DEV Community: Kristi Anderson

How to Share Google Calendar: Manage Multiple Calendars & Defend Your Availability

Kristi Anderson — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 14:36:07 +0000

Many of us are managing several calendars --- a work calendar, a personal calendar, maybe even one for your family, or a side gig. Viewing them all in one place can be challenging, especially when they live on different platforms.

On top of that, simply sharing your calendar won't effectively defend your actual availability. So it's tough for busy professionals to avoid double-booking --- spinning into days-long games of email/Slack tag. But it doesn't have to be a headache!

We'll show you how to share any Outlook, Google, or iCloud Calendar with your Google Calendar, making it possible to manage all your events in one place. Then we'll cover how to actually block your availability for events from other calendars to make scheduling a breeze and ensure you don't get double-booked.

Table of contents

Google shared calendars: What they are and why they're insufficient

There are essentially two categories of calendars in Google Calendar: primary and secondary calendars. Shared calendars are a subset of secondary calendars.

Primary, secondary, and shared calendars

Your primary calendar is the account you're currently logged in with in your calendar app or your browser, and the first calendar you'll see in the list of calendars when you open up Google Calendar under "My calendars." It's where all your events will be created on your calendar by default, and is the calendar that folks will see when they go to book time with you using Google's Find a Time feature.

All other calendars are secondary. Secondary calendars can be either shared calendars or additional calendars that you've created on your Google account that may or may not be shared.

Shared calendars are a type of secondary calendar that has been shared with your Google account.

Any events on secondary calendars will appear overlaid on your primary calendar. But if others go to book time with you using Google's Find a Time feature, they don't see any of your time blocked for events from those secondary calendars. They'll *only *see events on your primary calendar.

The problem with traditional calendar sharing

Sharing calendars is essential for time management, but sharing alone is impractical for defending your time without a massive headache.

No privacy between work and personal calendars: You could invite your work email to personal events, but now your personal events are on your work calendar for everyone to see.
Difficult to maintain: Even if you create a copy of your personal appointment to your work calendar, it's tricky to maintain because any changes to the original event won't get synced.
Doesn't prevent double-booking: Even if you share your personal calendar with the people at your work, they won't see your personal events when they use Google's Find a Time feature. So you're still at risk of overscheduling.

So how do you defend your time and share your actual availability?

We recommend using a combination of shared calendars and smart calendar syncing.

Start by sharing your calendars across your own accounts, following the instructions below so that you have complete visibility and access to all your events.
Then use smart calendar syncing to block time on the calendars you share with others to avoid double-booking and maintain privacy.

How to share Google Calendar with another Google Calendar

Sharing a Google Calendar is straightforward. The Google Calendar app for mobile currently does not have the share function, so you'll need to head to a browser on your computer.

Open Google Calendar and expand the My calendars section using the down arrow on the left sidebar.
You'll see all the calendars you have active on your account: your [name] calendar, possibly alongside other generic preset calendars like "Reminders," "Birthdays," and "Tasks." Those are secondary calendars that others will not see if you share your primary calendar with them.
Hover over the name of the calendar you want to share and click the three dots that appear next to it.
Select Settings and sharing‍
Click Share with specific people‍
Add the email address of the Google account you'd like to share your calendar with. (We'll cover specific sharing details below about how others see your calendar when it's shared with them.)

If you're sharing your work calendar, sometimes your IT administrator might have locked down sharing. If you're unable to share your calendar, you might need to contact them.

Create a new secondary Google Calendar without creating a new account

Sometimes you need an additional calendar --- maybe an "OOO / PTO" calendar for your whole team, or a content calendar to plan out your publishing schedule. You can create a new secondary calendar in Google without creating a new account.

With your Google Calendar still open, find the Other calendars section under My calendars on the left side.
Click the plus mark.
Select Create new calendar from the pop-up menu.
Give your calendar a name. A description isn't necessary, but you can add something there if you like.
Then, click Create calendar.

Nice! Your new calendar will be visible in the left sidebar in your calendars list.

How to share Google Calendar with an Outlook Calendar

Sharing your Microsoft Outlook Calendar with a Google Calendar is also easy from your desktop:

Click the Share button in Microsoft Calendar.
Type in your Google email address and hit the "Enter" key.
Select the level of access you'd like recipients to have.
Hit Share. You can modify sharing access at any time from the Currently sharing with field.
Then head to your Gmail account and accept the shared calendar invitation.

Now your Outlook Calendar will be visible in your calendars list on the left sidebar of your Google Calendar.

Like with any work calendar, sharing could be blocked by your organization. If you're unable to share your Outlook Calendar, contact your IT admin.

How to share Google Calendar with an iCloud Calendar

If you're using an Apple Calendar connected to iCloud, you can share it with your Google Calendar by making a public URL.

From the iCloud Calendar app:

Click the share option in your iCloud Calendar to the right of the calendar title in the left toolbar.
Tick the checkbox next to Public Calendar to generate a calendar URL.
Now, you can either send an email link to your Google account or simply copy the link to paste it directly into your Google Calendar.
If you emailed it to yourself, accept the invite from the notification that just arrived in your Gmail account.
If you copied the link, head to your Google Calendar and click the plus mark next to Other calendars in the left sidebar.
Select From URL.
Paste the URL and click Add calendar.

You're done! Your iCloud Calendar will now be visible in your list of calendars.

Note: This makes your iCloud Calendar public. Anyone you give the URL to will be able to see your calendar. So take note of anyone else you share your calendar link with.

How to share a calendar via a URL with your Google Calendar

You can share a calendar from any source with your Google Calendar if you have a shareable link. The instructions are easy and identical to the last few steps of sharing your iCloud Calendar:

Copy the link you want to share with your Google account and head to your Google Calendar.
Click the plus mark next to Other calendars in the left sidebar.
Select From URL.
Paste the URL and click Add calendar.

Easy as pie!

How to set privacy and visibility settings for your Google Calendar when sharing with others

Now that you've shared all your other calendars with your Google Calendar, it's important to understand how other people see your events when you add people to any shared calendar.

When you set sharing settings, these settings will apply to everyone you've shared your calendar with. So if you're sharing a calendar with yourself (i.e., another one of your other accounts) as well as others, the settings you choose will determine how the calendar displays to you (when logged into your other account) and other people.

So, you have to share all details and sacrifice privacy, or share nothing and sacrifice context. Fortunately, as we'll show at the very end of this post, there is an in-between option to show some context and still defend your time if you sync your calendars using Reclaim.

To set your Google Calendar privacy settings:

Click the three dots beside the calendar being shared.
Select Settings and sharing.
Manage public and organization-wide sharing under Access permissions for events:
You'll see one to three checkboxes depending on your account. Personal Google accounts tend only to have "Make available to public," while GSuite accounts have a couple of extra options. Most notably, "Make available for [organization]."
From the drop-down menu on the right, choose the level of detail you want to share with your colleagues:**

See only free/busy (hide details): This allows people to see that there's an event on your calendar, but they can't see any event details. It will just show "free" or "busy" as the event title.\
See all event details: People who can see your calendar can see full event details, including event name, attendees, description, location, and any meeting links.\
Make changes to events: People with this level of access can see and edit all details for the events on your calendar. They can edit the title, timing, duration, description, location, video conferencing details, and invite other people to your events. The only thing they can't do is share your calendar with anyone else.\
Make changes and manage sharing:* The user you're sharing with can see and edit details for all your events, *and they can share your calendar with other people.\
‍
Manage sharing with individuals by scrolling down to the Share with specific people section.
Adjust your sharing settings. Here you'll see any individuals you've shared your calendar with, including your other accounts. You'll have the same sharing options here as you did at the organizational level.
I always like to give my other personal accounts full access to make changes and manage sharing, so I can manage my accounts wherever I'm logged in.

Some of these permission settings may be locked by your administrator. So contact them if there's a reason to make an exception to the company policy.

An important note: any calendar that you share with your Google Workspace account in your organization can be seen by an IT administrator, even if you don't share it with them explicitly. This is a lesser-known feature of Google Workspace, and there isn't currently a way to turn it off. So: share cautiously! It's rare, but sometimes companies will even designate managers (e.g., your boss) as Google administrators, which theoretically gives them permission to spy on your shared calendars. The last thing you want is for them to see "Job Interview" on your calendar.

Another important note: sharing a calendar with your Google account doesn't block events on your primary calendar. If one of your coworkers searches for your availability using the "Find People" or "Find a Time" tool, they'll only see your primary work calendar, not any other calendars that you've shared, even if you're explicitly shared it with them. So if you want to maintain privacy and actually block your availability on your primary calendar, you still have one more step to go: sync your calendars using Reclaim.

Start scheduling smart with Reclaim's Calendar Sync

Now you have complete visibility into your schedule and can manage your calendars across accounts. But how do you truly block your availability for seamless scheduling with others and avoid double-booked meetings? It's all about smart calendar syncing.

Set up your calendar to do the heavy lifting for you with Reclaim's Calendar Sync. Calendar Sync automatically blocks events on your primary calendar from whatever secondary calendars you choose while keeping your synced events up to date when they change.

It solves the privacy issue by allowing you to set custom visibility for your synced events. Don't want people spying on your doctor's appointment or job interview? Just set your privacy settings to display events from your personal calendar as "Busy" or "Personal Commitment."

Your time is blocked without sharing the context you don't want to share. It's really the only way to share your availability accurately while maintaining privacy where you want it.

Calendar Sync is free forever at Reclaim between one personal calendar and one work calendar. So try it out to eliminate scheduling mayhem and take control of your schedule.

Best Planner Apps: Top 5 Tools for Productivity in 2022

Kristi Anderson — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 13:23:02 +0000

Dwight Eisenhower once said that "plans are useless; planning is indispensable." As both a U.S. president and top WWII military commander, Eisenhower had some complicated things to plan.

Unfortunately for many of us, planning happens through a mishmash of digital and paper task lists, notes (Post-it and otherwise), and various siloed calendars. We end up limping along to our project deadlines instead of marching purposefully toward them.

But no matter if you're strategically deploying troops across Europe or wrangling an overloaded workweek, planning really boils down to two components: a to-do list and the time you have to get it done. In fact, if you spend just 10-12 minutes planning your day, you'll save up to 2 hours of time you would have otherwise wasted from poor planning.

If you're ready to manage those two components better and break the cycle of poor planning, you've come to the right place. In this post, we'll walk you through five of the best planner apps for productivity, so you can get more done in less time and feel the calm that comes with a fully completed to-do list.

Todoist - for list planners
Reclaim.ai - for productivity-driven planners
Trello - for visual planners
Google Tasks - for Google user planners
Things 3 - for Apple user planners

5 Best Digital Planner Apps to Keep You Organized at Work

**1. Todoist - *for list planners***

Todoist is a task management planner app that lets you gather all your tasks into one convenient place so you can prioritize, track, and even delegate your to-do list. Todoist is great for both leaders and individual contributors who have long to-do lists filled with multi-faceted projects.

Todoist is one of the most feature-rich task management apps available. (source)

Pros

Simply creating a plan to accomplish unfinished goals will reduce stress and boost productivity. Todoist is where you create and keep track of that plan.

The app has a lightweight user interface that makes it easy to add one-off, recurring, or multi-step tasks (like new-hire onboarding). You can assign a priority level and reminder to each item, so you know what needs attention now and what can wait. And there are productivity visualizations---like charts and graphs---so you can see your progress.

Todoist lets you divide and conquer big jobs by assigning tasks to teammates. Plus, you can integrate the app with your email, Slack, calendar, and files---allowing collaboration to flow across communication channels.

Cons

Todoist doesn't support automated time blocking or managing your availability. Meaning, you'll either have to manually block time on your calendar to complete tasks, or take a risk that competing priorities will overlap in your workday.

Todiost pricing: Free → $5/month for teams

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**2. Reclaim.ai - *for productivity-driven planners***

Reclaim is a smart calendar assistant planner app that syncs your multiple calendars and your actual availability, and automatically blocks time for your tasks and projects, no-meeting days, and even your regular routines like a daily lunch break. It's a great solution for anyone with a busy calendar, from makers who need time for deep work sessions, to managers balancing productive work alongside lots of meetings.

Reclaim is an intelligent calendar assistant that creates up to 40% more time in your workweek using smart time blocking. (source)

Pros

All the to-do lists in the world won't help if you haven't set aside time to complete your planned goals. Reclaim takes care of that for you by automatically scheduling time blocks in your calendar, then flexibly adjusts as new tasks, meetings, and priorities pop up.

Say you have a Task to complete by next Thursday that'll take several hours. You tell Reclaim about it, and the app will break it up into smaller time chunks, then fit them into your calendar---moving each around automatically when other events get scheduled. As the deadline approaches, Reclaim puts a hard fence around that time so no other events can take it over.

The Habits feature in Reclaim does the same for your regular routines, like if you enjoy meditating every morning. You'd ask Reclaim to find 20 to 30 minutes of quiet time each day before noon. The app will automatically find time around your other calendar events scheduling as a soft time block that can adjust, but as a morning fills up, it'll stop shifting and mark your meditation time as busy---defending it from rescheduling around new events.

Reclaim also syncs your personal and work calendars, auto-schedules your 1:1 meetings, and integrates with Slack, Zoom, Google Tasks and Linear. So when you create a work meeting in Zoom or set a lunch date in your personal calendar, it auto-syncs to all other connected calendars and apps. Reclaim will even show you how much time you're spending on things like deep work and meetings, and allow you to reprioritize all of your plans around what's most important in a single click.

Cons

Reclaim does not currently offer team-oriented features beyond automated scheduling for 1:1 meetings. But, look for new collaborative features in early 2022 that will make group tasks easier, and project management seamless with integrations to Asana, Todoist, Trello and Jira, and more.

Reclaim pricing: Free → $9/month (paid plans coming in 2022)

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**3. Trello - *for visual planners***

Trello is a collaborative planner app that uses a kanban format to help you organize, manage, and visualize tasks and progress. Trello is particularly useful when managing projects with lots of moving parts and several stakeholders.

Trello makes to-do list building and tracking a visual exercise. (source)

Pros

Instead of endless text lists and bullet points, Trello users plan tasks on cards. The cards are slotted into columns representing each task's stage of completion. A simple drag-and-drop motion moves them to the next stage.

So if you want to track multiple steps involved in team OKRs, you can create a Trello board for each objective, and a card for each task within those objectives. Once the product team is done with their part of a task, you slide the card to the next column, which tells marketing it's time to get to work.

Unlike a simple bullet point, each task card can be a self-contained project in itself. You can add reminders, checklists, attachment previews, and team members can add comments and emojis and tag co-workers.

Trello excels at integrations, connecting with hundreds of other tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Slack. The Slack integration is particularly useful. Imagine a Slack notification that gets triggered automatically when someone creates a support ticket in the #dev channel.

Cons

While Trello has several features to help you organize a team project, it doesn't have the ability to translate cards or tasks to realistic planning on your calendar. So it's up to you to manually adjust times, and be wary of time overlaps.

Trello pricing: Free → $17.50/month

**4. Google Tasks - *for Google user planners***

Google Tasks is a mobile-first, bare-bones planner app for Google Workspace users that's designed to help you create and manage a to-do list on the go. Google Tasks is particularly useful for coordinating to-do lists among heavy email users as you can manage and create tasks right from Gmail.

Google Tasks doesn't have many extras, but it shines as a basic to-do list manager that integrates with your Google Workspace tools.

Pros

To-do lists are most powerful when you can easily take them with you wherever you go. That's where Google Tasks excels---as a mobile app that's ready to use whenever and wherever you are. Google Tasks also lives within your Google Calendar and Gmail so you can plan tasks right alongside your inbox.

While Google Tasks doesn't have the bells and whistles of other planners on our list, it does have a few basic functions. For example, you can break big jobs into sub-tasks, then set due dates and notifications for each one, and reorder your list with a basic drag-and-drop function.

The biggest strength of Google Tasks, though, is that it's part of Google's ecosystem of tools. That means it's fully integrated with other Google products you may already use. So if your boss sends an email asking for this week's report, you can create a to-do item from Gmail, track your progress in Google Tasks, then quickly trace that task back to the original email.

Google Tasks can also be a great option for cross-company collaborations where teams and people may not be working with the same task management tool or system, but can co-manage tasks using Rooms. You may even be collaborating outside your organization where you can't share access to a company management platform, but they likely have access to Google's platforms, so you can all coordinate there.

Cons

Even though Tasks is fully integrated with your Google Calendar, it doesn't manage your schedule like you think it would. For starters, when you create a task, it doesn't block time out on your schedule. It's more of a reminder.

Also, when you create a task, the due date is just the day the event is scheduled. Helpful to remember a birthday party, but less so if you're planning a project that will take 10 hours to complete.

There is a workaround, though. You can integrate Reclaim with Google Tasks to get the power of Google and the assistance of an actively managed calendar.

Google Tasks pricing: Free (with Google account)

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**5. Things - *for Apple user planners***

Things is a planner app built for Apple devices and designed to help wrangle growing task lists with smooth automations and easy-to-use controls. You can use it on your Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch or iPad. The app is ideal for individual contributors, or as a personal task manager, but not really suited for managers who plan for an entire team.

Things is a recently redesigned planner app that makes to-do list creating and management, dare we say, fun. (source)

Pros

Cultured Code, the team behind Things, recently rebuilt their planner and productivity app with a focus on pleasant aesthetics and enjoyable interactions. The result is a tool that makes task planning less chore and more fun.

At the heart of Things 3's new design are several easy-to-use controls. For example, you can drag the blue "+" icon and drop it anywhere to instantly create a new task or headline, or reorder several tasks at once with a quick drag-and-drop. A simple downward swipe gets you to the search function, and you can even use Alexa to add entries via voice to make planning a breeze.

Organizing your tasks and daily plan are also easy in Things 3. Headers break up big projects into manageable tasks, while checklists break multi-step tasks up even further. And if you have a bullet list somewhere else, just copy and paste it into Things, and it'll create a checklist for you.

Work-life balance is important, and Things helps you keep the two separate. There are "Today" and "This evening" tags that automatically categorize tasks as things to do at or after work. And the "Upcoming" view lets you see what the next few days have in store without muddying up today's goals.

Cons

Things is a *personal *planner app. Meaning, it's great for the individual trying to organize their life, but it has little team support functionality.

The app is also missing any meaningful priority planning other than simply reordering tasks in a list. So if some tasks come with a hard deadline and others can be moved to the back burner, you have to manage that manually in Things.

And, of course, as a beautiful but siloed to-do list, Things 3 won't actively protect your schedule to make sure you actually have the time needed to complete everything on your list.

Things 3 pricing: $9.99 for iPhone & Watch, $19.99 for iPad, $49.99 for Mac (one-time purchase)

Bonus: Calendly

Calendly is an appointment scheduling and availability planning app that allows you to eliminate back-and-forth communications when agreeing to meeting times. We've thrown it in as a bonus because planning isn't just about finding time for your own to-dos; it's also finding time to meet with users, customers, prospects, and co-workers.

Calendly is the only item on our list besides Reclaim that offers an effective availability planning feature. It also integrates neatly with Slack and your existing calendar, serving as an excellent complementary tool for conventional planner apps.

The app doesn't offer task management, priority planning, productivity metrics, or product management capabilities found in more robust planner apps. Calendly really works best when complementing those other solutions.

The Best Planner App = More Calm, Less Chaos

Every week it seems to be the same thing---we pledge to be conscientious and resolve to make like Buffett and Gates. Then before you know it, it's one unexpected meeting/obligation after another, and the workweek spirals out of control.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The best planner apps make it easy to manage your schedule, collaborate with your colleagues, and effectively prioritize your time and energy.

How to Add Linear.app Issues to Google Calendar

Kristi Anderson — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 15:51:09 +0000

As busy product people, we know just how hard it is to make time in a jam-packed schedule. Even with great issue trackers like Linear.app for software teams (which we're heavy users of here at Reclaim), we always have more to-dos than we have time to get them done. And because our calendars are more overrun with meetings than ever before, it's challenging to get time for our actual work.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to make time for your Linear tasks and projects, even in the busy world of software team schedules: the Linear + Google Calendar integration from Reclaim. We wanted to help teams make a better connection between their task list and their actual capacity (the calendar). So we built a way for them to work together!

In this post, learn how you can auto-schedule time for Linear issues to Google Calendar, by priority, before the end of your cycle/sprint or due date.

Why schedule time for Linear issues/tasks?

Because unfortunately, if you don't schedule time to work on your actual task list, there's a good chance that you'll lose this time to something that's not necessarily high priority for you. In fact, our recent Productivity Trends Report found that the average professional spends 21.5 hours in meetings each week, causing the average workweek to increase by 18.6% since February 2020 to 44.6 hours per week.

Before launching this integration, we spoke with Linear users to get an idea of how they're managing their time today. Here are some stats from managers and makers using the Linear issue tracking platform:

Less than 50% of issues get completed every Cycle
Managers report averaging only 1.5 hours of task work a day
Makers report averaging 4 hours of task work a day
Only 60% of maker task time is spent on productive focus work
Managers tell us they want to defend 17.5 more hours/week for each team member's task work
Managers spend 5.5 hours/week assigning, prioritizing and reprioritizing work for the team

Overall, the consensus across managers and makers alike is wanting more time for productive work so they can stay focused on reaching their sprint or cycle goals, and currently neither party feels they get quite enough time to do that. Enter Reclaim's Linear integration!

How the integration works

So how does it work? Reclaim's Linear integration automatically finds the best time in your schedule for your to-dos based on the priority, estimates, and due dates you set for your issues. Reclaim then schedules flexible time blocks for these to-dos that remain free so you can still accommodate new appointments, right up until you run out of time before your due date. Then, it will lock in the time you need for the task so it can't be overbooked, unless you choose to prioritize another task for this time.

All of your Linear issues with Estimates and due dates (or Cycles) automatically sync to your Reclam task list and get blocked on your Google Calendar, and stay in sync with workflow state changes from Linear.

How to connect Linear and Google Calendar

Now that we know how everything works, let's walk through setting up the integration:

Create a free Reclaim.ai account: Sign up for Reclaim (free forever, team plans free through March 2022).
Find your integration settings: Go through the onboarding steps, then head to Settings > Integrations.
Connect your Linear account: Once you enable the integration, review and accept permissions to connect your Linear teams to Reclaim.
Select your projects: In your Linear settings page in Reclaim, select the projects you want to connect to make time for your tasks.
Pick your scheduling method: Choose between scheduling Linear issues that use a Reclaim label, or scheduling all issues with estimates and a due date or cycle. Save your settings!
Start scheduling your Linear issues: If you already have estimates and due dates/cycles for all of your issues, you should be all set! If you prefer to use the label method, hop back into Linear and add a Reclaim label to each task you want to schedule.
Check out your calendar: Take a look at your Google Calendar, or Planner in Reclaim - you should now have time blocks for your connected Linear issues, scheduled by priority and due date!
Invite your team: Once your integration is set up, hop over to the Share Reclaim page to invite your team via email, or grab your invite link to share with them in Slack.

It's as easy as that! Once you play around with it a bit, you'll quickly fall into the rhythm of scheduling and prioritizing your tasks on your calendar. You might even find yourself assigning issues to members of your team, adding estimates and due dates to them, and letting Reclaim block time on their calendars to get the work done! Reclaim's Planner also makes it really easy to reschedule or reprioritize tasks on your calendar, and to check off the ones you've completed.

You're also probably wondering about the estimation method! Fortunately, each estimate type (t-shirt size, fibonacci, linear and exponential) is supported so you can continue to work with your Linear issues and projects the same way you do today. The larger the estimate, the longer the time block on your calendar. Here is the duration conversion chart for time blocking Linear issues on your calendar:

What are the benefits?

Whether you're a manager responsible for prioritizing work across an entire team, or an individual contributor who needs to find and defend time for productive work, this integration can help you accomplish up to 40% more every sprint.

By integrating your tasks with your calendar, you're not only protecting the time you need for work, you're also empowering your team to do the same! This increases transparency within teams, helps reduce interruptions that pull you out of your productive flow state, and helps everyone better estimate, plan out and achieve attainable goals every sprint. Here are just a few examples of what the integration can do for you:

Auto-block time for you (or your team) to GTD
Get more time for focus time every week
Hit your sprint goals more often
Get a realistic picture of team capacity
Reduce context switching & multitasking
Protect your work-life balance (keep your work during your actual working hours!)

So, no matter how large or small the task, all you need to do is set an estimate and due date (or Cycle) in Linear and Reclaim will magically find the best time for it in your calendar. And if something changes where suddenly you need to pivot to a different task, all you have to do is mark that a priority and your entire schedule will reprioritize for you.

We're also excited to share this is one of many more task integrations to come! Look out for Todoist, Asana, Trello and JIRA integrations in early 2022 - you can sign up for early access to these in your Reclaim integration settings! Follow up on Twitter at @reclaimai for updates on our latest and greatest releases.

Top 14 Project Management Skills for the Remote Work Era

Kristi Anderson — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 11:29:10 +0000

Project management is a hard, demanding job -- and not for the faint of heart. A project manager is responsible for taking a project from ideation to close, and leading the team through every milestone and dilemma in between.

Many project managers are faced with new challenges in today's world. So many of our conversations and planning sessions occurred naturally and spontaneously before, and project managers are now trying to lead their teams and projects through a completely remote, work-from-home environment. How can they still achieve the same level or success in a distributed workforce?

And it turns out this may not just be a temporary problem: 74% of professionals expect remote work to become standard, with 97% not wanting to return to the office full-time. Fortunately, many of the skills are still the same as before the pandemic, though a few need to be turned up a notch to accommodate new modes of communication. As always, project managers need a strong balance between soft and hard skills, and a mix of left-brained analytical rigor combined with right-brained emotional intelligence.

In this post, discover the top 14 project management skills every project manager should develop to be successful in the remote work-from-home era.

Project Management Skills

So what types of skills should a project manager have? As the coordinator for a highly complex show, project managers need an arsenal of people skills and technical skills to keep the many moving pieces in line. Here are the project management skills to develop to lead your project team remotely:

1. Leadership

The first and invariably most important skill on this list is leadership. As a project manager, you're in charge of an entire team of people who will need to work well together and produce high-quality results. And because effective leadership is so essential to achieving these results, 79% of organizations are prioritizing the development of project management leadership skills throughout their teams. An amazing project manager knows when to make hard decisions, how to build relationships, when to listen, how to coach, and when the team needs a good old fashioned motivational speech. And just because you can't swing by a team member's desk doesn't mean you shouldn't check in with them in the same cadence. In fact, one-on-one meetings have increased 500% since the pandemic, which shows the clear need for leaders to prioritize their team on their calendars in lieu of those spontaneous in-person check-ins.

2. Communication

Communication is an essential skill for a project manager, especially in the remote work era, and in some way, supports every single skill in this list. But unfortunately, 57% of projects fail due to a breakdown in communications. On any given day, you probably speak to at least a dozen different people associated with the project, including your own team, customers, stakeholders, and vendors. As project manager, you're responsible for communicating the many different moving parts, and ensuring your team has the information they need to do their work. And since communication isn't just composed of in-person meetings anymore, asynchronous communication methods help streamline these conversations on a schedule that works for everyone. That means leveraging a variety of mediums for communication: email, chat platforms like Slack and Zoom, project management tools or calendars, and even written status reports on what the team accomplished for a given week.

3. Time Management & Scheduling

Among the hardest project management skills to continue developing is time management and scheduling. All projects have deadlines that need to be met, and it's up to the project manager to build the schedule and milestones to reach to make effective progress throughout the project. You also need to consider the schedule of every person on the projectl, and ensure they have the time they need to accomplish their key priorities. A project manager with excellent time management skills will be able to develop a plan and timeline based on each individual's workload and time needed to accomplish it. They'll also be aware of major time wasters too like unnecessary meetings that are driving the average professional to spend 21.5 hours in meetings a week, and help their team minimize distractions and context switching through methods like time blocking so they can focus on their important work.

4. Task Management

Another highly important technical skill that every project manager must have is task management. Projects are made up of dozens of tasks, if not hundreds or thousands, each with their own level of difficulty and time requirements. It's up to you as the project manager to create, assign and manage these tasks for your entire team. And unsurprisingly, most project tasks depend on other tasks being completed before they can begin, which means you are literally the ring-leader to a highly complex show with many moving parts. So to be successful in project management, it's not just a matter of throwing together a list: you have to understand the project in its entirety so you can determine which tasks to prioritize to unblock others, and how to orchestrate a plan in the most efficient order. There's also always the opportunity to optimize - 54% of workers spend 5 or more hours a week on tedious tasks - what can you do to automate these tasks for them?

5. Analytical

What business decisions are made these days without analytics? Not many. And as a project manager, you're responsible for making a lot of decisions with and for your team. Projects are created to address complex problems or opportunities, and require thorough research and analysis to develop the best approach to solve a need. This means diving into performance data, gathering customer insights, researching market trends - whatever type of business intelligence your project needs so you can make productive, informed decisions. Data-driven project management skills are absolutely necessary to improving the ROI outcome of your project. Make sure to distribute the analytics to your remote team so they can leverage the same insights in their work!

6. Tech Savvy

77% of high-performing projects use project management software, yet only 22% of organizations actually make the investment - and this is as of 2021, a year after the pandemic started! As the person responsible for the success of these projects, it's up to you to advocate for the tech resources you need to optimize the process across your remote team. These tools are even more important now that you can't rely on a whiteboard in the corner of the office to be central station for a project.

Project management apps like Asana, JIRA, ClickUp, and Monday.com are comprehensive tools with deep feature sets to help you optimize every step of a project, or you could use a simpler tool like Trello or Todoist to organize and manage your projects. This is where your tech-savvy smarts come in - a rockstar project manager will not only quickly pick up and adopt the tool, they'll also help educate the team on how to get the most out of the platform. You should also be on the lookout for AI - 85% of CEOs expect AI to have a significant impact on their business in the next 5 years. Smart calendar tools like Reclaim.ai are already helping managers create up to 40% more time in their week.

7. Organization

Similar to task management and time management, organization is another hard skill you need to ensure your projects truly stay on track. With so many moving parts and managing a remote team schedule across multiple time zones, it is very impossible to coordinate without strong organizational skills. And while every project manager will have their own method, some abilities you'll want to have include documenting notes, updating files, prioritizing lists, staying up to date on progress, and so on. Office workers waste up to 40% of their day because they simply don't know how to stay organized! So make organization a priority so you can show by example just how impactful proper organization can be for productivity.

8. Flexibility

Who hasn't started the day with a well-laid plan, and gotten interrupted an hour in with an urgent priority that completely changes your focus? Maybe it's a new bug you encountered that needs to be addressed before the project can proceed, or another project entirely that has escalated to a top priority for your team. Things happen, and you need to be able to flex with them, not against. That's why all the best project managers know how to stay flexible around an ever-changing schedule. But don't let bad planning be the reason you need to flex! 80% of employees spend half their workweek on rework due to poor communication, so if you're reprioritizing often due to avoidable issues, focus on improvement in your earlier-stage project development.

9. Negotiating

While negotiation surely could fall under communication, it's such a major skill and project management requirement that it easily warrants its own seat on the list. Project managers are basically in a constant state of negotiation on behalf of their projects. On the external side, you're responsible for negotiating with partners, contractors and vendors, and not just bargaining on pricing. You have to negotiate all of the details of the relationship and their contributions - milestones, timeline, deliverables, responsibilities, approach, anything relevant to the project. Business travel is starting to pick back up, but you probably have a couple more years of Zoom call negotiations before corporate travel budgets increase again. Your persuasive skills are also needed internally too: project managers are also regularly negotiating with their team around what to prioritize, how to tackle a task, resource allocation, even mediating and resolving conflicts between remote team members or groups. Without a doubt, negotiation skills are a must for successful project managers.

10. Risk Management

As preferable as it is to focus on the good, risks are around and need to be managed. Depending on your project and company, you may be facing operational risk, cyber risk, regulatory compliance risk, data privacy risk, infrastructure risk, even health risk. Any every risk you weigh has multiple outcomes, and the good and the bad both fall on you. Do you go with the less expensive cloud partner to recoup those resources, does the app really need 2FA sign-in, do you add the new feature to risk missing the deadline, do you allow the team to work in-office without masks? In order to manage risk, you need to really know your way around risk analysis to both identify and estimate the consequences of these scenarios.

11. Cost Management

Every project has costs, and you're the lucky person who gets to estimate, budget and manage them. And regardless of how big or small your budget is, you have to find the best way to distribute them across the entire project. Fortunately, companies with project management practices save 28 times more money than those who don't! And while the perfect budget may be assembled the week before the project, needs are likely to change as the project progresses. Make sure to leave your projects some wiggle room so you're not stuck asking for more money that could have been forecasted before the project started. This is where you want to leverage the project management expertise you've already developed - consider past projects and the unforeseen costs that crept into those budgets in your planning. Don't forget to budget for remote communication and management tools too!

12. Creativity

Every project presents its own challenges and opportunities, and the solution may not always end up being the obvious choice. Project managers are definitely known to get creative when needed, and usually find their way into the awesome project management position from their ability to see all the different sides of the project. This allows you to really come up with the best approach to the problem, as you understand so many tiny details you can create a unique solution that might not be obvious to the rest of the team. In fact, recruiters rank creative problem solving as the second most difficult skill to find, so if you have a knack for it, put it to good use on your projects!

13. Critical Thinking

Creativity so often bleeds into critical thinking, but this project management skill really requires some left-brain power. In fact, critical thinking is another skill that really leverages a lot of the others on this list. Project managers are responsible for solving and managing complex problems that require deep logic-driven thinking to evaluate these challenges from identification to conclusion. Unito describes critical thinking as questioning processes, projects, and even core business practices that are widely accepted as given to improve them for the company or team. So don't be afraid to be the devil's advocate, or to question the norm. The project itself is also probably impacted by the global remote work shift, so take into account how that will affect your plan!

14. Patience

As with any good manager, patience is definitely a trait you'll need to be an effective project management leader. Projects are often long, even if you meet your deadlines. 15% of project managers are looking at only one project at a time, which can feel like a seemingly never-ending year. It's easy to feel impatient and want to rush, but remember you put together your milestones and timeline for a reason, so don't push faster than you can unless there's a strong reason to. And most importantly, always have patience with your team. They are facing the same challenges and frustrations as you navigating a new working environment, so if you feel wound up after a mistake, relax and remember patience before kicking off a hard conversation. It will make you a better listener and leader for your team.

How to Become a Better Project Manager

Now that you know the top project management skills you need for success, what can you do to continue to develop and cultivate these qualities?

Join project management social communities: Join a LinkedIn or Facebook project management group! This is a great way to hear about other people's experiences in the same role, and how they addressed their scenarios.
Participate in project management forums: Find some project management discussions on Reddit and Quora to ask your own questions!
Get certified: If you learn best in a course setting, there are plenty of certification options available through organizations like the Project Management Institute (PMI) that currently has 17 different certifications available. As a bonus, 61% of organizations are now providing some type of project management training - these are a great booster to a project manager's resume!
Educate yourself: There's no shortage of great project management resources out there to educate yourself! Find books, articles, data reports, case studies and more all online.
Start using a project management app: If you haven't already, get started with a project management platform. 54% of organizations lack the ability to track KPIs in real-time, giving yourself the tools and knowledge you need can have an amazing impact on your own performance as a project manager.
Ask for feedback: Feedback as a manager should never be a one-way street. Ask your team: what can I do to better support you in your role?

The completion of almost any project requires a project manager who can help team members meet goals and adhere to a strict schedule. And the demand for project managers is growing fast - according to PMI, the project management labor force is expected to grow by 33%, adding 22 million new jobs, up to 88 million total jobs by 2027. So whether you're working on becoming a better project manager, or aspiring for the future, investing in your project management skill set is a smart bet towards a successful career.

Have another project management skill you'd like to share? Tweet us at @reclaimai!

Team Meetings: 5 Types & Best Practices for Scheduling

Kristi Anderson — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 19:08:40 +0000

Who doesn't love a good gathering of the team? When used effectively, team meetings, or staff meetings, can be a great way to build relationships, collaborate, share updates, and drive alignment across teams. The problem is teams are big, time is precious, and far too often the response to a problem is let's get the team together to discuss.

Team meetings suffer a lot of the same issues as status update meetings - they're very often overscheduled, not oriented around making decisions, and easily become duplicative across areas of the organization. And with the average professional attending 25.6 meetings a week, or over 21 hours in meetings, it's clear that meetings are overwhelming the workweek and organizations have to get their meeting load back in check.

In this post, find out the top 6 best practices for scheduling and organizing productive team meetings, and the most common types of team meetings across a busy organization.

6 best practices for team meetings

So what makes an effective team meeting? In order to justify taking time away from your teams busy schedule to meet, your team meetings should pass all of these best practice criteria:

Make decisions in these meetings: The number one checkpoint for every single meeting is if it is oriented around decisions. Each team meeting you schedule should have a real purpose with clear objectives that requires getting people together to discuss. If the end result isn't going to be actionable takeaways that move your projects and priorities forward, you don't need to have the meeting.
Limit attendance: If you're on the invite list, you should have a part to play in this meeting. Anyone who is not essential to the conversation should be spared from the meeting. The larger the group, the harder it is to have a productive discussion, so keep the attendee list small to improve the effectiveness of the meeting, and allow the people left off to make better use of that time. Don't worry about leaving them out, they don't want to be stuck in a meeting that's unrelated to their actual work, and is probably going to keep them late playing catch up.
Always use an agenda: With team meetings being the largest gatherings you'll find at your company, this makes it all the more important to set an agenda so these meetings don't run off the rails. Each team meeting should have a dedicated person who creates the agenda, gathers agenda items from contributors, asks the team for input, and distributes it to attendees so everyone knows what to expect and prepare for the meeting. A great agenda will include links to any reports or documents, with detailed communication around what needs to be reviewed before the meeting.
Prepare for your part: There's nothing worse than making the time for a meeting to find that half the group is unprepared. Make time to review the agenda as soon as it's distributed so you know what your involvement is, and how much preparation is needed before the meeting. If you have trouble finding time to prepare for the meeting, schedule yourself some focus time to make it a priority on your calendar.
Share status reports before the meeting: Team meetings should be dedicated towards collaborating, not sharing status reports. This is a great opportunity to leverage written status reports that key participants can complete and distribute beforehand so everyone can review these updates on their own time. This small change can dramatically cut down on the length of these team meetings, or even replace quite a few of them! With everyone up to speed beforehand, you can dive right into discussion and keep your meetings aligned to making real strategic decisions.
Change them from recurring to as needed: The other big consideration is how often are these team meetings scheduled. If they don't absolutely have to be recurring, which few actually do, then remove them from the calendar and schedule only as needed. A good indicator is how often are these meetings rescheduled and cancelled? If you end up pushing this meeting off or frequently cancelling due to a lack of agenda items, or just higher priority projects that need the team's attention, they're probably set too frequently. Even if you have a light agenda, ask yourself, can this meeting be an email?

5 types of team meetings

What are the different types of team or staff meetings? Turns out, 89% of people attend one each week, but depending on your role, you may have quite a few eating up time on your calendar. Here are the most common types of team meetings to look for across your workplace schedule:

Team / staff meeting

These meetings are used to share updates across the team and make sure everyone is aligned on the tasks and issues you're prioritizing this week. The team lead will facilitate the meeting, distribute work across the team, uncover any blockers that need to be cleared, and share any special presentations that need to be made to the group. Team meetings are almost always recurring, and often run long as large group discussions are easily sidetracked. You'll find all, or most, members of the team, the team leader, and program managers or operations personnel at a team meeting.

Cross-functional team meeting

This meeting is really an attempt to ensure cross-functional alignment, usually as a reaction to a single incident, which results in a recurring meeting to ensure two groups are talking. Cross-functional team meetings are used to resolve disagreements, increase awareness across groups, share updates or special presentations, and when used properly, to make decisions. While well-intended, these meetings easily become duplicative, overlapping discussions and topics with other meetings where both groups are present, so they're most often better scheduled as needed than on a recurring basis. You'll find leaders from the cross-functional groups, the program managers or operations personnel, and an occasional guest star at these meetings.

Executive / leadership team meeting

Also known as the HIPPO meeting (highest paid person's opinion) these meetings are scheduled for the top leaders to make urgent, high-impact decisions on discussions that escalate up the chain of command. The executive or leadership team meets to review key metrics or special presentations, analyze execution issues, and discuss and determine the strategy to move forward with. Attended by SVP and GVP leaders across multiple functions, though one of the most important participants is actually the program manager or operations personnel who are present. It's their job to share honest insight and context around what's happening on the ground floor, and how these decisions will impact the project and team.

Skip-level team meeting

This meeting is organized to get a department together for a general sort of discussion. Often used to support team building, increase awareness around company initiative, or to share updates or special presentations, skip-level team meetings are also used to discuss strategy and resourcing across the various levels within a department. You'll find all members of the functional department, the program manager or operations personnel, and an occasional guest star present at these meetings.

All-hands meeting

The big company meeting organized to share business updates, special presentations, and foster team building across the entire company. The presentation is generally led by senior leaders, followed by an interactive Q&A open to all employees. Depending on the size of your company, and if everyone is remote, this Q&A may be moderated and facilitated via online question submissions vs. the traditional hand-raising format. The larger the company, the less interactive the Q&A tends to be, but leaders should do their best to reserve as much Q&A time as possible so employees are offered an adequate amount of time to voice their questions and concerns.

And that's the lowdown on team meetings! When used correctly, and only as needed, they can foster amazing discussions and generate real impactful decisions for the business. They can also cost you millions of dollars in lost productivity, and result in higher rates of burnout, so if you still have recurring team meetings on your calendar, take the time to review if they're really necessary. If you're curious to see how much time you really spend in meetings every week, check out the free smart calendar tool for Google Calendar, Reclaim.ai, to see your calendar productivity stats and weekly report on your time management trends.

If you want to learn more about optimizing your meetings, check out this Smarter 1:1 Meetings blog post, and stay tuned for upcoming posts on brainstorming meetings and ideation sessions, operational reviews and staff meetings, and external meetings at busy organizations.

Naming Calendar Events: 5 Calendar Etiquette Tips

Kristi Anderson — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 19:30:32 +0000

You've probably been here: blowing through your workday, and all of a sudden, an email comes through requesting that you set up a team calendar event to discuss Q3 goals for next quarter and KPIs around the upcoming new product launch campaign. You hurry over to your calendar and create a meeting called 'Quick Sync' -- and suddenly you have five more people pinging you about what this meeting invite is about! If you've fumbled a calendar event title before, know that you are not alone!

This article will help you avoid the Pythagorean theorem when creating calendar events, and break down best practices for optimizing your event titles to communicate context to your invitees, colleagues, and incoming schedulers.

Why is proper calendar communication important?

As many organizations are choosing to stay remote, and others are adopting a hybrid model, it's become increasingly important to maintain clear lines of communication across the team. With little to no in-person banter happening in these scenarios between coworkers who used to run into each other six times a day throughout the office, it's now necessary to put forth a little extra effort in communicating context and priorities, and the simplest way to do so is through your calendar.

If you aren't properly communicating via your calendars, you may find coworkers will book over events, assume you're available at all times, and cross boundaries that they were not aware were present. Establishing workplace calendar communication is simple, yet it starts with the first thing people see: the event title.

1. The devil is in the details

It's easy to get stumped on defining the details around a calendar invite, especially when you're sending something that's going to be visible to your entire team. So, start with the things you know: date, place, and time. If you're inviting a group to discuss Q3 goals, you will also need any links or documents that will be used to guide the meeting.

For example, your team probably needs to review Q2 data to build a game plan for the Q3 discussion, and you can help them out by linking all sheets and documents so everyone can properly prepare before the meeting. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of meeting descriptions. Details matter! So provide everything so that if it were you on the receiving end of this invite, you'd feel confident that you know what's going on and what you need to prepare for.

2. Words have value (no, we're not playing Scrabble®)

Your invitees need to know what's really going to be happening at this meeting, and it's up to you to communicate that clearly. Naming the event 'Quick Sync' not only gives absolutely no context or insight as to what the meeting is about, but can also create unnecessary anxiety for your coworkers wondering what the heck they missed. Instead, try naming the event 'Q3 Goals & KPI Planning' to get in front of any questions around the purpose of the meeting.

Just as you're emphasizing the importance of putting valuable context in the invite, you also want to touch on the flip, which is to avoid unnecessary words. No need for wordplay or jokes in the calendar invite title. Straight to the point and concise without being vague is the key here. Save the witty puns for the meeting icebreaker.

3. State your business

This could be the difference between all attendees showing up, and half deciding that this meeting is not worth their time. Don't be afraid to use 'important' or 'all hands on' if the meeting is a top priority, and if those invited need to be in attendance.

But when it's not an absolute must-attend, mark the meeting as 'optional' to be respectful of your coworkers' time! Your team will appreciate keeping that hour to themselves so they can spend it on their own high priority work. As you've probably experienced firsthand, there's a big difference between effective vs. pointless meetings, and you're going to have way higher attendance rates if your coworkers can trust you're only taking time out of their day for the really important stuff!

4. To emoji or not emoji is the question

Some say to take them, and some say leave them. However, what you need to keep in mind is the subject matter of your meeting. Emoji use can help add a personal approach, act as a display of honesty, and get the reader's attention.

Are you hosting a virtual (or in-person) happy hour for the staff? Or are you conducting a Q3 briefing call that's client-facing? Whatever the case may be, keep it appropriate and relevant. A good rule to stick by is if it's an internal, fun, and easy-going event intended to bring the team together, then it is appropriate to throw an emoji into the name of your calendar invite. For external meetings, a lot of schedulers prefer to keep it professional and forgo the use of emojis in event titles.

5. Bonus: Name your personal calendar events well to defend your me-time

It's not just your work events that need good names. Make sure to put these best practices to use when blocking time for your personal events as well! Do you have a dentist appointment at 11 AM next Tuesday? Let your team know by getting it on your calendar, and not just a "Busy" block that can be interpreted as interruptible time. Communicating context around your personal events can really help you defend this time from getting overbooked by ambitious schedulers. Instead, try using a title like "Personal Commitment" so your team knows you're not just plugging away at work, and this time really can't be disrupted. You can even use Out of office / OOO to ensure all existing and incoming meetings are declined.

There you have it! You should now have everything you need to build concise, detail-filled event titles that your boss and team members will fully understand. Next time you're tasked with creating the meeting invite, it will be a piece of cake and you will be able to Reclaim the extra time it used to take.

Lunch Breaks: 5 Ways to Improve Your Productivity

Kristi Anderson — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 11:59:37 +0000

In the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko declared that "lunch is for wimps." And it seems that conceit has taken hold --- 62% of professionals say they usually just grab a quick bite at their desk. After all, trading 60 minutes of downtime for another hour of effort seems like a reasonable exchange.

But as it turns out, that additional hour of effort may not translate directly to an hour of productivity. If improved productivity is the goal, skipping lunch or eating while working won't cut it.

If you want to improve the quantity and quality of your work, consider scheduling yourself a lunch break every day --- and more than a 10-minute break to eat a quick sandwich. Lunch should be considered a block of time as important as any other high-priority work task.

In this article, you'll learn 5 ways in which taking a lunch will actually improve your productivity.

1. Eating lunch keeps you alert

Skipping lunch may seem like an easy way to get more time out of your day. After all, if you're hungry, you can always just grab a snack later, and that time can be spent finishing a report or catching up on emails. However, skipping a meal comes at a cost to your productivity.

Lunch breaks consisting of healthy food choices can set you up for a more productive afternoon by giving your brain the fuel it needs to focus and continue working. Your body turns food into glucose, which provides the energy needed for your brain to stay alert. A cheap, fast lunch may seem like a good option, but these foods can lead to a temporary burst --- followed by a dip --- in energy, and can also make you groggy by causing your digestive system to work harder.

Without that healthy energy, it becomes much harder to concentrate. "When we don't feed our brains, this can signal to the body that it's time to shut things down," says Frances Largeman-Roth, registered dietician and nutrition expert.

Of course, eating a healthy lunch full of energizing foods is important. But to feel mentally refreshed and ready for the second half of your workday and beyond, you also need to give your mind a rest and separate from work during your lunch break.

2. Lunch breaks replenish energy

A break in the day can help you replenish the energy that you may have lost during the morning's work. A study conducted by Live Science showed that tough mental tasks can cause more fatigue than you might realize. Participants were asked to exercise, and those that had first expended mental energy on a challenging task stopped 15% earlier than those who didn't. Heading into the afternoon, you can count on having less energy if your morning was consumed by difficult work.

"Taking a break in the middle of the day for lunch is a recovery period, allowing employees to come back refreshed and reinvigorated for the second half," Jennifer Deal, a senior research scientist at the University of Southern California (USC).

Lunch breaks can also include other activities to help you recharge. Making time to exercise, or even just take a walk, brings positive impacts, improving your memory, concentration, and alertness. Meditation can reduce stress. Using a lunch break as a restorative period can set you up for a more productive afternoon.

3. Lunch breaks help you collaborate

While you can certainly use your lunch break to spend time alone (especially if you've been trapped in meetings all day), it may benefit you to eat lunch with teammates.

Lunch breaks give you an opportunity to meet with your colleagues in a more casual setting --- not focused on work --- which can help everyone get to know each other more. Socialization between employees increases the effectiveness of collaboration as you increase your understanding of your colleagues' backgrounds and values.

"From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today's workplaces," says Kevin Kniffin, author of the study "Eating Together at the Firehouse: How Workplace Commensality Relates to the Performance of Firefighters." The study found that the job performance of firefighters who ate together was higher than those who dined solo.

For teams working in a shared space, lunch breaks are a convenient opportunity for coworkers to gather over something more intimate than a spreadsheet. Remote teams can gather for a "Zoom lunch" or meet at a coworking space or restaurant if they live in close proximity.

Whether the gatherings occur in person or virtually, teams that take breaks together have stronger social groups. And the strength of social groups correlates positively to productivity. A study found that workers who take a lunch break every day have more engagement on a wide range of metrics, including job satisfaction, efficiency, and the desire to be an active member of the company.

4. Lunch breaks boost creativity

Creativity often happens in the moments *between *the otherwise high demands on your brain to constantly process information. Motivated attention is known as the task-positive network. Your brain is fired up and busy filing away everything you've taken in.

But, much like your body can't physically be in go-go-go mode all the time, your brain also needs some downtime. The human brain is particularly demanding, constantly requiring 20% of your body's energy. Between this high demand and information processing, your brain needs space in order for creativity to occur. Stepping away from a task to take a lunch break lets your creativity flow again.

By contrast, your brain also has a default mode network (DMN), or brain activity that occurs when you are supposed to be "at rest" (i.e., not involved in a specific mental task). As it turns out, during DMN, your brain is far from idle. The brain instead works to make sense of what it has learned. While "aha moments" may seem to come out of nowhere, they are often the result of mental activity during downtime. They say the best ideas come to you in the shower, but you've probably had just as many while eating a sandwich.

The DMN is linked to cognitive abilities like divergent thinking. The DMN systems activated during rest are also important for imagining the future and feeling social emotions. When you give your brain a rest, you're giving a big boost to creativity and problem-solving. Your lunch break can serve as an ideal time to reach DMN, leading to more brilliant ideas later.

5. Lunch breaks sync with your productivity rhythms

Most people hit a low point in the early afternoon. This aligns with your circadian rhythm, or your body's natural ability to feel alert or sleepy. So, if you feel like you have an ebb and flow of cognitive ability throughout the day, you're not alone!

The good thing about this rhythm is that it's predictable. You reach peak alertness in the morning, and then it begins to decline. Somewhere in the late afternoon, you get a second wind, but that trough in the middle of the day is where you need to be mindful of how you spend your time.

Image source

"The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol," writes Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford, and Leon Kreitzman in their book Rhythms of Life. Studies also show that 4 to 5 hours of demanding mental activity is the limit before burnout.

Instead of fighting your body's natural rhythms, you can be cognizant of how you spend your time. You can plan for less demanding tasks in the early afternoon. And a lunch break can be timed perfectly to address your naturally waning productivity.

It's your lunch break: Set it --- don't forget it

The research certainly backs taking a meaningful lunch break: one where you can recharge for the afternoon with food and other energy-boosting activities. If you're looking to improve your afternoon work, take ownership over a block of time in the middle of your day. Protect that time on your calendar in the same way that you would a meeting or other scheduled event, and form habits for how you will spend that time. Your productivity depends on it.

Effective Meetings vs. Pointless Meetings: How to Tell the Difference & Prioritize Your Own Time

Kristi Anderson — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 16:34:19 +0000

In the early days of a company's growth, things are a lot simpler. You can rely more on "serendipity as a service" to keep projects and initiatives organized, and everyone has a decent idea of what people are prioritizing from week to week.

As organizations grow, however, it becomes harder and harder to answer "simple" questions around what people are working on, and which priorities company resources are being allocated to. Moreover, relationships within the organization become more difficult to maintain and develop as roles grow more specialized, and there's less opportunity for direct collaboration.

All of this leads to a lot more meetings every week. And with so many things flying around, it can be really hard to know which ones to attend, and which ones to drop. In this article, you'll learn the key differences between meetings that are truly effective and valuable, and those that are pointless and not worth the organization's time.

Why do we have so many pointless meetings?

As a company grows, you have to start being more intentional about process and internal touchpoints to keep things moving forward.

This is typically what leads to an explosion of unnecessary meetings. Recurring meetings are often used to force cross-functional relationships into existence, or to build more verification into the system so that people (typically senior leaders) can answer questions like "Is this project on track to be delivered?" or "How many of our teams are working on the top 3 key priorities in our organization?"

The problem is that these meetings are often a poor solution to a much larger problem around strategic and organizational cohesion. The assumption is that if you get enough managers in a room to talk about something important, good things will follow. Unfortunately, the reality for most organizations is very different: these meetings not only aren't solving the core problems that the company wants to address, but they actually result in even *more *meetings spiraling out of them.

For example, a single "Weekly Status" meeting might inadvertently lead to additional, redundant status meetings being created that are intended to address perceived gaps in the existing meeting. Topics might emerge during the meeting that lead to other ad-hoc meetings between different stakeholders who are present at the meeting.

To put it simply, recurring meetings are often at the root of unnecessary meetings, because they're often a response to an issue that is much more complex and multifaceted to solve. This isn't to say that meetings can't be used as a part of the solution to this problem, but more to say that too many of them often just end up making things worse.

How to tell the difference between a pointless meeting and an effective one

Unnecessary meetings tend to have a few distinct characteristics. While you won't necessarily see all of these elements in every single pointless meeting on your calendar, you'll find at least one of these five indicators tends to be present:

1. They exist to fill a process gap

This is typically where a meeting is created primarily to "inform" or "update" an extremely large group about progress against organizational priorities and projects. Every middle manager is probably familiar with these kinds of status meetings. They're an immense timesink, especially as the organization grows in size and the number of people that have to be involved in a companywide status meeting increases exponentially.

These meetings are really filling a gap in a process that is more asynchronous: for example, written status reports that can be reviewed weekly by senior leadership.

2. They involve a very large number of people

Any meeting with more than 8 or so people cannot -- almost by definition -- be useful in terms of achieving an outcome. Once a meeting has too many people in it, it becomes an "inform" meeting, and thus, exists primarily to fill a gap in process. Inevitably, even if the meeting involves a round-robin where everyone provides their status on a project, the vast majority of the people in the meeting do not need to be there.

3. They have low RSVP rates

People vote with their feet, and meetings are no exception. Meetings where the majority of people don't RSVP Yes (or even Maybe) to the event are likely viewed by many invitees as low-value and not worth their time. This is a good signal to the meeting organizer that they may need to rethink their strategy for gathering information without forcing everyone into a long status meeting.

4. The outcome and intention aren't clear

This is an obvious one, but it's too often overlooked by organizations. Every single meeting needs to have a clear and simple set of objectives and goals, and those goals cannot simply be information sharing. If the meeting doesn't result in some amount of work product being created, or some degree of decisions being made, then it's likely not a useful meeting.

5. They're duplicative

If you have a status meeting for your team, a status meeting for your department, and then an org-wide status meeting for managers, those are really just three versions of the same meeting where you have to come in and say three versions of the same thing to three different groups. Duplicative recurring meetings tend to be a big part of meeting fatigue for middle managers, particularly as the organization grows in size.

Limiting the impact of pointless meetings on your calendar

Lots of time management advice tells professionals to "just say no" to unnecessary meetings, and while this is certainly part of a strategy to reduce meeting fatigue and focus more time on your priorities, it's often an unrealistic approach to actually getting what you want.

As a professional, you may not understand that you have far more influence than you realize in terms of shaping company culture, and in terms of structuring the kinds of meetings that exist within the organization. If you don't feel that the meetings you're being invited to are necessary or relevant, then model the behavior you want to see and propose it as an alternative.

A simple example of this is written status reporting. Teams and organizations that build a strong culture around short weekly reports that can be reviewed regularly reduce the need for recurring meetings that force everyone into a room for several hours every week. It also helps to build a good written record of where the organization's time is being allocated, and democratizes the process of status reporting so that a single meeting organizer doesn't have to be the sole chokepoint for every bit of status gathering.

Try looking at your calendar and mapping your recurring meetings to a status report. Ask yourself this question: how many of these meetings wouldn't have to exist if I wrote something down and shared it with my company weekly? Once you've sorted that out, propose it to the meeting organizer for those meetings as well as your manager.

At a minimum, you might find that you've effectively gotten yourself out of the meeting without ruffling feathers -- and more aspirationally, you might find that you've positively influenced the meeting load for the entire organization.

3 tips to avoid new pointless meetings getting booked on your calendar

Now that you've seen how to identify (and hopefully escape) the unnecessary meetings that were plaguing your calendar, how can you avoid new pointless meetings from invading your schedule again in the future?

1. Build a company culture around writing things down

Per the points above, a company that's figured out how to scale using asynchronous processes (e.g., weekly status reports) will have a much lighter schedule in terms of recurring meetings. Building this muscle is hard, but it starts with every team having a ritual around documenting their workweek, and -- more importantly -- every senior leader regularly reviewing those reports so they can get the information they need and ask questions (either over email or in an ad-hoc small meeting) without having to bring everyone into a massive status meeting.

2. Audit your calendar and block time proactively

If you don't run your calendar, your calendar will run you. Every week, it's imperative to spend time inspecting your schedule to eliminate unnecessary meetings and organize your time around your priorities.

If less than half of your meetings and solo work sessions are dedicated to your top 3-5 objectives, then you've got a problem. Your calendar should be a reflection of what matters to you, not a reflection of what you've been invited to. This approach makes you proactive instead of reactive when it comes to responding to meeting invites -- if you have a good sense of how your workweek is organized, you can make smarter tradeoff decisions.

3. If you need to say No, do so with context

Declining meetings is an art form, and can make a big impact on how you're perceived in the organization. While saying "No" to meetings is definitely a good way to keep your time defended, it's also a quick way to create some tension between you and your peers. Whenever possible, try to convey the "why" behind your No so that people understand the context of you declining it. It can make a huge difference in how your RSVP is received!

How does this fit with your organization?

While every organization is different, almost all face the same challenges when it comes to balancing time management with accountable processes to keep the train moving forward as you scale. It's the organizations that prioritize employees time and invest in reducing inefficient redundancies that will reach their growth goals sooner, not to mention, keep a much happier workforce that feels their time and priorities are truly valued.

So, does your organization do a good job of minimizing unnecessary meetings for your workforce? Do you think you could get a couple hours back each week in unproductive meetings?

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter at @reclaimai to help others bring more productivity to their workweek, and eliminate all the unnecessary meetings that are slowing down their priorities!

3 Ways to Find Work-Life Balance in the New Normal

Kristi Anderson — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:35:10 +0000

You want to find the right work-life balance. But balance too often implies separating work and life into equal halves -- which is nearly impossible to do in an age where they so easily bleed into one another. Who hasn't booked a vacation from the office, or conversely, responded to a work email on vacation?

The recent shift to remote work has made it even more difficult to keep your personal and professional selves separate. You can no longer rely on a commute or the confines of office walls to divide your lives into parts. If this is really the new normal, your wellness relies on throwing away the notion of life and work as separate halves.

This starts with expelling the idea of balance, and instead striving for work-life harmony. This approach helps you to prioritize both professional fulfillment and personal well-being without battling rigid symmetry, permitting work and life to be fluid and embrace their natural ebb and flow. Instead of fighting to achieve a neat distribution of your time, you shift toward accepting that career and personal demands will fluctuate and adjust your focus as that happens.

Here are three ways to thrive in the new normal and make work-life harmony a reality that reflects the growing complexity of managing work and life.

1. Audit your calendars across work and life

To begin achieving work-life harmony, you first need to evaluate and understand how you're prioritizing your time on a weekly basis. Think about asking yourself these kinds of questions:

Are you finding yourself pushing work and meetings well beyond your working hours into evenings and weekends?
Do you have sufficient free time during the week to keep your schedule flexible? In other words, if things change, can your calendar accommodate those changes?
How frequently do you find yourself betraying your intended routines, pushing them off in service of meetings or other kinds of distractions?
Similarly, is your to-do list filled with stuff that you're falling further and further behind on, so much so that you're forcing yourself to work overtime to get it all done?

While this isn't a complete list of questions that tell you whether or not you've achieved work-life harmony, it's a great way to start thinking about how your calendar is oriented (or not) toward a solid balance of activities across work and life. It's also a great way to uncover areas where your priorities are clearly misaligned with your agenda, and to start pushing yourself to better map the time you're spending to the things that truly matter.

The best way to answer these questions is, of course, with actual data! By auditing your calendar, you can start to draw some quantitative conclusions about the trends that govern your weeks, and take steps toward bringing your calendar into a state of work-life harmony. Gathering this data manually can be challenging, so it's helpful to use tools that help you to automate the process of extracting meaning from your calendar data:

As we mentioned earlier, it's understandable (especially in the era of remote work) that your work and personal lives are blending together throughout the day. The important part is making sure you aren't completely absorbed by one or the other, particularly given that for most folks working remotely, their work days have gotten longer and their personal lives have become even more demanding. During the early days of the pandemic, the average workday for employees actually went up by 48.5 minutes, an 8.2% increase, and workers received 8.3% more emails after business hours adding more pressure on employee well being in an already highly stressful situation. Another poll found that 60% of executives were working remotely with family responsibilities like caring for children or older relatives.

So, as you are auditing your calendar at the end of the day or week, check to see if one is causing too much strain on your work life balance.

Another way to ensure you're achieving flexibility and harmony across work and life is to sync your personal and work schedules. Too often, work tramples over our personal commitments because our coworkers simply can't see those times as blocked. Calendaring platforms don't make this an easy problem to solve, and so you end up in situations where you might be -- for example -- en route to a doctor's appointment, only to see a calendar invite pop up for a sales call that starts in 5 minutes. By syncing your personal calendar to your work calendar, you can block time for your life without sacrificing your privacy.

Lastly, it can be extremely useful to color-code your calendar so that you can visually inspect how your week is divided across different categories of events. Just like auditing your calendar, color-coding your calendar manually can be an arduous task, so it's helpful to have a tool that does it for you automatically:

Once you have a true understanding of how you're prioritizing your time, you can begin to make positive changes to correct your schedule towards the balance you want to achieve.

2. Create your ideal plan -- but expect it to change

It's hard enough to sit down at the beginning (or end) of a workweek and plot out exactly what your schedule should look like. What makes it even harder is the reality that once you make the "ideal plan" for your week, it's almost certain to change. All of the effort that goes into planning a perfect week goes right out the window once Monday morning rolls around, and suddenly you're inundated with meetings and requests for your availability.

A recent survey found that on average, busy professionals spend roughly 20% of their time managing their calendars every week. That's basically an entire workday lost to just moving events around and playing the not-so-fun game of Calendar Tetris. A lot of that time is spent in the initial planning, where you craft your ideal week -- but a lot of it also gets lost due to the domino effect when changes occur on your schedule that you have to react to.

For example, maybe you've blocked out your entire calendar between meetings and heads-down focus time for the week, and on Monday morning you get an invite to a meeting that you have to attend. You now not only have to renegotiate your schedule to replace whatever time was lost, but you also have to decide what else you might trade off (or not) to ensure you're getting sufficient time for your priorities.

This is why it's so important to build flexibility into your schedule, particularly when it comes to balancing your routines and tasks across work and life. Instead of filling up your entire schedule with "busy" blocks, which inevitably get interrupted and force you down the rabbit hole of endlessly tinkering with your calendar, use tools that let you establish dynamic policies for your to-dos and habits, which can automatically adjust and reconfigure your schedule as your week fluctuates between priorities.

By making your calendar smarter, you diminish the amount of time spent doing low-value, toilsome scheduling tasks and spend more time on the things that really make a difference in your week: deciding where to make tradeoffs, where to allocate time, and which priorities to focus on. You can also use these tools to automatically reprioritize your entire schedule when things change, which means you're no longer sweating the process of moving events around every time a new event interrupts your work-life harmony.

An even simpler thing you can do is add buffer time around your calendar events to decompress after meetings and leave room for transition between activities. This allows you to keep flexibility in your schedule so that you're not constantly hurrying from event to event without a moment to travel, take a breather, and prep for the next event. Executive coach Dina Smith recommends adding a 20% buffer to your tasks to account for "unexpected obstacles, delays, and interruptions."

Work-life harmony requires you to have a plan, but that plan shouldn't be so rigid that it can't accommodate changes -- which are an inevitable part of every workweek -- and it's imperative to leave flexibility in your calendar so that your plan can adapt.

3. Stay focused by communicating context

Saying no to other people's priorities is hard, and sometimes it's just not an option. But you can empower yourself to stay focused on your own --- and let your colleagues know when your high-priority work is happening --- by asynchronously communicating context.

There's a belief that if you keep your calendar open, your time will be stolen. Basecamp Co-Founder Jason Fried believes shared calendars invite your colleagues to rob you of your time: "You can see everyone else's schedule? That makes any spare time, any free time, any unclaimed time like seams of gold stuck between rock in the quary [sic]. Mine it!" Fried believes that every block of time should be negotiated individually. But that's not practical for most organizations.

You're more likely to have success setting boundaries in a remote, always-on culture if people understand the context of what you're working on. The title of your calendar event is a great place to start. For example, if you have a 4-hour block of time on your calendar that just says "busy", it's all-too-easy for someone to look at that event and think "Well, since I don't know what the context of this thing is, I'm just going to interrupt it." A simple change to give the event a title of "Write important strategy doc" can immediately signal that the time is less interruptible to others.

Mike Monteiro, a design leader at Mule Design, puts this extremely well: "Let's start with the premise that you have a 40 hour week...That's 40 hours of time to do your job. Now look at your calendar. If your job is to spend a very large part of those 40 hours in meetings scheduled for you by other people then you're fine. If your job is to produce things such as code, comps, analyses, flow documents, etc., then why isn't the time to do that on your calendar? People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it's viewed as second-tier time. It's interruptible."

Similarly, you can be just as intentional about your Slack status. By letting other people know when you're busy for different kinds of events -- and even setting "Do Not Disturb" for the moments where you really need to be heads-down in a meeting or focused work session -- you can cut off a ton of notification noise and proactively communicate your availability (or lack thereof). Again, doing this manually is challenging to maintain, so an easy way to convey this context is to use tools that sync your schedule with Slack.

As mentioned above, you can even set your Slack status to "Do Not Disturb" for events where you really don't want to be interrupted. If you've paused your notifications, your colleagues will be less inclined to interrupt you since they know what you're working on and for how long you'll be away. And even if they do decide to interrupt, you won't get distracted by a Slack ping.

Lots of people focus on the idea of blocking time to prevent interruptions, but too little attention gets paid to the importance of communicating context asynchronously. The littlest amount of context can go a long way toward defending your time, and can often be the difference between your time being interruptible vs. not.

Achieving work-life harmony in the new normal

Work-life balance is no longer a useful way to think about our workweeks. Instead, we have to find a way to dynamically shift our focus from day to day as our schedules and priorities change, and we need to understand that it will rarely -- if ever -- look like a straight 50/50 line.

By auditing your calendar regularly, building flexibility into your weekly plan, and communicating your needs to others, you'll find that you're struggling less to maintain a kind of stasis between your work and your life. You might even get a bit more time to take a breather now and then.

Pareto Principle: Using the 80/20 Rule for Priority Management

Kristi Anderson — Tue, 25 May 2021 19:51:36 +0000

Most people feel "time-poor" --- too many things to do and not enough time to do them. When it comes to time management, you want a simple formula to help you determine where you should be prioritizing your time.

In this article, learn how to use the Pareto Principle as a framework for priority management to help you focus on the tasks and habits that make the most significant contribution to your personal and professional well-being.

What is the Pareto Principle?

The Pareto Principle, also called the 80/20 rule, argues that 80% of results come from 20% of the effort. Economist Vilfredo Pareto first introduced the concept in the 1900s when he found that 80% of Italy's wealth was concentrated among 20% of the population. Since then, his principle has been used to show trends in everything from the world's richest nations to open-source software activity.

You can see the 80/20 principle take shape in other industries as well. In the automotive industry, Toyota wanted to establish the life cycle of a car's carbon emissions and discovered 20% of a car's carbon footprint came from its manufacture, and 80% from its use.

How to apply the Pareto Principle to priority management for better results in less time

During the typical workday, there are always more things you could be doing: meetings to attend, tasks to cross off your list, emails to respond to. But you can't tackle everything.

When you apply the Pareto Principle to priority management, you commit to focusing on the highest-priority areas above all else. The goal behind this practice is to help you improve both your time management and project management because you'll be able to focus on the work that produces the highest yield, and deprioritize the stuff that matters less.

Here are three simple steps to help you get started on applying the Pareto Principle for your priorities:

Step 1: Identify your priorities

In order to devote more time to your priorities, you first need to determine what they are.

A good practice for identifying priorities is to consider what are the most important things you want to accomplish over the next few months. Your priorities should align with your long-term goals --- your personal North Star --- so you're confident you're moving in the right direction. Priorities are more useful when they're in the "Goldilocks zone"--- they shouldn't be so small that they're just tasks (e.g., write that strategy doc), and they shouldn't be so large that they don't have any concrete meaning or deliverables (e.g., build a great product).

If you need help identifying your priorities, there are some techniques you can try. David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system is a productivity method that begins by recording everything that's pulling your attention --- a master list filled with all projects, tasks, and to-dos. If you're like most people, you'll likely end up with a long list. From there, you can use a prioritization technique like the Eisenhower Matrix to identify activities you should prioritize, delegate, or stop altogether. Make Time has also developed a planning system called One Big Thing where you essentially single-task your entire day around the one big thing you'd like to accomplish vs. slicing projects or days into many to-do's - a simple way to do more by planning less.

So, in short, you can follow these simple steps for qualifying your priorities:

Identify your priorities
Identify the 80/20
Figure out what you need to do to produce that 20%. This doesn't mean you get to shirk the details, it just means you get to focus on the thing that really matters.

For example, say you've determined that your highest priority is shipping a new feature. To apply the Pareto Principle - 80/20 rule to determine which requirements to take on first, you consider that 80% of the value your users are going to receive is going to come from 20% of the feature -- the key things that they need to make it useful. What you would do is spend more of your time optimizing for the 20% that your customers will go nuts for, and accomplish the other 80% incrementally over time.

Or, for example, maybe your priority is improving employee onboarding. You want to isolate the biggest, most significant sources of confusion for new hires. After analyzing the most common questions, you find 80% of reported causes come from a handful of key onboarding processes. You dig deeper and find that the most prominent root cause is that team members aren't sure when and how to access the company's internal software, so you decide to focus your time on solving that issue. This not only helps you to get in front of the majority of issues, but it also helps you to identify the next highest priority to focus on next.

Step 2: Time block actions linked to your priorities

Now that you've determined what your priorities are, you can start mapping out your action plan by time blocking your to-dos on your calendar.

As discussed above, priorities are really the big projects you want to accomplish over a medium-sized span of time. There are many tasks that go into accomplishing the work behind a priority. To put it in practice, block off time in your calendar for specific pieces of work you need to get done. And, if you're applying the Pareto Principle, you focus on the activities that have the highest returns towards your goal.

A good way to start might be scheduling recurring routines for the things you know your priorities might require regularly. For example, if you're working on the go-to-market plan for a new feature, you might want to have a weekly habit to spend time researching competitors. Then, you'll want to start blocking off time for the individual tasks you need to take on to move your priority forward, such as testing releases in staging, writing help docs, and drafting emails to announce the launch to your users.

Time blocking your priorities is really quite easy once you dive in. Some people like to map out their entire plan on their calendar at the beginning of the priority, and adjust time blocks as schedules evolve. More commonly, people look at their calendar at the beginning of each week to add the tasks, events, and habits that are needed for the deliverables that week.

One thing you might find when blocking time for your tasks is that it's hard to stick to the plan with your schedule constantly changing! This is where you may find it helpful to use a tool like Reclaim for flexible time blocking. Reclaim adapts your time blocks to find the best slot in a changing schedule, and can quickly reprioritize your entire workweek around a single task when your priorities change.

Time blocking will help you keep a healthy pace of progress towards your priorities, and you'll likely also find it's a great way to communicate context to your colleagues around what's important to you that week.

Step 3: Continually analyze your time and priorities

Since the entire Pareto Principle really revolves around analyzing and understanding the true value and impact of your time, it's important to adopt some kind of ritual for continually auditing your schedule to see where your time is going.

Collecting and analyzing data on how you're spending your time will help you stay devoted to your high-value tasks. This information is key to continuously improving your prioritization!

A small but groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management in 1982 found when people went through time management training and recorded the time they spent on tasks, they spent up to 10x more time on high-priority work.

Tracking and planning for priorities is actually highly driven on our own time estimations of what we think we need to accomplish them. In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends a time-tracking exercise where you log the actual amount of time you spend across activities for three days to help you determine:

The accuracy of your estimation
If you're satisfied with your actual time spent
What you need to change

The important things to look out for when analyzing your time is what's pulling your attention from your priorities, and whether those interruptions are worthwhile. Is your workweek getting eaten alive by meetings, and if so, how much time does that leave you for solo work on your tasks?

A good place to start is to create categories for each of your priorities -- things like wellness, relationships, personal development, and work. This can help you evaluate which activities you're prioritizing highest for any given week. A helpful way to visualize this breakdown is color-coding your calendars so you get a sense of where your time is being spent at a glance.

Lastly, as you start to see the results of your effort come to light, you need to reevaluate what the next 80/20 opportunity for improvement is. Circling back on the employee onboarding scenario, if you eliminated 80% of the complaints by clarifying when and how to get set up with IT software, what's the next 80% issue impacting your employees?

There's nothing better than checking a priority off of your goal board and seeing the impact of your work! Now it's time to get moving on which high-impact project to prioritize next.

Improve your priority management using the Pareto Principle

Being effective and constantly busy are not one and the same. As you've likely experienced firsthand, spinning too many plates comes at the expense of progress on your most important work.

When you apply the Pareto Principle to prioritization, you shine a light on the activities --- the 20% --- that will bring the best results in the shortest time. Don't be afraid to pare down your calendar and your task list. Instead of ticking off one low-value task after another, try using the 80/20 rule to make sure you're building something meaningful in exchange for your time.

10 Google Calendar Issues You Didn’t Know You Had

Kristi Anderson — Tue, 11 May 2021 13:51:20 +0000

Google Calendar is the one of the most popular calendar services out there. It's great for setting up meetings with people in your organization or seeing what your agenda is for the day. It's also a powerful tool for both individuals and companies to keep their teams connected and (mostly) focused.

But when it comes to being a calendar "power user" -- someone who lives and dies by their calendar, and who's being pulled in a million directions every day -- you might hit the limits of Google Calendar pretty quickly.

If you're finding yourself wasting many hours just doing the basic work of keeping your calendar defended and organized, this post is for you. Here, we'll show you 10 ways to use Reclaim alongside Google Calendar to increase your productivity and reduce the toil you go through managing your schedule.

#1: (Finally) merge multiple schedules into one

In Google Calendar, there are two types of calendars: primary and secondary. Your primary calendar is the calendar where all the action happens: anytime someone goes to schedule time with you, they'll be looking at your primary calendar.

Secondary calendars are really just calendars you can share with your Google account, which is useful if you want to see multiple schedules overlaid on one another. But here's a dirty secret you might not know about: no one else can see those calendars -- your events from a secondary calendar will never be reflected on your primary calendar.

This creates a lot of pain. For example, if you have a doctor's appointment on your personal calendar and want this time blocked out so others don't overbook it on your primary work calendar, you basically have three not great options:

Invite your work email to the personal event: this is hard to maintain, and means that you now have a personal event sitting on your work calendar for all to see.
Create a copy of the appointment on your work calendar: this is also hard to maintain, because now you have to keep the copy up-to-date with the original event.
Share your entire personal calendar with people in your org: this may allow others to see your calendar (and all its private details) but they still won't see your personal events when using Google's Find a Time feature.

Reclaim solves this problem for you with a little feature we call Calendar Sync. Calendar Sync allows you to block events across calendars, keeping your synced events up-to-date anytime they change. It also solves the "privacy problem" by allowing you to set customizable visibility for your synced events. Don't want people spying on your job interview? Just set it to say "Busy", or even "Personal Commitment". It's a great way to offer just the right amount of context without worrying about people seeing details you don't want them to.

Another advantage of using Calendar Sync is that you can completely eliminate your organization's visibility of your other calendars without having to worry about being overbooked. If you share your calendar with your work's Google account, your IT administrator can likely see all the details of that calendar via GSuite.

#2: Make your time blocking adaptive

Another thing you might have tried out in Google Calendar is time blocking. Time blocking is the art of scheduling blocks of work on your calendar, and it's a great way to give yourself the space you need to focus on the stuff that matters to you, and it ensures that you get heads-down time in between the many meetings you have to attend every week.

But as you may have found, time blocking is pretty hard to accomplish in practice when you're doing it manually on Google Calendar. You might spend all evening Sunday night blocking out the perfect workweek, but none of that matters come Monday morning. You'll quickly find that meetings have collided with your time blocks, and now you have to spend a bunch of time playing Calendar Tetris to get back on track.

Reclaim gives you a much more adaptive way to block time -- and you don't have to worry about manually doing the work. You can define routines that you want to spend time on each week as well as add the to-dos that you need time for before they're due, and Reclaim will automatically find time for them in your busy schedule.

Best of all, you don't have to worry about doing your routines or tasks at the same time every week, or sticking to a plan that is super static. Instead, Reclaim uses your preferences and inputs to find optimal times for them, and moves them around when interruptions occur to accommodate inbound meetings.

#3: Give your workweek more flexibility

If your whole workweek is blocked out, it's really difficult for others to find time to meet with you. This can often lead to even more work on your plate. You've probably gotten a Slack message that looks something like this:

Or maybe an email like this:

When you get messages like this, your blood pressure rises. You start thinking about which events to sacrifice, how it might impact your overall schedule, and -- perhaps more than anything -- how to get out of this situation gracefully.

A little known fact about Google Calendar is that events aren't all created equal: in fact, there are some events that can only be seen as blocked by you, but won't be seen as blocked by others. These events are known as "Free events", and they can be a really powerful way to add events to your calendar without impacting availability:

But in practice, you can't really put Free events to work without a lot of manual work. For example, if you add a Free event to your calendar, and it gets overbooked, now you have to worry about finding another place on your schedule to accomplish it.

Reclaim does this for you automatically. As Reclaim blocks time on your calendar for your routines and tasks, it looks at your schedule to see how busy you are. If you have a lot of slack in your schedule, Reclaim will initially add those events to your calendar as Free, which means that you can see them but others won't.

As your schedule fills up and Reclaim senses that you're running out of time to get things done, it flips those events to busy so that they block out your availability:

It's the best of both worlds: you get the time you need when you need it, but you don't have to worry about getting pesky emails telling you your calendar is too full to schedule a meeting.

#4: Eliminate your meeting fatigue

Back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings take a serious toll on your productivity and overall health. Even the CEO of Zoom says he has Zoom fatigue!

Google Calendar doesn't have an option to slow it all down a bit. It can be all too easy for you to find workday after workday where you have nothing but meetings, with nary a minute to even take a bio break.

Reclaim solves this problem simply: by adding "buffers" to your Zoom meetings. Anytime Reclaim sees a meeting that contains a videoconference link, it can automatically add a chunk of time afterward to make sure you get some time to decompress. You can configure these buffers to be whatever duration you want:

#5: Automatically categorize your time

Google Calendar gives you some great tools to categorize your events, and the best one by far is color-coding. You can simply right-click on an event to change its color, which is a pretty nice way to get a sense of how your workweek is divided across different types of events.

For example, maybe you want to color-code all your 1:1s so that you know how much time you're spending with your team that week, or maybe you want to color-code your external meetings so that you know how much time you're spending with customers.

The problem? This is yet another toilsome, manual process to maintain manually. This is where Reclaim can really help you to take control.

Reclaim automatically color-codes your events based on intelligently-detected categories. That means that all you have to do is flip a switch, select the palette that you like best, and sit back:

Now, you have a calendar that really shows you where your time is going with a single glance:

#6: Add just the right amount of context to your events

Privacy in Google Calendar is a bit of an "all or nothing" affair. Events essentially have two modes:

Full details: you can opt to show viewers of your calendar the full details of an event, including its title and description.
Busy only: you can, conversely, opt to show users just "busy" when they look at your calendar, which also hides other details about the event.

This works well in some cases, but too often it results in either too much visibility or not enough. For example, if someone is looking at your calendar and sees only a bunch of events that say "busy", it's really hard for them to know what they can dare to interrupt versus what might be important.

Reclaim offers a bit more nuance to privacy settings in Google Calendar by giving you flexible options for how to show events synced using Calendar Sync.

For example, if you want other people to know when you're busy for a personal event -- but don't necessarily want them to see the details of it -- you can just opt to show it as a "Personal Commitment". This is a simple but powerful way to give others context while still preserving your privacy. You'd be surprised at the number of hours you can save with adding a bit of context to your calendar.

#7: Easily audit your calendar

Ever try to audit your calendar? It's a great way to see where your time is going, and to better align your schedule to your priorities -- or to see where they're off-track. But Google Calendar doesn't make it easy.

Calendar audits are ideally the kind of thing you should be able to do each week, but it's often just too labor-intensive to do frequently. Even when you do perform an infrequent calendar audit, getting accurate data can be challenging, unless you're a Google Scripts wizard and want to worry about cleaning and parsing your calendar data.

Reclaim gives you two powerful ways to audit your calendar. First, it gives you weekly stats on where your time is going across different categories:

Second, you can look at how your time is broken down alongside your calendar, and even filter individual classes of events out to see -- for example -- how much time you're spending in group meetings:

You can make way better decisions about your schedule when you have data, and Reclaim makes it way easier to get the information you need.

#8: Make Google Tasks awesome(r)

Google Tasks is a great (and perhaps underutilized) feature in Google Calendar. It's a pretty simple to-do list that lives right alongside your schedule. But here's another dirty secret about Google Tasks: it doesn't really work the way you think it might.

First off, Google Tasks doesn't really block time on your calendar. Instead, it blocks another event type called "Tasks", which don't show as blocked times to others when they view your calendar. It's more like a friendly reminder, which isn't that helpful when you actually need the time to get stuff done:

Secondly, when you set a due date for a to-do in Google Tasks, that due date is treated as "the date the event will be scheduled", which is also very unhelpful if you need the time before the due date! If you need 8 hours to write a document, it's not much good to have a reminder on your calendar the day of -- when your day is already likely very overbooked.

Reclaim integrates natively with Google Tasks to automatically sync your to-dos to your calendar, actually blocking the time for you to get the work done before it's due. And, just like any other Task in Reclaim, it will reschedule and toggle between Free and Busy as your schedule changes.

#9: Reprioritize your entire calendar when things change

Another thing that can be really challenging about using Google Calendar is dealing with changes to your priorities. Even if you've set out a great plan for your week and blocked it all on your calendar, things happen and it's not uncommon for your priorities to shift around. This often means you have to rejigger your whole schedule to get things back on track -- AKA, more Calendar Tetris.

In Reclaim, this is as easy as a single click. If you decide -- for example -- that "Customer support emergency response" is more important than "Write that important strategy doc", even if the strategy doc is due sooner, you can just tell Reclaim that you changed your mind:

When you do this, it's the same thing as telling Reclaim "Hey, originally I thought my week was going to be focused on XYZ, but now it's changed and I need you to change things around." It's like having an assistant of your own -- except one with the computational power of a thousand AWS instances.

#10: Keep your Slack status in sync with your schedule

Slack has a Google Calendar integration that can update your Slack status to show when you're busy for an event. It sounds cool, right?

But again, this is where things are just a bit too all-or-nothing: the whole purpose of updating your Slack status is to help others know when you're truly busy and shouldn't be disturbed, versus when you can afford to be interrupted. But in this case, the integration only shows one status: "In a Meeting".

This is a bit tough if you really want your Slack status to stay synced up with your schedule. You don't want people to think you're constantly in meetings, and at the same time it'd be great to make sure you don't get bugged when you're heads down on important work or meeting with customers.

This is where Reclaim can help to bring a bit more power to your Slack status. Not only can you manage your entire schedule from Slack using Reclaim's integration, but you can also sync your status to different categories of events that Reclaim automatically detects on your calendar:

You can set Do Not Disturb for particular categories of events and customize the message shown to others. It's an awesome way to bring the same context you've added to your calendar into Slack, where distractions can be high in supply.

Make Google Calendar more powerful with Reclaim

Even as a casual Google Calendar user -- but especially as someone who relies on it as a power tool for keeping your priorities in check -- you may not be getting what you need to be productive. By adding Reclaim to Google Calendar, you can truly take control of your schedule and eliminate the toil that comes with managing it.

3 Single-Tasking Tips to Improve Your Focus

Kristi Anderson — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:41:03 +0000

You sit down at your desk to compile a report and within a few minutes you have checked your email, scheduled a doctor's appointment, and have Netflix going in the background. Our environments and priorities are constantly pulling us in different directions. With so much to juggle, it feels as if the only way we can get everything done is to multitask.

Right?

Well, not exactly. While we may think that multitasking is a skill we can master, science says otherwise. The message is becoming more prevalent: your brain performs best when it focuses on only one thing at a time. This practice is known as "single-tasking", and it's a great way to work more efficiently.

In this article, we'll share three powerful single-tasking methods to break away from your multitasking mentality and regain your focus.

Multitasking comes at a cost

As many of us have shifted to working remotely in an era where the average home has more than 10 connected devices, it's becoming increasingly difficult to stay focused on a single task while the digital world competes for our attention. We think that we can easily shift gears or multitask -- without realizing that this negatively impacts our ability to get things done.

According to one report, only 2.5% of people can multitask effectively. Everyone else faces some performance deficit when trying to multitask, where they're constantly switching from one thing to another. The result is that tasks actually take *longer *and are more prone to errors.

Researchers call this performance deficit a "switch cost," and the results are typically unavoidable. Think of the brain as a computer with a certain amount of processing power. When we switch tasks, the brain requires extra processing power to bring forward the information needed for the new task. And, like a computer, the more you ask it to process at one time, the worse its performance.

Studies have further shown that multitasking in everyday life can affect sustained attention and long-term memory. We need to recognize that multitasking isn't only bad for the task at hand but also has lasting impacts on how well the brain can do its job.

Make the change to single-tasking

Single-tasking is, as you probably guessed, focusing only on one task at a time. If multitasking causes us to perform poorly, then, by contrast, we can improve our work's quality and efficiency by single-tasking.

Even as we come to accept that multitasking is harmful to our brains, "un-learning" this behavior can be a challenge. Making the shift to single-tasking takes some effort and practice, but you can incorporate some simple things into your day to reframe your thinking toward single-tasking.

1. Set due dates and block time for longer tasks

Setting due dates for your tasks is as simple as taking your to-do list, prioritizing it, and clearly identifying when you will get the work done. Rather than having an endless to-do list that isn't reflected in your schedule, this practice forces you to commit to completing work by a certain date -- and has the added benefit of creating awareness around your week's capacity.

For example, your to-do list may include longer, more intensive and strategic tasks like "writing a strategy doc" or "submitting Q4 financials". It may also include a ton of little tasks, like "respond to an email from Fred" or "review PRs in Github". In this example, you'd want to block time for your most important and time-consuming tasks -- the ones that will often take a lot of your energy and cognitive capacity -- so that your week doesn't end up being a scattered mess of activities.

In order to avoid another frenzied day of multitasking, start by assigning a due date to the tasks that you know are going to take awhile. Anything longer than an hour would fall into this category. Then, block time for those tasks on your calendar based on when they need to be completed. Don't confuse the due date with the date the task needs to be scheduled! If you need six hours to write an important document by Friday, it doesn't do you much good to have the time blocked on Friday afternoon.

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It's important to give yourself enough cushion to move tasks around as necessary as well as to take breaks and check off some of those smaller tasks we mentioned above. Something more important may come up that forces you to reprioritize your task's due date. Or, a task may take longer than you initially thought, which may mean you won't be able to get through all of your tasks due that day. Allow yourself the flexibility to move things as needed on your calendar.

Lastly, because longer tasks tend to be more cognitively demanding, it's important to set time aside for them during the periods of your day where you're most productive and "locked in". So if you're not a morning person, don't block time for writing that lengthy strategy document at 6am. Instead, use that time for the things that aren't going to demand as much of your energy.

2. Set aside dedicated time for the small stuff

Blocking time for specific tasks that you know are going to take awhile is a great way to stay focused on one big thing at a time. But what about all the other little things that you need to get done each day? How do you incorporate those into your week without losing focus on what matters?

The answer is so simple, it might shock you: create a routine that you can stick to every day where you batch all of your "microtasks" into one time block. Instead of earmarking time for every little thing -- or distracting yourself from your core work as new pebbles come in -- you just set aside a single block of recurring time for it.

This approach has two big advantages:

It lets you stay focused on your lengthier, more strategic tasks because you know you've got dedicated time set aside to work on the small stuff.
It lets you organize your small tasks into themes. For example, you could have a routine for "Emails + Slack" where you check your email and chat notifications, another routine called "Customer support" where you spend time responding to customer requests, and so on.

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The key here is to optimize your routines for smaller tasks around when you're least productive and energized. It's a bit unintuitive, but essentially what you're doing is confining your low-cognition tasks to the period of the day where you feel least motivated, and reserving your energy for the more important and demanding to-dos. Not only does this allow you to focus your productivity around your most important tasks, but it also ensures that you get to feel a sense of accomplishment during your less energetic moments.

Just as you need to keep your time blocks for important tasks flexible, you also need to do the same thing for your "microtask" routines. You should have a rough sense of when you want to have the routines happen each day, but with your schedule constantly changing it can be difficult to stick to exact times. Creating flexible routines on your calendar for your smaller task work enables you to get the time you need for the little things without having to feel boxed in by your schedule.

3. Stick to your plan (if possible)

A study found that 3 out of 5 people have more tasks on their to-do lists than they can possibly accomplish. Between wanting to be helpful or a tendency to jump in and fix problems, "yes" can often be the first response out of our mouths.

It's understandable that we want to say Yes to everything that comes our way. We want to feel useful in our jobs, and it's our natural tendency to help others where we can. It's also sometimes simply not an option to say No. A meeting with your CEO, a Slack message from a valued team member who tells you they're thinking about leaving the company, or an email about a project that is going off the rails -- all of these kinds of things rightfully steal our focus.

But those Yeses can add up quickly, and more often than not results in you straying from your core plan. A few meetings here and there start to eat away at your strategic single-task time, or rob you of the routines that you need in order to keep your head afloat. Suddenly you're doing the important work in the evenings and on weekends, or catching up on your email instead of spending time with your loved ones.

It's imperative to find the balance between being flexible and being (politely) defensive of your time. Without that balance, everything quickly rises to the top of your priority list -- and if everything is a top priority, nothing is a top priority.

Here are some questions to ask yourself any time you're finding yourself attracted to saying Yes to a distraction or shift in your ideal plan for the week:

Is this more important than the most important thing I was planning to do today?
Am I the only person who can help with this?
Is the cost of declining this distraction higher or lower than the cost of accepting it?

And, remember that declining things doesn't make you a bad person. In fact, if you do it right, declining things can actually have a positive effect on you and your organization: it lets you focus on the stuff that really matters, and it illustrates to other people that it's OK to defend the time you need to get the important things done.

Retrain your brain and regain your focus

Maybe you're still skeptical about single-tasking after reading this article. Maybe you even checked your email several times in-between reading it!

Let's try this for a week: go through your to-do list, find the 3-5 most important things that you want to get done, and block time for them. Then create a couple flexible routines to fit in the smaller stuff. At the end of the week, see how you feel.

We think you'll find that your workweeks are happier, more productive, and more evenly energized the less you engage in multitasking. By starting with these single-tasking tips to manage your calendar, you can build up your ability to single-task over time.