The following is an abridged excerpt from my latest e-book, The NOW Year: A Practical Guide To Calendar Management. As the last week of January is upon us, I figured that this short piece may help you be okay with any resolutions that may have fallen by the wayside and inspire you to tackle future resolutions in a more measured way going forward.
“Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.” – Charles Richards
365 days. 52 weeks. 12 months. All of these add up to a calendar year in one form or another.
As I wrote about in The Front Nine newsletter, we tend to focus on the calendar in very constrained terms. We identify its length by the year we’re in—not the year gone by or the year to come. We often cram a bunch of our tasks, projects, and ideas into the early stages of the calendar year and, once we realize we haven’t hit the mark on some of them, we do the same for the tail end of the year.
Stop that.
When you try to cram things in, you don’t think big. You think small. You think about how much you can fit in. Further to that, you try to figure out how you can fit things into an increasingly smaller space.
Stop that. Seriously.
Your year can start anytime you want to let it. You just have to be able to look beyond the numbers—the quantification—and look toward something else: the quality of what you do with those numbers. Your calendar habits are a critical component of task and time management. When your calendar is out of control — or too heavily controlled — you can be hurting your long-term productivity rather than helping it.
If you start using your calendar better now, you’ll find that your calendar will start helping you move forward every single day.
Photo credit: malko via SXC.HU