A Guide to Becoming More Productive With Your Time

Contrary to popular belief, people that schedule or have many meetings during the day are not busier than other people. There are only two determining factors, whether you're busy or whether you're accessible, and how productive you are. You want to hone in on your accessibility and productivity when you look at your calendar. Leverage Your Calendar A calendar is a tool that can change your life. It’s there for a reason, but people often think of using it as a chore. One of the most compelling reasons to be a student of your calendar is that while the amount of time spent on scheduling grows with the amount of appointments that people have, the time needed to actually schedule meetings decreases. This means that the more meetings you schedule, the better you get at scheduling them. Understand that there is a vast difference between being busy, which is filling up those 24 hours you have in a day, compared to productivity, which is being efficient with those 24 hours. A busy person always has something going on, whether that is work or simply sleeping on the couch. They aren’t necessarily productive with the time they are busy, though, and they are often inaccessible. Understand Your Activities A productive person knows how to maximize two things: the activities they get paid for and the activities they don’t get paid for. This delineation is important to make when maximizing your productivity and accessibility, so you can prioritize the activities you get paid for, as well as those activities which you enjoy the most.