I've got two hours and 30 minutes that have already been scheduled. You can see as this bar slowly moves to the right my day will become more and more filled.
So I can see at a glance that Thursday is probably my busiest day so far, right? I've got four hours booked already but Friday is pretty open let's be honest. I've got a fair amount of available time on most of my other days but here on my Wednesday, I've got this little red color and what that's telling me is that I have at least one double booking.
I've got 30 minutes in conflict here. So if I click on that, of course it's gonna take me directly to that day and sure enough I can see that I've got this one-on-one meeting with Brian but it's scheduled where I have this budget review meeting as well.
So I better update this meeting maybe I need to push it back maybe push it a little bit later in the day so I can schedule that meeting with Brian and I will no longer have any conflicts there as a result. But there's another thing that really helps me prioritize
How to use meeting templates in Woven
my calendar as well and it makes dealing with my calendar so much more efficient
and that is using templates. And that's one of the great features here within Woven
is creating recurring meetings or the types of meetings that you will be using on a regular basis, fill it in with all the information you need such as a video call link, such as the participants there and you can instantly create those meetings in a matter of seconds.
So for example let's say I need to create a quick 20 minute check-in meeting. Well, I've already created such a template. I just wanna be able to add it here on Friday afternoon. So all I need to do is click on one of these spaces here
as if I was going to enter in a new event but you can see here before I enter in the event name, down below I've got a summary of some of my top templates. So these are templates that I've already created in the past and one of them here is my team check-in meeting. You'll see it even has the people pre-populated within that. So if I click that it's instantly going to create that meeting it has the video link.
Let me schedule it and we'll go into those details here. If I open this up, you can see on the left-hand side I already have the different people that have been invited.
Yes, I'm going the three have already been sent their invitations here, I've got my custom video link here for the video call down below, I've got the password information down below here as well. I could custom at a tag or anything else that I want to this
in just a single click I've created that meeting with all of the contents, all of the people, all the information that I need for that particular meeting. So templates can be really, really powerful.
Adding Tasks as All Day Events with templates
Now, one of my favorite tips for being more efficient and more productive is to use your all day events area of your calendar to manage your tasks at least your most important tasks. Why? Well, 'cause you can't ignore it.
Here you can see I've got an example called call Bill regarding the sales flyer and no matter how far I scroll up and down it's always going to be visible at the top of my day. And it doesn't matter what view I go into whether it's a daily view or a monthly view it's always going to be here.
So this is another great use of using templates within Woven. So I can create special tasks at the top of my all day event area and not have to remember to check or uncheck certain things as I'm doing it.
So let me walk you through how to create a template right here within Woven this time especially for tasks or to do's. So all you need to do is hit this plus button here at the top and select template.
Now, in this case I'm going to give it a simple name. You can give it a different name than the task itself, right? Because when we create this particular event we wanna add in the details of the task ourselves. So I'm gonna call this one task that's gonna be the name of the template but down below we can leave the event title blank, right?
Because it might be an email, it might be a project whatever that task is going to be.
Next we're gonna look at the duration and no I don't want it to be an hour or a couple of minutes I'm gonna select custom and I get to say one day because remember I want it to appear up here at the top. I'm going to say done, I'm gonna come down
and maybe pick a different color. I'm going to choose that same dark gray that we had for this existing one here. And if I don't wanna reminder I can just come over here, I can select this and actually click it off and remove it or just adjust the existing reminder there.
The last thing that we want to make sure we do if we are using this template for tasks is we don't want to show it as busy because that would mean as soon as we add a task to any day it's gonna block off our calendar from other people
from either booking it or for showing our own availability. So I'm gonna come here and say free.Now I could add a private tag, I could add other information as well
but I'm going to leave this is at the moment. So now that that task is saved
if I want to add a task here on Thursday all I have to do is click this all day event area,
I'm gonna select task and now it's waiting for me to input that information. So maybe I need to email Jen regarding our new meeting or something along those lines. I'm going to hit schedule and boom! There it is at the top of my Thursday, it's listed as free.
So it's not going to be in conflict with my other meetings. And I can add other tasks that I need to there in the all day event area.
Sharing your best calendar tips
So I'd love to hear from you next. What kind of tips do you have for me and the Simpletivity community to be more productive and efficient with your calendar?
Be sure to share your best ones down in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching. If you got value out of today's video make sure you subscribe right here
to these Simpletivity channel. And remember being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
