I want it all, don’t you? A successful career, a happy family, an inspired personal life… all of it. It’s a lot to pack in and leads to the familiar refrain of “I’m so busy.” But, it isn’t that you’re busy; you’re just not prioritizing well. Your life is driving you rather than you driving your life.

There’s a whole book to write about the quest for happiness actually driving us further and further towards discontentment. For today though, let’s stick to something more practical: making yourself more available. To do that, I recommend using electronic calendars to manage the multiple facets of your life.  

I realize this isn’t the most glamorous topic and not necessarily ultra-innovative. But, if you don’t have a good strategy for managing your available time, you aren’t able to say “yes” to the things you want. And that’d be a shame because life is short.

Know Your Free Time
When I talk about calendars, I am referring to electronic calendars. I have two: a work one, which is Microsoft Outlook, and a personal one. For the personal one, I use Google, since I use that for my personal email, also. I get a unified view of both calendars on my phone where my work commitments show as blue appointments and my personal commitments show as purple appointments. You don’t need to use Google, but you need one that is cloud-based so that it is easy to sync up across multiple devices, such as a laptop and phone.

I generally work a normal Monday to Friday schedule, so I don’t worry about workday events being represented on my personal calendar. However, if there is a work event that spills over into personal time, like an after-hours meet up, I add by personal account as an attendee to the meeting. If I have a personal appointment during the workday, like a doctors appointment, I put it only in my work calendar, but mark it as private. 

Are you one of those people that say, “we should do lunch sometime” and then never schedule it? If you’re being insincere, stop it! Chances are you’re sincere, but get caught up in other things. Next time you are tempted to say that phrase, don’t! Make “sometime” now and schedule it right then. Once it is scheduled, it is much more likely to happen. With this system, you’ll have ready access to your calendar, be able to see your available time, and book the appointment on the spot.

Share Your Life
If you have a partner, scheduling becomes even more important. My wife uses the same configuration, a work calendar and a personal calendar. We have configured our personal calendars so that they are shared with each other. This allows her to see the events in my calendar and vice versa. This makes scheduling easier as it allows us to create family events on the spot, also, even when my wife isn’t right there. 

The other benefit is that it eases communication for us. There are plenty of times I schedule an event after work and forget to tell her, or she does the same. Having access to each other’s calendars has simplified communication because if one of us forgets, the other sees the appointment in the calendar. 

We put everything in the calendar. When the schedule for the kid’s sporting events come out, we load them all into the calendar. When we figure out who’s giving rides to whom at the beginning of the week, it all goes in the calendar. It relieves a lot of the burden of the family logistics. 

Family Accounts
Google recently introduced Family, which allows me to add my wife and kids to the same family group and provides us with a Family calendar. In my phone, I can add events to the Family calendar and they will appear on my unified calendar. They will also appear on the unified calendar for all the people associated to my Google Family. 

Although my kids haven’t really needed to start using a calendar, yet, I am planning to use it for things like family trips. This will provide our kids instant access to those dates for when they are having to plan summer work schedules and things like that. 

Say Yes
For some of you, having life so highly scheduled may seem stifling. For others, you may want to take this even further and start planning every minute of your day. You have to decide what is right for you. The most important thing is that you’re able to say “yes” to the things you want to say yes to. If that isn’t happening, it’s time to make a change.

Simple Sundays can be a great time for evaluating how you spent your time last week and how you want to spend your time next week. Do that, and you’ll make Monday awesome!

Cheers,

Brian