Use multiple calendar categories
It always amazes me when people don’t do this. But you can set up multiple ‘Calendars’ in your calendar (the terminology gets a bit confusing). Think of a calendar as a category. For example, I have calendars for:
Appointments – For client bookings.
Work – For planning my tasks and work.
Family (shared with my wife) – For planning family events.
Sport – For booking classes at our gym.
Social – For social events with friends.
Random – For miscellaneous stuff.
Busy – To block off time that I don’t want to be booked via Calendly.
Apps – For syncing events from Pipedrive to my calendar.
Block out time for tasks
I have a whole article on time blocking so I won’t spend long on this. But blocking out time for your tasks is a great way of taking the items on your todo list and creating a plan around when you’re going to do everything and how long it should take. If you struggle with procrastination or get distracted easily, try blocking out time for your tasks and see how this helps. You could even start by blocking time for the types of work you do e.g. ‘client work’ instead of specific tasks.
Don’t allow overlap
Unless there’s a good reason, the appointments on your calendar shouldn’t overlap. How can you do two things at once? When you avoid overlap, it’s much easier to make sense of your calendar to see what’s going on and what you should be doing next.
The exception would be if you have access to a colleagues calendar and can see their appointments, naturally, these will overlap with your own. But the nice thing about having multiple calendars (mentioned above) is that you can toggle them on/off to show/hide them.