181. Time Management Series #2: General Items

Last week we would have bought our physical calendars for 2022 already and gotten ready to use the calendar software.

Before we begin, I would like to suggest you get different highlighters to make your calendars more colourful, one colour for each major item in your calendar, for e.g.:

1. Red for Public Holidays

2. Yellow for Birthdays

3. Green for Personal Items

4. Blue for Work Items

5. Orange for Family Items

6. Etc

This week, we want to stretch our calendar filling muscles by warming up. Let us spend a bit of time today filling up the following in the physical calendar:

1. Public Holidays (Google 2022 Public Holidays [Country Name]) – for better clarity and identification, use a specific colour highlighter to highlight all Public Holidays you just wrote down in your calendar (at one glance you’ll be able to see them when you flip your calendar pages)

2. Birthdays of important people in your life (can use your Facebook app for this) – can also use a separate highlight colour

3. Planned long leave in 2022 – can also use a separate highlight colour (and also other leaves you will take during the year)

That’s all for now, simple right?

Now, if you can…. Whatever you filled up here today in your physical calendar, put them in your calendar soft copy (there should be a built in function for highlights)

(Why do this twice, you may ask? This is done twice for everything because we want our muscle memory to also lock in not just the habit of keeping a schedule, but actually doing the schedule and looking at the items that make up your life in a year. It is not a waste of time, it is a time spent knowing and appreciating the effort you are taking to making sense of your schedule and looking at the times you want to stop and enjoy life, i.e. during holidays, loved ones’ birthdays and your own leave days)

Keep your pens and highlighters, we will move on next week….. see you then!