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Use your online calendar finally for what you actually need it to be!

Almost all email service providers also offer a calendar service as part of the account usage, which allows you to use these accounts as a digital calendar as well and merge different accounts in a calendar client of your choice, just like you know it from your emails.

So far so familiar. However, many of us use the calendar feature efficiently only in the context of our professional email accounts. In contrast, all private accounts are only used poorly, if at all. You can only profit from this if you professionalize your private calendar use as well. For example, I use my digital calendars for the following purposes:

  • Coordinate private appointments with others
  • Long -, medium- and short term planning of personal appointments
  • Time management by reserving time between appointments for specific tasks (“time boxing”)
  • Overview of different appointment categories, as a strategic planning tool for evaluating the effectiveness of my time usage

Coordinate private appointments with others

Online calendars are great for coordinating with other people, just like you might know from your professional email use. Simply invite the person to your appointment by adding their email address to the appointment entry and the invitation is already in the calendar of the other person and nobody forgets that you have an appointment! This function is very widespread in professional use, but privately it is hardly used, even though it is very useful and can make life much easier for you and the people around you. However, you need to start using it in a personal context, because sending them calendar invitations to visit a cafe can be considered ” too much ” by some people… Better to follow these guidelines:

  • if an appointment is given by “outside” (e.g. theater or cinema ticket, reservation for a restaurant, etc.) it is usually no problem to set appointments also in a private context
  • blocker for long term planning of appointments is often ok, because the blocker is only an indication for the meeting and can be adjusted well to individual circumstances
  • for spontaneous meetings or phone calls I would, if at all, only set private time blockers, but not necessarily send others an invitation to these blockers, because this can very quickly be misunderstood as control addiction

Long -, medium – and short term planning of personal appointments

Another great way to use calendars privately is for perspective planning of long-, medium-, and short-term appointments. The typical example is the use of birthday calendars, which remind you every year to bake a cake in time or at least to send greetings to you loved ones. But you can adapt this principle to many other areas. For example, I use an account calendar to plan ahead for vacations and events I want to attend. Likewise, I have a calendar account for planning private projects, where I enter milestones annually and block out time periods monthly to work through certain topics. Then, on a weekly basis, I write specific tasks for those appointments. For doctor, crafts, or other appointments that I need to coordinate outside of my professional life, I also use a calendar account. Last but not least, I have a calendar account for athletic goals, milestones, and workouts.

Time boxing

Online calendars are not good for planning specific appointments, but also for planning blocks of time to structure the day or week between fixed appointments. This use is not suitable for everyone, as so often when planning your own time: something always comes up… And many of us are then very demotivated, because the planned period could not be used for the intended task at all. So please don’t be too hard on yourself if you want to try the “time boxing” method for yourself. Personally, I plan my week as well as my days with time blocks, each of which corresponds to a category, especially so that important topics find a place in my daily tasks and are not displaced by urgent tasks. For this purpose, I usually reserve time in the morning and try to actually use these time periods for the intended strategic topics. In the afternoon I’m a bit more relaxed and schedule some “admin” time for emails or similar, but I’m also not completely overwhelmed if other than the intended topics come in between.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of my time use

And last but not least, you can use those calendar accounts to strategically evaluate your personal time usage. For example, you can set a goal to do more sports (e.g. at least 3 hours a week) and check every month whether you have actually kept to this goal, as well as plan ahead for a month or a week, in order to always be reminded that you now have a certain time frame just for this goal. This type of use also requires a lot of practice and should not be handled too strictly, but also not too loosely, so as not to demotivate yourself unnecessarily if a task has not gone as planned in the calendar. Then be honest with yourself, write in your calendar what else you used that time period for and why the planned use had to be prioritised. This way, you’ll learn more about your motivations for prioritising your goals and can learn for the future why, for example, some time periods may be better suited than others for pursuing goals.

Checklist:

  1. think about which tasks you could benefit from using your online calendar (e.g. “long, medium and short term planning of personal appointments” and “coordinating private appointments with others”)
  2. decide which task you want to start with and which tasks you want to try afterwards
  3. decide which existing Internet account you want to use for this purpose, or if you need to create a completely new account
  4. try the usage for at least one month to see if it adds value to you and if it does, keep it or adapt the usage a bit to better suit you