The importance of planning

I hate missing out. My mum once told me that when I was a baby, I used to fight going-to-sleep. When I finally did fall asleep, I would wake up early.

She said, it was as if I was afraid of missing something.

That hasn’t changed. I hate being late for appointments, and I would much prefer to plan rather than be rushed.

It seemed natural that one day I would be asked to plan and present time management training, and I have done so now for a number of organizations of different sizes.

I have used all sorts of project management tools professionally but keep coming back to my Outlook Calendar to manage my daily time, workload and whereabouts.

Plan

Always make time to plan. Today I took time to plan out University teaching weeks into my calendar for the next 12months. These key dates drive my current projects and everything else will need to be managed around them.

Prioritize

Meeting my professional partner's deadlines is my highest priority, so planning to meet them was vitally important. The payoffs will be self-evident with happy partners and deadlines met.

Protect

Protect your time. Set aside planning time, Book travel time between appointments, and create time slots for specific tasks.

Learn short cuts

Learning keyboard shortcuts saves keystrokes, and errors, and discovering how to drag an email to my calendar and make it into an appointment was a game-changer for me. The reminders functions in outlook can be crucial tools in bringing things back to the top of a busy mind.

Colour coding is cool!

My Partner organizations teaching weeks are colour coded in my calendar to match their internal schema. It helps keep me focused on where I need to be.

Don’t let email drive your day

Turn off pop up notifications so you can remain focused on your work and not spend your day responding to emails. Make email windows, when you check what has come in, and respond if you need to, or schedule a time to handle it in your calendar.

Learn to use your Outlook’s rules wizard and create some folders so you can let outlook do the filing for you. You can make certain people like your major clients or your boss and team members your main priorities and channel email from each into specific folders. Then you can quickly see who has been emailing you and make fast decisions about what to handle first.

#production #storyboard #onset #onshoot #entertainment