Favicons and tech enthusiasts, today we plan to address your summer plans and the burden of keeping up with work when there are so many vacations, sunny weekends and trips in discussions. We aim to sync technology with an old-school yet surprising tool – the printable calendar.
There are so many productivity and time management tools that sometimes it might become chaotic just to search through them and see what they offer. So, we have developed your method to connect work during summer with your plans and make sure you keep both up to date. Productivity is subject to many challenges, especially in summer. July 4th is just one of them. You also face vacation plans, the trip offers for a specific period, team buildings and other initiatives that take time from your work. Below you can find 5 key steps to manage your time through the method we called paper-and-tech.
#1 Prepare Your Tools
Contents
You will need a charger for your phone and 5 – 10 minutes. First you will need to find the right visible place at your desk where you’ll place your calendar. We recommend making room for the printable calendar near your monitor, at eye level. Find simple calendar templates which emphasize weekends, so you can see unavailable days immediately. Print out a June 2018 calendar and place it on your wall. Continue with the rest of the summer months.
The printable calendar needs to be fully always accessible for viewing and editing. So, keep a marker at hand. Once the June calendar is on your wall, you can begin planning.
#2 Assign Roles
Roles are essential for your activity. You will have various categories of tasks, regardless of your work. Find the major ones and begin by color coding. You can have distinct colors for monthly reports, weekly meetings, regular trips, key deadlines, trimester or semester assessments and so on.
Find a code for each category and mark them on your printable calendar. Remember to keep it realistic – it’s not yet time to optimize your work and shorten its duration. Use colors and shapes to create your own visual information code.
#3 Use App Planners
There are plenty of apps which help you with work productivity and time management. They can become even more useful if you use them as planners in sync with your calendar. The best way to work with these digital and analog tools is to mention them.
Feel free to write see calendar in your app or see planner in the calendar. This way you will avoid overcharging the calendar or missing essential information out of it. Your printable calendar is not a planner or a to-do-list. It’s a helpful tool to plan your week and month, but it needs constant updating. You can go even further and sync the above color coding system with your digital planner or to-do-apps for even more relevance.
#4 Update and Back-up Weekly
Always consider leaving out weekend and US paid or federal holidays. Although the summer is not that generous when it comes to holidays, vacations are in store for many of us. Quickly update as soon as you find out about a meeting or day off.
Have you considered backing up your information? Take a picture of the calendar once you update it to make sure that you are always aware of your time.
#5 Think Ahead and Beyond
Create your own performance evaluation by keeping copies of past months calendars, once they pass. Notice how long a project or task lasted and how you’ve estimated it. Keep it realistic for future estimations and always have a reason for each change. This helps you measure your working time and improve future productivity.
Also, think ahead. Consider holidays, trips and conferences when assigning roles to your next months. You will see exactly how many working available days you have in each month and how many of them you need for specific monthly activities.
Why is a printable calendar useful next to your digital apps and planners? This tool is a reliable back-up for the times when your phone has a low battery or there is a power cut and you cannot access your time information. Moreover, it’s accessible and saves you time when you need to plan meetings. Sometimes, you must provide business partners with a quick confirmation. Therefore, you just need to look at the calendar to see if you’re available or busy.
Also, you don’t need a learning process to work with your calendar. However, it will require a look each morning when you arrive for work. This look will turn out to be productive and helpful to optimize your working time and plan your holidays based on activities and meetings you should attend for work. Let’s begin syncing these tools with our time!
Featured Image Source.
