Effective leaders organize their days. Do you do this?
Not only do well-organized leaders get more accomplished each day their organizational skills inspire their people. When an entire team is using the same Nice methods they become super productive, reach and surpass their personal and professional goals.
“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.”
The Nice Calendar is a simple strategy you can use in your daily productivity toolkit. Itโs an easy way to stay focused on the type of work you should be doing during segments or chunks of time throughout your day.
We use Google Workspace at Futureforth, so Iโve written this example with Google Calendar as the example, but you can replicate this using your Calendar software of choice.
Before getting into the setup. You should go analog with a pen and paper and jot down the categories of common things you work on each day. For example, you might include email and social media, all-hands meetings, strategic planning, leadership meeting, onboarding, AMA coffee meetings, health and wellness, family time.
3 Steps to Creating Your Nice Calendar
1. Along the left side of the Calendar interface, you will see My calendars and Other calendars that you are subscribed to. Turn them all off by clicking the box next to each one. Your calendar interface should be blank.
2. Create a new calendar and call it "My Nice Calendar". Add general daily areas of work you need to do, these should seldom change. This isn't a to-do list. Carve out 30-120 minute blocks of time for each category.
Tip: It helps to make these reoccurring in the calendar, so you don't have to create a new item for each day manually or you can swap categories to different periods on certain days.
3. Along the left side of the Google Calendar interface you can select different calendars. Turn your regular calendar back on, so you see how your workweek compares to your Nice Calendar. Moving forward, you will adjust your regular calendar to be sure it fits your Nice Calendar template.
The Nice Calendar will help you know what you should and shouldn't be doing each day. It will also help you realize how you can adjust your life to make up more time each day.
I recommend you print your Nice Calendar, so you can review it through the day to be sure you are staying focused. Mine is taped to my wall over my desk. I always find printing items helps me get the work done because I face it all day.
Another wonderful example of getting organized is the Daily 8 Worksheet.