BRX Pro Tip: Using Your Calendar to Manage Your Time
Stone Payton: [00:00:02] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you, Lee, we lean on this tool a lot. We want to encourage everyone in our world to, at least, seriously consider leaning on this tool, but our counsel is to utilize your calendar for time management. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Lee Kantor: [00:00:21] Sure. Both of us kind of rely on our calendar for our life. We don’t know what we’re doing unless we look at the calendar. And the calendar tells us when to show up, where to show up, and things like that. Those are obvious. Like when’s a show, who’s on the show, all the stuff about the show is within that calendar. So it gives us an easy way to keep track of our interviews and things like that.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:42] But there’s other ways to leverage a calendar. I think it’s important to schedule blocks of time on your calendar to do kind of those regular tasks that are important. Like if you’re going to say, okay, once a week, I’m going to connect all my clients with a past guest, then put that in the calendar. Find a day in time that works, and then put on a repeat on a repeat schedule and say every Tuesday at 2:00, I spend 30 minutes connecting my clients. Just put it in there, lock it in, and then just do what the calendar says to do. I would spend some time just trying to attack big goals, just thinking time, put that in the calendar, market down and hold. These should be non-negotiable things that don’t move.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:27] And then, I would expand that to just say things about your own life. If you want to put the gym in there, put the gym in there and make it a non-negotiable part of your life. You know put your family in there, put whatever you want to put in there, but block it, lock it, and leave it alone, and make it a non-negotiable part of your week. And then, you’ll see, things get done. We put in, “Do these Pro Tips.” I have one day on the weekend, I have 30 minutes to come up with topics. And every time that pops on my calendar, I sit down for 30 minutes, and knock out a bunch of these topics. And then, we do the same thing. Hey, now, we’ve got to record those podcasts. Then, we put it down, and we record the podcast, and it gets done. If you put it in the calendar, it gets done. People break promises to themselves all day long, but they do not miss appointments. So, make an appointment, make it non-negotiable, and things will get done.
Stone Payton: [00:02:25] Well, I agree. And I really learned this from you. And I find this strategy so powerful for the things that really can—something you can do tomorrow, right? Like we didn’t have to do the Pro Tips right now, we could have done on tomorrow. But then, tomorrow comes, and then, well, we could have done the next day. So, I find it very powerful for that. And I also find it very powerful for big, hairy things like working on a book or something. If it’s a big hairy thing that you need to cut up into chunks to calendar-specific blocks of time, and again, I learned it from you. It’s made all the difference for me.