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Planning Your Day, Week, Month, and Year—Looking Forward and Back
Technique #8: Devise Systems to Plan Your Day, Week, Month, and Year
People often ask me what the best product for office organization is. It’s a question that makes me cringe, because there is no product that exists that can be the ultimate solution. While product and technology can play a role in the overall solution, they are typically not the solution. So my answer to this question is usually “It depends.” While I fully realize this is not the answer most people are hoping to hear, it truly does depend on several factors—such as the part of your office or workday you’re trying to organize and make more productive. We established in the introduction that it’s necessary to organize four components of the office to make your workplace work for you—and an important one of these is time management. No matter what, I would always recommend that you have some sort of calendar. In fact, it is the one product I will always tell people they need to have in their office.
You would think that having a calendar would be just as important as having a chair on which to sit to do your work. Yet I am frequently surprised to encounter people who don’t use calendars to help plan their days. I live by my calendar; as the saying goes in our office, “If it’s not on Laura’s calendar, it’s not going to happen.” While I recognize that this may be somewhat of an extreme approach, the system that works for me is one where I put just ...
