I’ve been trialing a time management strategy: a fully booked calendar for my personal life.
Why do I need to change anything?
I want my default behaviours to be oriented towards my goals. My default choices aren’t the best when I’m tired and have a large number of choices. Empty calendars are filled with “tired and large number of choices.” This time management strategy gives me more high-willpower influence over my default behaviour in low-willpower circumstances.
What is this time management strategy?
Objectives
The main objective is to influence my default behaviour in my personal time towards meeting my goals. The hypotheses of this time management strategy are:
- I can make better decisions about what is the best thing to do with a timeslot 1-5 days in advance instead of in the moment/hour, and this improvement in decision-making is worth the planning admin time investment
- If I book plans in my calendar for doing something 1-5 days in advance, I’m likely to decide to follow through on the planned activity during that timeslot
The objectives of this strategy do not include:
- Figuring out out what the “right” behaviours or goals are.
- Prioritizing different behaviours or goals.
What must I physically do?
- Write in my calendar every day
- Make calendar items that are good decisions for those timeslots
- Don’t book so much that I’m guaranteed to fail
- Follow the plans in my calendar
- Be aware of my calendar items
- Following my calendar should be my default behaviour
- Update my calendar to reflect a realistic future
Here are some examples of weeks in my calendar where I booked most of my personal time (blue is personal, grey is work):
Observations, results, and conclusions
- This strategy makes sense when there is consistency in my life. It doesn’t make sense when there is high uncertainty - ex: I need to travel for work. Anecdotally, I’ve done this for a few weeks, then had disruptive weeks, took a while to recover, then resumed.
- The weeks where I performed this activity were anecdotally more productive. They were also more mentally taxing.
- Sometimes I blow through a whole set of calendar items, ignoring them. That’s ok. I can move them to the future.
- I need to have some sort of goals framework or tasks list to generate calendar items from.
- I will have limited ability to perform productive activities outside of my standard full day of work. Make an achievable plan for future me.
- Using calendar meetings to communicate with others in my personal life is very efficient and unambiguous. With my significant other, it reduces conflict resulting from ambiguity, and events without calendar items are always at risk of miscommunication.
- To follow the plan, it needs to be relevant to “today’s me” and I need to be invested - for example, leaving a recurring “write for 1hr” block in the morning gets ignored.