this video is sponsored by skillshare if you want to make better first impressions with people you meet build good relationships over time and in general live a more successful life one of the simplest things you can do is be punctual be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there of course that's easier said than done because most of us live pretty complex lives we've got class we've got work we've got meetings we've got secret back room deals to get to so it's not always the e
asiest task to keep a perfect record of your schedule up in the three pounds of mushy cranial material inside your head and honestly you shouldn't even be trying as david allen the original productivity guru once wrote your brain is for having ideas not for holding them so today you my friend are entering calendar bootcamp now your calendar is a part of what i love to call the productivity system which is a combination of external tools that come together kind of like voltron robots to form this
cohesive real world source of truth for everything going on your life that includes tasks ideas contacts and of course events so today i'm going to teach you how to set up the calendar part of that system so that it never fails you and accomplishing that goal means following three simple rules number one set up your calendar in a way that suits you number two add events and relevant information to those events and number three get information out of your calendar at the right time and the right
time might not be what you think it is so let's kick this off with rule number one set up your calendar in a way that suits you and that starts with choosing a calendar system in the first place leading us to the inevitable age-old question what kind of calendar is best physical or digital and if the answer is digital what's the best calendar app well in the world of fitness there's this old adage the best workout program is the one that you will actually stick to the most hyper-optimized progr
am for olympians is going to be useless to you if you don't enjoy it or if you don't have time to stick with it that's actually why i work with lifting coach if i have a super busy week or if i'm traveling matt can just adjust my programming accordingly and i stick to my workout and the same is true for calendar apps and productivity apps in general the best one is the one that you'll actually use and stick to now personally i like google calendar some of my friends like apple calendar better my
mom actually sticks with an old school wall calendar that works for her these are all legitimate choices because a calendar is really a personal tool that has one main job acting as that external source of truth for your life's events so as i mentioned earlier google calendar is my personal calendar app of choice that's because it is free i can pull it up on my computer and my phone which is always with me and that's nice even my watch and it also has some integrations with other apps like savv
ycal which i use for scheduling meetings with other people and not doing email tag so for that reason we're going to be using google calendar as the visual example in this video but i do want to mention that there are some other great apps out there i've got a companion article for this video and you'll see them listed there and in general i will note that again for me i do think that digital calendar apps have some very compelling advantages over paper calendars namely recurring event support a
nd reminder support which is very nice but if you want to use a paper calendar or paper planner like this one that's totally cool too and there are some advantages to paper calendars as well do you always carry that calendar in your pocket yes for one it's pretty hard to get sucked into instagram or tick talk when you're adding an event to your paper calendar and also you can use markers and highlighters to make your paper calendar now one thing that i like to do when i'm setting up my calendar
is divide the different types of events in my life into groups that i call life buckets and this was especially helpful when i was a student and had a much more chaotic life because i had work shifts i had class i had exams i had on-campus events i had scheduled study blocks with study partners and friends tons of different things going on in all kinds of different categories and i think a lot of you are going to be in the same boat we live very complex multifaceted lives in many cases so doing
this just gives you some visual separation on your calendar and just gives you a better bird's eye view of everything you have going on in your life now in google calendar you can easily choose the color of each event and you can divide your events up into life buckets that way but i like to go one step further and create an actual separate calendar for each of these buckets that gives me a couple of different advantages number one i can set a default color for every single event type but number
two and more importantly i can set up default notification preferences for each of these different calendars and that's very useful because i sometimes do want to get notified about events like for appointments but i don't need notifications for every single event on my calendar like scheduled self-study time in the morning i don't need to be notified about that i know i'm gonna do it rule number two is to add events to your calendar kind of obvious but also add relevant information to those ev
ents so in order for your counter to be that trusted external source of truth you have to actually add events to it but for a lot of people especially over the long term that's kind of easier said than done because a lot of calendar systems have a lot of friction and when there's friction involved in a system especially a productivity system we start getting tempted to just try to remember things we go against that david allen advice from the beginning of the video we're trying to hold ideas in
our head instead of externalizing them and that's not good so what we're going to do in this section is go over several different tips for getting events into your calendar painlessly and with less friction but also how to make those events more useful to you as well and let's start with optimizing for quick capture in the world of productivity the idea behind quick capture is that the faster you can get something into your system be it a task an event an idea a contact the more likely it is tha
t you're actually going to do so and there are a lot of tools out there that try to optimize for this there are gtd style inboxes a single default place where you basically just dump everything when you're on the go and then process it later my ultimate tasks task manager notion template has one built in for calendar events there are also some quick capture tools out there the one that i use personally is an app called fantastical now earlier i said that i use google calendar as my calendar syst
em but what i actually do is import those calendars into fantastical which is both an iphone app and a mac app and what that gets me access to is fantastical's natural language processing for adding events and if you've ever used todoist you're probably familiar with this in todoist you can type out all the details of a task in the quick ad bar and if you have like a project tag or a due date to do this we'll parse that information and add it where it's supposed to be and fantastical has the exa
ct same feature pulls out details like location date and time so basically i can just type or in many cases speak the event right into the title and it's going to get all the information and put it in the right place which is really really nice i also keep fantastical's widget on the front page of my home screen so i can just tap in there and tap the add event button and that's a tip that works for pretty much any calendar app that does have widgets our next tip is a pretty big one here and it's
to use recurring events this is another area where like i said earlier digital calendars have a huge advantage over physical calendars if you have events that repeat like something that happens every single day or every week or heck the third wednesday of every other month in a digital calendar app you can go and set up a recurring event so all you have to do is put in the events details once specify how it repeats and if it ends and that's always going to be on your calendar at the right time
so those are a couple of tips for getting events into your calendar more quickly but what about making those events more useful to you well one thing that i love to do is add relevant information about an event into the description field of that event i do this all the time because when i'm going to an event when it's about to start my calendar is the most relevant piece of my productivity system with respect to that event i don't want to be digging through my email i don't want to be digging th
rough my note-taking system if there's information about an event i'm just going to open up my calendar and find it there another useful tip is to add optional events to your calendar your set in stone schedule isn't the only thing that can be on your calendar you can also basically give yourself options so as an example i'm currently taking a course to get my professional barbell coach certification and the course comes with optional coaching calls that i can get on every week with higher level
coaches who answer questions and go through different topics and i'm really busy i've got these videos to make i've got notion templates to make i can't always make these calls but i always put them on my calendar in a special life bucket called edu opportunities so that when the time comes if i do happen to have time i can choose whether or not to attend and another tip that's kind of along the same lines here create reference calendars for useful information useful schedules so back in colleg
e my professors like most professors had office hours so at the beginning of the semester i would get all the office hours from my professors and i would put them in my own calendar called professor office hours and normally this was hidden by default i didn't want to gunk it up my own schedule but in the case that i needed to see a professor i could easily just turn the calendar on and see when their free time when their office hours coincided with me having some time on my schedule and this is
also very useful for things like basketball court schedules open gym schedules anything that you want to reference and cross-reference with your own schedule make a reference calendar for it and finally this is a tip that i shared over on my twitter the other day and it's more of like a general personal development tip but if you find yourself with your long-term goals at odds with your short-term desires if you find yourself skipping workouts or not cooking when you're supposed to start schedu
ling things start scheduling time to work on your goals whether it's instrument practice or workouts or cooking dinner because when you schedule something you remove ambiguity from the choice and a lot of times when we are trying to do things that we know are good for us we are dealing with a lot of ambiguity and that contributes to the resistance and the likelihood that we're just gonna go play video games so when you schedule it when you put it in your calendar you're basically saying i want t
o be beholden to my past self and i'm adding some specificity to this goal and it's gonna make it much easier to actually do it and it should boost your motivation a bit and now we move on to rule number three get information from your calendar and get it at the right time i've got two big tips that you're going to want to follow so you actually get stuff from your calendar number one check your calendar every day this is a very simple tip but a lot of people skip it a lot of people don't look a
t their calendars even if they're adding offense to it and that doesn't make the calendar very useful so right when you wake up in the morning check your calendar make it part of your morning routine and in doing so you're going to prime your brain and you're going to get a bird's-eye view of everything coming up in your day and be much less likely to have something blindside you and throw off your plans secondly set up notifications if you are using a digital calendar app you can set up notific
ations to remind you before an event happens and i highly recommend using these especially for very important events like interviews and exams and the destruction of the universe by zorp the surveyor hails or but hang in a second when should you set these notifications to hit well that is going to kick us into a bit of a discussion on human psychology see we humans with our mushy brains and all are susceptible to something called the planning fallacy which describes how we are very over optimist
ic when we are estimating how long things are going to take this is partly because we basically can't distinguish between the best case scenario in the average case scenario so you know best case like you hit every single green light there's no traffic average case there's a few red lights there's some traffic but our brains conflate them we're making estimations there's research on this and there's also the segmentation effect if i broke down a task like go to work into a bunch of different min
i tasks and had you estimate how long each one would take you would be much more accurate than if i asked you how long is it going to take to get to work that's the segmentation effect and we are very susceptible to it so when setting up our notifications we should be cognizant of these facts we should know that we vastly underestimate how long it's gonna take to get places to do things to get ready and we should set up our notifications accordingly now one way you can do this is go very simple
and just say i'm gonna make it an hour before but sometimes it takes more than an hour to get ready so you can also do is use a fudge ratio take your initial estimate of how long it's going to take to do something and add a multiplier to it 1.5 is a good starting point so if your initial estimate for getting ready for work let's just say is 30 minutes then add 1.5 x on that and let's just set your notification for 45 minutes in advance one additional note here is that most calendar apps let you
set up multiple notifications so for especially important or infrequent events i would recommend having an additional notification that comes much further out and this is especially important for things like birthdays or anniversaries where you're gonna need some prep time to find a present or book a venue or whatever it is so to quickly recap here first set up your calendar system in a way that suits you it can be digital it could be analog it's all cool just pick something that you're actually
going to stick with secondly add events to your calendar and relevant information to those events use quick capture techniques and apps like fantastical to cut down on the amount of time it takes and also make your events more useful add reference calendars optional events and schedule time for goals and things that are important to you and finally third get information from your calendar at the right time check your calendar every single day make it part of your morning routine and also set up
notifications so that you have ample time to prepare and actually get to your next event so you're not freaking out and stressed all the time now as i mentioned earlier your calendar is just one part of that productivity system if you want to learn how to set up the entire thing and optimize it including your task manager the way you take notes your file organization system you should take my productivity systems class over on skillshare in this class you're gonna learn how to set up each of th
ese systems but more importantly you're gonna learn some techniques for optimizing the way that you keep it organized so it doesn't get messy and unusable over time which happens to a lot of people they end up ditching their systems over a hundred thousand people have already taken this course and you can join them for free because right now skillshare is offering the first 1 000 people who clicked link in the description down below a one month free trial with unlimited access to the platform wh
ich means once you get into skillshare you don't have access just to my classes but to thousands of other classes from expert teachers who can teach you how to make great youtube videos like mkbhd class they can teach you how to do 3d animation they can teach you how to mix music and tons more and even after that trial skillshare is a very affordable platform and new classes are being released all the time so click that link right there if you want to start learning today and support this channe
l or you'll find in the description down below and thanks for watching you can also find two more videos right here and here hit that like button for the algorithm if you enjoyed this video and found it helpful and i will see you in the next one
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