#37 - Review your calendar, grade your time allocation, improve your impact

Guidance on how to improve how you spend your time, with examples and graphics of how I've done this.

I had a project where I was the right-hand to a relatively new Chief Commercial Officer for a couple of months. I was spending time helping to stand up the CCO’s office, strategic priorities, cultural goals, target state organizational model, and collaboration model with all of the other functions at the company. I’d love to be able to say the main thing I took away from that project was about market strategy or running a large organization, but it wasn’t. It was an extremely basic lesson: you should review your calendar once per month, and give yourself feedback on how you could have better allocated your time to hit your goals (both at work and at home).

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How to Implement This (with examples):

1. Get your calendar out and scan for themes in how you spent your time over the last month. I usually go week-by-week and start writing out things like:

   1. 1-1s with teams

   2. Leadership / steering committee meetings

   3. Thinking time

   4. Growth strategy project X

   5. Administrative work

   6. Transformation project Y

   7. Wasted meetings — meetings where you sat, did nothing, ingested nothing of value

   8. Last-minute emergencies

2. Get general counts — “Roughly 10 hours on project x, roughly 60 hours on 1-1s”

   1. Go into a spreadsheet, write your categories, and assign hours to them

   2. Then assign a percentage of total time to each category

      1. Take total core hours you worked, usually 160 (40*4), 200 (50*4) or 240 (60*4)

3. Now, for each of the categories, add the goals you had for the last month

4. And now, go category by category and give yourself feedback (both affirmative and constructive), and keep in mind that the goal isn’t simply, “spend more time on what matters”… It’s also “optimize how you’re showing up in these categories.” This is probably the most important step

5. The last thing I like to do is to go category by category and grade my overall impact. The key here is not to grade “did you spend enough time here??”, it’s to grade your impact in that category. Are you driving positive outcomes through your 1-1s? Are you showing up effectively in meetings?

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Closing Thoughts

Each time I do this, my categories have looked slightly different, and I’ve only ONCE given myself an A (out of probably 12 times of doing this?). Ideally you do it once per month, but in reality once per quarter probably makes the most sense.

If you want to improve your impact at work, where you spend your time and how you show up during those times will make a massive impact on your team/org, and also the pace at which you grow in your career.

ASK: If you’re interested in templates to go along with the letters I’ve been writing, lmk!