We’ve been talking about resilience all year long at Admin Slayer, because we know that no business achieves any level of success without it. As we’ve told you before, resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or stress. You’ll face at least 2 out of the 4 most months of the year, and we always want you to bounce back, stronger than ever.
With that in mind, we’ve written about resilience in your company as a whole, and broken those ideas down into smaller chunks, including your finances, your team, your new business pipeline, and your processes. Resilience is necessary in every aspect of your business, through every moment of your day, and every task you and your team complete. As you create large-scale and small-scale resilience, you and your business become incrementally more powerful, creating streams of success - and the ability to bounce back from failure, no matter what stresses you face.
One of the places we often experience - and plough through - resistance is creating resilience in the complex world of… calendering.
That’s right: we think managing your calendar is complex.
Trust us: we are experts.
Sure, anyone can manage a calendar poorly - just like anyone can drive a car poorly or run a business poorly. They’ll manage it for a little while, but eventually, they’re going to hit a wall. Depending on whether it’s a car or a business, that wall may either be literal or figurative. Either way, it’s going to hurt.
Great calendar management keeps you from hitting walls. It creates both structure and flexibility (yes, we hear you saying: but I like to be free for what might come up and yes, it’s still possible). It supports your strategic plans, breaks your goals down into bite-sized attainable pieces - and keeps you focused on what matters, not just what’s on fire.
Have you ever created a strategy that will absolutely see you winning the race, and then get busy with some things… and some months later, find that strategy in a crumpled ball in the corner? Imagine if you’d already implemented it by that point. How much further ahead would you be if everything had been done?
At the end of the day, great calendar management is great strategic project management. It’s a way of making sure that you, and all members of your team, are focusing on the right stuff to move you in the right direction. It ensures that you’re not just thinking ahead but planning ahead, allocating your time and attention in such a way that you sustain your energy and your business, without falling into the feast-or-famine cycle of drumming up business, doing the work, finishing it, and then rushing to fill your pipeline once again, when you’re out of money, out of ideas, and out of energy.
Get Thee A Calendar Template
Sure, everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, and the same 7 days in a week, but how each one of us uses and is used by that time is unique to us. Our best working and thinking hours, our personal chronotypes, and the exact type of work we do, all play into what makes the most sense for us. If you haven’t stopped to think about it, you’ve probably been wasting at least some of your most precious resource - time.
First, pay attention to your own rhythms. Just have a normal week and start noting your energy, and your engagement. The Designing Your Life website has a great worksheet for this right here.
This will help you design an “ideal day” and an “ideal week” that is designed around how you work best - all the time.
Your calendar template may look something like this:
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Morning | Weekly goal setting/review | Workout | Drive kids to school | International calls | Workout | FREE | Writing |
| Late Morning | Focused work | Meetings | Focused work | Meetings | Team Meetings | FREE | FREE |
| Early Afternoon | Focused work | Meetings | Calls | Meetings | Strategic Projects | FREE | FREE |
| Late Afternoon | Focused work | Meetings | Focused work | Meetings | Cybersecurity protocols, final messages | FREE | FREE |
| Evening | Yoga | FREE | FREE | Events | DATE NIGHT | FREE | FREE |
Of course, there are few weeks that will look exactly like this because the world around you changes, and there are some weeks when you want your day off on a Wednesday rather than a Saturday - but the idea is that you’ve got some parameters and some clear understanding of what kinds of things you want to accomplish based on your personal rhythms, and how your business works.
By grouping certain types of tasks into single days, you’re also reducing the amount of time you may spend getting in and out of a project, commuting, and generally ruining your focus. Great calendar management puts you in the best possible position for productivity. You may even save money on fuel!
The key to this, of course, is that this is now something you can delegate. A great assistant can take this information and run with it, ensuring you have all the time you need to get things done, and that your business is set up for maximum performance.