My Favourite Tip: Patrick Lightbody - How the calendar experts manage their time

You’ve probably heard the old adage, “what gets measured gets managed”, and when it comes to your time, it absolutely holds true. Knowing this, Patrick Lightbody co-founded Reclaim.ai to regain control over his own time, and to help others do the same. 

Patrick shares some of the most useful calendar hacks he’s come across throughout his career, and they’re all features on the freely available Google Calendar (and most similar calendar apps, too). 

But before you go and colour-code your calendar within an inch of its life, Patrick recommends doing a calendar audit, and making that audit part of your weekly or monthly routine. Most importantly, he recommends you compare the results of your calendar audit with your work goals more broadly. After all, what good is hacking your time management system if you don’t know why you’re trying to save time in the first place!

Connect with Patrick in the support chat at Reclaim.ai

You can find the full interview here: Turn your calendar into a virtual assistant with Reclaim co-founder Patrick Lightbody

***

My new book Time Wise is out now. You can grab a copy here.

 

Connect with me on the socials:

Linkedin

Twitter

Instagram 

 

If you’re looking for more tips to improve the way you work, I write a fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things I have discovered that help me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets I am loving. You can sign up for that at http://howiwork.co

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at [e-mail]

 

CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You've probably heard the old adage what gets measured gets managed,
and when it comes to your time, it absolutely holds true.
Knowing this, Patrick Lightbody co founded reclaim ai to regain
control over his own time and to help others do
the same. So what are some of the most useful

(00:21):
calendar hacks he's come across throughout his career. It turns
out they're all features on the freely available Google Calendar
and most similar calendar apps too. Oh and you also
might want to do a calendar audit, which Patrick explains
exactly how to do. My name is doctor amanthe Immer.

(00:46):
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show
about how to help you do your best work. On
today's My Favorite Tip episode, go back to an interview
from the past and I pick out my favorite tip
from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Patrick
Lightbody and we start by talking about little known hacks

(01:10):
for making the most out of Google Calendar.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, one is the free busy time. You know, I
mentioned that it's binary, but a lot of people don't
even know about that. And so if you didn't know.
There's a little setting at the bottom of your events
when you make them, and you can mark something as
for your busy and so if you want something to
appear on your calendar but not necessarily block your availability,
market is free. That's one that we've discovered very few

(01:34):
people know about, which is partly why they also don't
know where claim's doing the job of changing that value
around at times. But that's probably the least known one.
Another is color coding. I'd say most people know they
can change the color of their calendar. Not as many
people know they can change the color of their events.

(01:54):
And it's a little weird because once you start getting
into that, you'll actually have two colors on every event,
funny little stripe on the left side that represents your
calendar color and then the main event color. And oddly
Google has decided you can have eleven colors for your event,
but infinity colors for your calendar. Talk to them about
that limitation. But color coding your events can be really

(02:17):
handy because it can help you be a little more
intentional with you know how you spend your time by
category for example, or I jokingly have referred to it
after I interviewed one customer, I need to wear pants
color code because I literally once I was talking to
a customer, I was like, why do you care about

(02:37):
your external meetings with customers? Why should those be colored differently?
I'm assuming it's because you know, you need to be
prepared for the customer call and you got to do
your research so you show up the best poss away.
And he told me, he said, honestly, it's that I
need to shave and wear a nice shirt and have
pants on because you know, if it's just an internal call,
I'm going to wear sweatpants and not worry about that

(02:57):
as much. So I was like, oh, right, that makes sense.
So just you know color coding. You can write click
right in Google Calendar if you're on a desktop and
kind of start labeling some of your stuff, And just
recently Google has allowed you to put a label like
words that go with the color, and then that gives
you some nice analytics about where you're spending your time.
So it seems like they're leaning into that even more so.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Now you've kind of touched on this in some of
the tips, But can you tell me what a calendar
audit is and how to do one.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, it's kind of I mean, it's a little bit
of that ritual I was describing that weekly ritualthough I
did like a mini version of it. But you know,
calendar audits are this basic idea of reflecting on where
you've spent your time, summing up the different categories of time.
The simple way to do it is by type, and
so that could be these are internal meetings, these are

(03:49):
external meetings. I would encourage you, if you're going to
do a calendar audit, to go a little deeper and
try to tie it back to like thematic priorities or
you know, some sort of some sort of priority or
ok are or you know, guiding principle, whatever system you're using.
That's a little tougher because it means you actually have
to inspect the content of the meeting and and and so,

(04:12):
you know, it requires a little more brain power. I
would definitely set a little time if you haven't done
this ever before, like give yourself a couple hours. It's
really taxing because it starts stressing you out because you
start seeing how far out of whack. I mean, maybe
you won't maybe you're amazing at time management, but if
you're like most mere mortals like us. I think you'll
find that a ton of your time is not being

(04:34):
spent on the things you wished you were spending your
time on, and that can be emotionally draining. But yeah, ultimately,
you know, you can use tools, and i'd say over
time whereclaim will help more and more with some of
the stuff. We do mini versions of this with like
weekly reports and whatnot. But the best way to get
start is just open up a little spreadsheet, write down
the things that matter to you the most, and then

(04:55):
you know, maybe a column for every week, and go
back a few weeks. Don't go crazy with it. Go
back a few weeks and count up the number of
meetings or hours if you want to get a little
more precise, that are in service to those priorities. And
then have another bucket. And almost certainly you will find
the first time you did this your other bucket is
like fifty percent of your time, and that's okay. Don't

(05:17):
feel bad about it. The first step was just acknowledgment
and awareness of it. So yeah, I mean, I'd say
that's the best place to start. But that naturally leads
to the second step, which is a lot of people
have a lot of blank space on their calendar. You know,
it's like, well, I treat my calendars where my meetings are.
That's not where I do my work. And that's understandable.
The challenges how do you know what you did last week?

(05:38):
Some people might be in their task list, But if
you're really focused on trying to manage your forty some
odd hours that you're spending every week in your day job,
then it can help a lot by actually recording what
you did, and so you don't need to use your
claim to do this. You can also just make it

(05:59):
a habit to say, okay, let me just do rough
blocks of time, you know, twice a day, check in
and put a little block down that just says worked
on blah blah blah, you know, and that fills all
that space in Personally, I find it it was valuable
I did this before reclaim to also put down the
personal stuff, you know, took a break to go run
an errand just because it helped me remember what was

(06:21):
going on in these crazy days. And then that makes
a lot, a heck of a lot easier, and it
really starts to you know, I think bend you towards
that intentional planning.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
If you enjoyed this extract for in my chat with Patrick,
you might want to go back and listen to the
full episode, which you can find a link to in
the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to
improve the way that you worked, I write a short
fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered
that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets

(06:53):
that I'm loving three to interesting research findings. You can
sign up for that at Howiwork dot code, howork dot co.
Thank you for sharing part of your day with me
by listening to How I Work. If you're keen for
more tips on how to work better, connect with me
via LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm very easy to find. Just

(07:14):
search for Amantha Imba. How I Work was recorded on
the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
Koln Nation. I am so grateful for being able to
work and live on this beautiful land and I want
to pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging.
How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support

(07:35):
from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba
who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better
than it would have otherwise.