Electronic Agendas – 3 Great Calendar Habits To Adopt Now In Our Digital Lives

How many of you are reliant on an electronic calendar for our daily timetable? I know I am completely dependent. I have developed three calendar habits that I would like to share with you and hopefully you can adopt if you see fit! For easier understanding, I use Google Calendar on Mac. The calendar app on my iPhone is also Google Calendar (it used to be the Sunrise app until that one was, sadly, sunset!).

#1/ Calendar Habit #1 – Meet Someone New Every Day

As part of my daily hygiene and my business strategy, I make it a point of meeting someone new EVERY day. As such, I give these appointments a different (light green) colour in my agenda. The idea that you build a network through serendipity is fine. For me, I like to make serendipity happen! When scanning my week, I can quickly see if I have a full week of new contacts.

#2/ Send Empathetic Invitations – Two to Tango

Whenever I have a meeting with someone, I like to create a shared calendar appointment. This tends to reduce the possibility of error — although it’s not foolproof. Unfortunately no-shows still happen as many people will receive the invitation, but will not make the small effort to “accept” it. As such, they are “off the hook” if they don’t show up. Poor form. But here is the key insight and habit: when creating an invitation, add your own name to the title Click To Tweet Many is the invitation that comes to me with the title: “Meeting with Minter.” In their calendar, that makes sense. But for me, it’s useless. I have to look inside to see who sent it. If I had a lunch with John Smith, I will write in my calendar: “Lunch: Minter with John Smith.” I wish we’d all do the same!

#3/ Travelling Man – Adjust Your Time Zone

Since I travel a lot, that means I often change time zones. I colour code my days for when I am overseas. As smart as our calendars are getting and are able to handle time zones, when setting up appointments with people in other countries, I have found that it is useful to add the time in the local country directly into the title. That way, if you somehow get the country time zone wrong, you are still on track when you land in that country and switch to the new time zone. Digital is beautiful, but it doesn't fix human error. Click To Tweet

Any other ideas and calendar habits you’d like to share?