🌈 Uau! Colors everywhere!
A quick guide on how to optimise your week
Hey there 👋🏼
Today I want to share with you one of the most effective ways I know of reducing the overload between your brain and your hectic calendar.
So here’s my problem. See if you relate 🙂
I work with teams covering 4 different scopes under 1 leadership umbrella. I currently have 7 direct reports and regularly meet with Human-Resources / People Team to work on leadership topics.
On top of that, I cover everything from my small side hustle - A Leader’s Mindset - from content creation, coaching calls, etc. I add everything on my calendar view.
This generates a lot of meetings of different importance, context, and type.
I already go through many optimisation techniques that maximise the layout of my calendar for maximum productivity, such as questioning meetings, consolidation and time blocking.
But what allows me to instantly switch context are colors 🌈
Every six months, I create a new color scheme for different types of meetings and contexts.
For example, I can have:
meetings I really can’t skip 🔴
1:1 sessions 🟣
exercise 🟢
context a 🟡
context b 🟠
etc.
As I check my calendar on what is the next meeting, the color scheme immediately tells me where my brain needs to go.
Now you might be asking, why does he change colors every six months?
The answer has to do a lot with my personality. I get bored quickly, so by changing the color schema, I feel I’m always on my toes, ready to take on the next challenge.
In a way, it’s similar to the seasons of the year. As the season changes, so do the colors of my calendar.
But this doesn’t end here.
Our company provides us with corporate/business accounts for Google. It gives us a really cool feature called Time Insights.
It’s a really cool feature Google launched back in 2021, and it helped us understand how our time was being spent and with whom we were meeting the most.
I was using a plugin called Clockwise that gave me similar data. As soon as Time Insights was released, I adopted it immediately.
The feature I used the most was to understand how much Focus Time I was having. I then added time blocks that filled the Focus Time, representing the tasks I was working on. I call it my Real Life Calendar.
Now… Google did again 🙂
You no longer need to group your time by meeting (recurrent or one-time), the number of people in that meeting or focus time.
Google is rolling out a feature that allows you to group your time by color and assign it a label!
Now you can see your data represented like this:
To me, it’s an incredible game-changer as I can drill down on where I’m using most of my time.
This way, when I review how I spend my week, I have much more valuable information than if I spent my week in meetings with 3 or more people.
But because I’m never happy, here’s the thing that annoys me.
You can’t influence your time insights with shared calendars.
Why this matters to me? Because I use multiple google accounts, each with its own calendar and view it all centralised.
Not considering shared calendars means that I have to:
Ignore the time on shared calendars. This defeats the purpose of consolidating and revising how I spend my week.
Copy all the events to calendars within my account. I don’t think the labor justifies it.
Stop using shared accounts and consolidate all my calendars within one account. Doesn’t make sense because my user accounts are divided by scope: work, personal, or side hustle.
Anyway…..
This is a new feature, and I’m so excited that I had to share it with you immediately. I honestly feel it will make a difference in how you manage and review your time and, above all else, the quality of your time.
That's it from me. I hope you have a fantastic weekend and that this issue helps understand how you are investing your time.
⏱ TL;DR
Between work, home and A Leaders’s Mindset, I end up with a pretty chaotic calendar.
This is a quick trick to allow my mind to do instant context-switching.
Create a color scheme for types of meetings (1:1, syncs, etc) and different contexts or scopes
Apply it to the events on your calendar
If available, use a tool like Google’s Time Insights to understand how you’re investing your time.
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Have an incredible week! 💪🏼
Parada 👊🏼 A Leader's Mindset