7 Proven Calendar And Schedule Management Hacks To Try Out

The saying “time is gold” holds a heavy weight in business. How could it not be when time lost is profit forfeited for your company? Thus, project management is critical to any team, individual, or business. There is a lot to unpack when it comes to such a topic. So for now, we’ll focus on the calendar and schedule management tactics to improve your productivity.

It may sound easy, but many fumbles the bag when it comes to having a proper schedule for productivity. Meanwhile, managing their time and project tasks effectively is second nature for some people. As such, some get more done in a day, while others experience productivity lapses.

In this article, we’ll give you an overview of what schedule management is and its importance. We will also give you a list of proven methods you can do as an entrepreneur to stay on top of everything. By the end of the read, you can have a seamless system and be on the road to achieving a different mindset to help you navigate the day. 

Scheduling is one of the most crucial aspects of project management. It keeps everything on track and helps plan for possible delays or issues down the line. It determines critical tasks that need to be completed at a specific date to finish the project on time and within budget.

What’s more, it's how you ensure your team has enough time to complete their work without getting overwhelmed or stressed out by giving them too much to do at once. It also involves determining and organizing individual tasks, their dependencies, and the resources required to complete them.

Without a schedule, it's easy to lose track of what needs to get done and when it should be done. That can lead to all kinds of problems down the road and failure in achieving project objectives.

With that, let's delve deeper into the importance of schedule management.

Managing your calendar or schedule effectively requires a certain level of skill. And let’s be honest, it's not for everyone. It can be extremely time-consuming because you have to keep track of everything, from deadlines to when people are available to work on certain tasks. 

Its importance, however, cannot be understated for individuals, project managers, project management teams, entrepreneurs, and companies alike. Here are the reasons why it’s crucial to keep a detailed project schedule or calendar: 

As an individual employee:

As a company, project manager, and entrepreneur:

Not only are calendar and schedule management paramount in completing tasks and projects, but it also affects everyone in the company. You don't want to waste time on things that don't need doing, especially under time constraints.

Don’t worry, help is on the way. We have several tactics for you to improve your calendar and schedule management in no time.

Now that you know the role of scheduling in project management as well as its importance, it’s time to answer the following questions: 

Well, here are the 7 tactics, with examples, to help you answer those questions:

Prioritizing your tasks is crucial to avoid spending time on meaningless or less important activities. It helps in productively structuring your project and business.

So, how do you make a priority list?

You can list down every task that you need to do. From there, you can separate the urgent and important tasks from the ones that aren’t. For instance, if you're selling face masks, which are season-sensitive items, and the project goal is to increase sales by 15% within the month, you can put marketing-related tasks as priorities. 

Instead of filling your calendar with a cluster of unrelated tasks, you can focus on strategy creation with the marketing team to get customers on the website and buy the masks quickly. You can discuss the following to develop the strategy:

Once you have a solid strategy to increase your sales of face masks, the segregation of tasks based on their importance can start, along with the creation of the project timeline. Thus, jumpstarting the entire project scheduling process and avoiding delays.

As an entrepreneur, you have dozens of tasks to do every day and it can get hectic real fast, resulting in a lot of wasted time. Thus, it’s crucial to know where your time goes. So conduct a time audit and leverage project management tools for your project plan to help you with that. But before utilizing these tools, it’s important to know how time auditing works.

It means tracking your time to know how long you spend completing each task. It allows you to effectively schedule your day by having a regulated time for most of your assignments. Plus, it allows you to identify certain issues with your scheduling.

For instance, by running time auditing, you realize that you spend more than 2 hours clearing your email inbox. You can find ways to solve that because you can devote a great chunk of that time to more pressing tasks, especially if most emails are non-critical. 

Moreover, time audits impact your company’s projects as well. For example, if a project deliverable requires your input or approval within a specific date, you can properly schedule that in advance since you now have an idea of how and where you use your time. By having an idea of the time required to develop an app, you won’t have to do a guessing game as to when you can attend to a specific task, decreasing the risk of delays.

This is critical for workflows that include approval for lead generation tasks like what this solar panel lead company would need. Since they act as a middleman between a solar panel provider and clients, prompt responses are needed so a time audit will help ensure tasks get taken care of once they occur. 

Technology is your friend, even when creating your schedule or filling up your project calendars. As the big boss, there’s no doubt that sometimes it’s hard to keep up with every project, strategy, task, and employee. 

Fortunately, you can leverage an online scheduling tool and software, not only for your tasks, but all company departments can also utilize it when doing a project. These tools will help you keep track of everything and everyone effortlessly.

Let’s take a real-life company as an example. 3Wishes is a lingerie company that handles the design process for its products that’ll include plenty of meetings and tasks to successfully prepare a collection.

To help avoid overwhelming you and reduce the risk of missing tasks, a project management tool or software can assist you in breaking each part of the process into smaller tasks, especially for complex projects like this. The breakdown can look something like this:

Of course, the breakdown of tasks above is just an example. Project management tools have templates or different designs you can customize to fit your needs. If you need more customization, you can always outsource a software development project from firms like Aloa and TrustShoring to have a tool that fits like a glove. Furthermore, this can guide you in scheduling each of your tasks on your calendar, allowing you to manage your time more efficiently and ahead of time. 

Yes, this can be under project management tools. However, given the unique features of smart calendars, they deserve their spotlight. People using these applications tend to only know the default options, which isn't ideal since they'll likely just use them as normal calendars.

You have to dig deeper than the surface-level features. These smart calendars can be customized to fit your needs as an entrepreneur. They have many attributes you could utilize to your advantage. Here are some examples:

4.1 Google Calendar

You’re already probably using this one. But do you know it supports integrations with other Google platforms and other applications? You can use this on your laptop and mobile phone for your convenience.

4.2 nTask Calendar

This feature-rich app will make your life easy. It can sync with your other calendars, set follow-up actions, easily share minutes of meetings with anyone from your team, and many more. It even has a built-in task timer, making time auditing seamless for you.

4.3 HubSpot Meetings

This is more than just a scheduler/calendar. For instance, this can be a learning tool since you’ll gain access to the HubSpot Academy, where you’ll find one of the best digital marketing courses. You’ll also have other tools at your disposal that cover components such as marketing and customer service. 

These examples are barely scratching the surface of these applications. There are many other features you can use to ensure you're staying on top of your project schedules and doing your parts as needed. 

That’s not all. If your smart calendar doubles as an appointment booking tool for clients, you should protect their data to facilitate trust. Using an appointment setter can streamline the scheduling process while ensuring sensitive information is handled securely. You can integrate a consent management platform to assure them that their data, contact information, and “digital footprint” left on your application or website will be secured and safe. As such, they’ll be more enticed to proceed.

Sometimes, it’s okay to admit you need help. In business, you shouldn’t do it alone if you want to grow. For example, if you’re an emerging eCommerce store like this dress forms supplier, you could hire a virtual assistant to manage product queries for those who want to order in bulk or want to customize their orders for the clothing line they’ll sell, especially the ones that take longer for you to do. Hence, you don’t have to take more than you can handle. 

And if you think the hiring process is time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be, thanks to plenty of recruitment tools to guide you in choosing the best assistant for the job. You can even require them to use a template from a resume builder so they can optimize the information to show only those important to you. Using these tools can give you your ideal virtual assistant in just a few steps.

In addition, having a helping hand has a great impact on keeping your project schedule on time. With minor tasks out of your hands and calendar, you can spare time to monitor the project status of each department’s schedules. As such, you can schedule more meetings with your project leaders as necessary to ensure everything is moving smoothly.

Sometimes the ping on your phone during meetings can be distracting, especially when it’s about something insignificant. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to be familiar with the tools you’re using.

For instance, if you tinker with the settings for your calendar app, you’ll see that you can customize how you receive your automated reminders. You can set a specific time and day as well as the frequency of those reminders. 

It sounds easy, right? Well, some people don’t know how to optimize their settings to their advantage. Thus, reminders pop up randomly as no date and time were set.

So, how do you use it for your convenience? For example, if you have a meeting with your project managers at 11:30 AM, you could set your calendar app to give you a 24-hour notice as well as an hour before. By optimizing your reminders, you never have to miss a meeting because you simply forgot. 

Also, you can adequately prepare for the meeting and not forget the points of discussion. As such, you don’t run the risk of overlooking details that can be critical to successfully finishing a project.

Breathe in, breathe out. Every minute of the day can't be filled with tasks. You need to clear some space on your calendar for a break. It doesn’t have to be long, it can just be a 15-minute break. If you don’t do this, you will get overwhelmed and run the risk of experiencing fatigue. 

Sometimes entrepreneurs don’t want breaks because it’s seen as a waste of time. If not, they think not working every minute can have dire consequences. That’s simply not true. 

In fact, you being overworked will have bigger consequences because it can impact your health. And the result? Without you functioning properly, the projects could be paused until your return and other affected business operations can harm your company. Thus, valuable resources will be wasted along with an increase in costs.

This is especially important for those in the medical industry whether selling elderly mobility equipment or pharmaceutical ingredients. If you’re in this industry, it's critical to focus on your health as it also affects the health of others too when your product is haphazardly designed or produced. 

So, that 15-minute break daily can go a long way to guarantee you and the company are running without hiccups. You can do whatever you want during that time as long as it’s not work-related so you can relax. You could always just sit back, relax with a Theragun, and clear your mind.

The topic of project management is complex, but you can excel in calendar and schedule management. If you succeed in handling your schedule more effectively as the head of the company, it will positively affect everything around you.

Now, as the big boss, you won’t exactly be involved in the smaller tasks under the project schedule. However, your input, feedback, and approval are still needed for the big decisions to be made in every project. As such, your schedule management is crucial to avoid delays and waste of resources. 

Is it going to be easy to change your ways when it comes to time management? Not at all. You’ll need to learn the best and most effective strategies to run your online business, and that’s what we’re here for. 

From discount ideas to business software productivity reviews, we’ve got you covered. Experience the best way to earn online and learn it from us.