How to Use Google Calendar to Improve Productivity?

#productivity

I heard about this trick the first time from him:

I tracked every minute of my life for 3 months.

I think Matt made this sound a little bit harder than what it really is.

Simply the idea is to create new calendars for each project, hobby, etc. you have and some other things like freetime. Then you just mark stuff after you have done them to the calendar.

I track everything I do in 15 min accuracy. It means that if I do A for 12 minutes and B for 3 minutes I just mark A. I try to do this the whole awake time.

The thing is that I’m not always checking my calendar and updating but sometimes I just mark stuff later the same day. I don’t use too specific descriptions but just rather create one bigger block and call it something like “coding the app” and then as it’s in certain calendar I know what app I’m talking about.

What benefit this gives to me?

First of all I have retrospective (https://www.notion.so/lankinen/Retrospective-55b60057da9842f1af11dae17efd30bc) in the end of every week and having a calendar that shows what I have done helps a lot. No one remembers what exactly they did on Monday noon.

Then the second benefit is that I get pretty good overview of what I have done and can notice some time leaks. If I spend too much freetime there will be a lot of red (color of my freetime calendar) blocks everywhere and it motivates me to spend less freetime the next week.

Thirdly, I just like making journals and document stuff. I started documenting stuff some time ago because I just wanted to be available to look 50 years later what I did when I was 19 years old. Everyone gets really good feeling when they see some old pictures of themselves and that’s what I’m looking for. I also try to share most of my stuff so other people can learn from my mistakes and victories but right now at least I haven’t shared my calendar publicly. There shouldn’t bee anything too private so if you are interested you can try to get it by contacting me.

Props from the cover image to Elle Cartier