Cancel the fluff - TMR #7
Open your calendar for the week. What do you see?
Is your week filled with endless conference calls and countless hours in pointless meetings, with no real outcome?
How much time are you dedicating towards revenue-generating activities (RGAs)?
Success and wealth aren’t just about money, they’re about freedom. The freedom to only do the things you want to do.
Success is when your calendar is packed with hard work—but the kind of hard work that gives you fulfillment and allows you to make the impact you want to make on the people around you.
If you want to guarantee failure, then you should ignore time management and this entire article altogether.
It's time to reset and be more intentional.
How does your week's agenda measure up to your idea of success and wealth? Let's run through a short process for redefining your calendar and reclaiming control.
Audit your time
The first thing you need to do to start regaining control of time and being more productive is to actually open up your calendar and bash yourself. 😀
Take a few minutes to stare at your calendar and think about the things you’ll actually be doing this week.
What do you see in the example above? An agenda teeming with commitments, yet hardly any meaningful progress.
Busy but unproductive.
Notice those gaping voids. The extended lunch breaks. The glaring deficiency of Revenue-Generating Activities (RGAs)! The meetings that spilled over the intended time!
But, hey, at least the fitness goals were met, right…?
If we were to grade, this week would scrape by with a C!
Despite its aesthetic appeal and apparent organization of events, this calendar did a mediocre job of propelling us toward our success.
This is what we want to change.
Particularly now, as we sail into the last quarter—traditionally the most hectic period of the year—it's even MORE important to take the reins of your time management.
So here’s a simple 3-step process for optimizing this week. Do this now:
Cancel the fluff
Timeblock for outcomes
Measure actual usage
1. Cancel the fluff
Odds are, there are some obligations on your calendar that you do not want to do.
Perhaps you've been tricked into commitments that are more about pleasing others than propelling your progress. 🤔 Essentially turning your weekly agenda into a mosaic of everyone ELSE’s priorities.
Either way, take this as permission to cancel 100% of the coffee chats, zoom check-ins, and other obligations that do not drive YOU or YOUR COMPANY forward.
I hate being the one to cancel anything on my calendar so I understand how uncomfortable it can be to nix plans at the last minute…
BUT you have to be thinking big-picture. You have to start optimizing for yourself, instead of everyone else, if you want to reach your massive goals.
Reschedule if you just cannot cancel completely, but go ahead and make yourself clear up this week.
I’ll wait…
2. Timeblock for outcomes
Ready for a game-changer in productivity? It’s called Time Blocking and it is exactly what it sounds like.
Create a block of time on your calendar that isn’t hyper-specific, but is more of a guideline for that window of time in the day.
For example, “RGAs,” “Sales,” or “Client Meetings” would be a block of time in which you only do those certain activities—fully immersed.
I highly recommend making your timeblocks a minimum of 2 hours long. This will allow you to get into a deep working state while also keeping the blocked time “name” general enough for multiple activities.
I highly recommend fitting in some of these time blocks into your week (2h min):
RGAs/Sales/Marketing
Fitness/Health/Hygiene
Innovation/Learning/Education/Growth
Planning/Admin
3. Measure actual usage
As I go through my week, I like to keep my calendar updated with how I actually spend my time.
Imagine your calendar as a live record of your week—a timeline that evolves with your every action. What if every overrun meeting, or prolonged lunch break, was consistently reflected in your schedule?
Try this: extend that 30-minute meeting to 45 minutes on your calendar if it ran longer. If you indulged in an extended lunch break, adjust it on your schedule.
It’s a manual process, but that’s half the benefit (but hey, you can always get your assistant to do this for you as well).
By doing this it keeps you aware of where your time is going—aware of where you need to improve.
It also makes you realize when you didn’t focus on those important (but not urgent) things (RGAs!).
You don’t have to do this forever, but I do recommend trying it for a week or two just to rewire your brain to think about time differently and to be more intentional with time.
Plus, if you use Google Calendar, it has a cool feature called “Insights” which will actually show you a breakdown of how your time is spent on your calendar:
Taking action
No matter how dreadful last week was, this is your time to reset and plan for a better week ahead.
Change, or don’t.
How are you currently managing your time for peak productivity? Let me know in the comments