You feel busy, wish you had more time and work really hard but feel like you are still behind. Sound familiar? It’s time to do a retrospective on your calendar.
I use a program called RescueTime to analyze my productivity in conjunction with BusyCal. I have tuned the software to run from 9a-5p only Mon-Thu. I don’t like to analyze my Morning Think or nightly reading routines and work at home on Friday usually declining meetings. A few weeks ago RescueTime told me that I was averaging 6hrs per day talking, on skype or in meetings. No wonder I was struggling to keep up with my workload.
I decided to try an experiment to see if I could reduce the 15 or so meetings I had on my calendar for the upcoming week. I reached out to Project Managers explaining what I was doing and asking to be removed from the meeting request for a few weeks. I promised to rejoin if my name kept coming up in the meeting. This worked and I have reduced some of my standing meetings freeing up some quality time to be productive.
Our our software development team we are using agile and have a scheduled retrospective at the end of each release (quarter). It is important to physically block time for the team to analyze how they work together, pros and cons and ideas to improve efficiency. I am finding this same concept is important to the quality of your personal productivity. Do yourself a favor and conduct a calendar retrospective.
Kelly Taylor's Blog 