Five Tips for Your 2022 Calendar

Looking to ramp up efficiency in 2022?

There’s no better place to start than your own calendar. Here are five tips for squeezing the most out of your scheduled time, and that of your teams, by maximizing calendar efficiency for the coming year.

5 Decline meetings you don’t attend

Set a new policy at your company for everyone to treat all meeting invites like a good, old-fashioned RSVP. Living by the calendar allows your team to rely on your availability based on your calendar. Like most tools, it’s only as useful as it is accurate. This may include changing the culture at your company to not invite everyone to an optional meeting. Check out Loom.com. It’s a great tool to keep employees in the loop as needed without being a time vampire.

4 Reduce and batch recurring meetings

Write down a list of all your recurring meetings and put them into categories of weekly, monthly and quarterly. Then, stack or bundle as many of them as possible. It’s amazing how many redundant meetings are out there.

3 Add your core working team as admins to your calendar

For years, booking meetings would require a double opt-in, and usually asking people to move things in their calendar to accommodate a priority meeting. Save time by making core team members administrators on your calendar (and you on theirs) so everyone knows when the band can get together.

2 Set ‘Focus Time’ for specific hours

Make tasks into calendar appointments for yourself. Turn that hot mess of tasks into calendar Tetris to get things done. Google Calendar even has a specific button and customizable color for Focus Time.

1 Add teams and groups to the meeting invite

Setting up groups or teams and inviting them to meetings allows everyone in your company, as well as non-company guests, to see the context of who’s invited. As an added benefit, anyone added to a group or team is automatically added to all of the upcoming recurring meetings. You may need to have IT admin privileges to do this, but wow, it’s awesome and useful.