Colour-coded calendars
What really matters to you?
Most of you said last week that you preferred weekly short-form to monthly longer-form posts. So, here’s a short one. Also, please share this Substack via email or LinkedIn with others that might benefit from more colour in their lives.
TLDR: Nail your colours to your mast
Word count: 432
Read time: 2 mins
This week, I changed the coloured labels in my calendar.
Previously, and as printed in the book, the labels were:
🔵 Standard work
🟢 High-value-work
🟣 Book
🟡 Friends & family
But I’d been noticing that more and more of my activities weren’t captured by any of these four. They weren’t each collectively exhaustive, to use a McKinseyism.
I’ve been starting to intentionally do more speculative work. Work that might or might not yield something down the line, but which I find interesting and want to pursue. Then, on timeboxing, I’m now doing a lot of talks (which is not strictly ‘book’, nor for that matter is this blog). I also felt that friends and family, though infinitely important, aren’t all I need to thrive.
It took me a few weeks, but I’ve now settled on these five:
🔵 Filtered.com eg meetings, sales, thought leadership.
🟣 Timeboxing eg talks, this blog.
🔴 Speculative work eg an AI short story, next book, 100 GenAI use cases HBR.
🟡 Soul eg sea swims, friends, family, pádel tennis, MR ELF.
⚫ Admin eg tax, emails.
I’m saying something important and personal about myself to myself (and now thousands of readers of this blog!) with this. That these are the important areas of my life. That I’m choosing to think about them in this way. That I’m going to monitor how much time I spend on each. That it’s not other areas of life, it’s these five.
These five categories are almost certainly not going to suit you and your life. What’s important to an individual human is profoundly personal. But it makes a lot of sense to think about which are the right categories so that you can understand how good a life you’re living, against exactly the measures you deem important.
In Chapter 9 - For an intentional life of Timeboxing, I list some of the other ways one might choose to partition life:
Work vs leisure; self vs others; learning vs work; office vs WFH; challenging vs repetitive tasks; social vs partner vs family vs solo; productive vs unproductive leisure time.
If you do this groundwork, the tech can then carry you further along. For example, Google’s Time Insights and Microsoft’s Viva Insights features will record, analyse and advise on how you’re spending your time and living your life.
What are the three, four or five most important areas of your life? Are you sure? Do you spend enough time on each? How would you know?
Marc
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
Connect with me on LinkedIn