We've touched on a few items for managing your day and your calendar here at Drive Thrive. The reality is that we could host an entire website devoted to nothing more than calendar management tips. Our goal here is to do more than that and some calendar basics are essential as well as just a good follow-up to our recent posts about "Bookends, not just for your bookshelf", and "Setting you 'Open for Business' hours".
In our previous posts we shown you how to set your "work time" and set "boundaries" for your work days. With those good practices in place you should already have a more manageable calendar with a clear idea of the amount of time you have each day. It's now time to make sure that you are also planning for yourself.
To do this we're going to show you the steps to set recurring appointments in your calendar to hold a few more common sense chunks of time. Let's start with Lunch! Nobody like to be booked for a lunch meeting and most people automatically avoid it. Setting a recurring meeting for lunch does help you directly by again showing you how much time you really have in your day and also helping you actually take that break.
This one is pretty straightforward to setup all you need to do is:
Go to your Calendar and double-click on 12PM for Monday
Adjust the start and end times for the length of your lunch break
In the Ribbon on the Appointment tab click on "Recurrence"
In the Recurrence patter section select the following:
"Weekly"
and checkmark the days of the week that apply (Mon to Fri)
In the Range of recurrence section click "No end date"
Click "OK"
PRO TIP
You may not want to get a 15 minute reminder for every lunch break, you can remove that by removing the "reminder" when you create the appointment which is located in the Appointment tab in the Options section.
You can also repeat this tip to add other blocks of time you want to hold for yourself on a continual basis. Some other ideas are: 30-min morning prep, coffee break, and 30-min end of day.
HOW TO DO IT
