How to Schedule Goals: Success Secrets

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Kerul Kassel on behalf of Expert Village and in this segment we're going to talk about using your calendar and "to do" list without making yourself crazy. Because we often do make ourselves crazy, particularly with our "to do" list and we don't use our calendars effectively enough. So, how do we manage that? Well, first of all if you're not using your calendar much I suggest you refer to it much more often during the day and you utilize it as a tool to help you accomplish things. So, a paper calendar or and electronic calendar or a combination, my suggestion is to use a combination and to back it up. This way if you lose your day book or your hard drive crashes or your lap top gets stolen you still have some kind of back up and it doesn't feel like your life is falling apart because everyting that was in there is now gone. So, we're going to use a combination of a "to do" list, a calendar and reminders so we can make sure that nothing falls through the cracks or that much less falls through the cracks. I suggest using "Outlook". "Outlook" is a great a great workhorse, great program for you to use. Let's take a look at how we can use it to accomplish our goals. Here is what "Outlook" looks like, this is a current version of "Outlook" and we've got a calendar. In this case I've made it look like a daily calendar. This is just today but I could make it look like a week or a month. The way I set this up is that I have the days of four months here so that if something is coming up in the future I can take a look at when it is. I've also got a task list here on the right bottom and these are tasks that are essentialy "to do's". Sometimes what I do and I suggest you do is you take these things off your task list and you put them on your calendar for a specific date and a specific time. This way you're comitting to getting them done on that date and that time. And then you can program them with a reminder so that a reminder pops up anywhere from immediately when the item is due for you to start working on to days before and anything inbetween so that you've got something to remind you. So, using this will help you accomplish things. You can even, for the preparation to accomplish some of these tasks. For instance, today I needed to create a script with segments so I created a spot on my calendar where I set aside some time to work on that script. Using this kind of system helps you accomplish all that you want to do. It lets you look forward, lets you look backward and lets you be, have you're calendar be a servant to you rather than you being a slave to your calendar. Feel free to move things around during the day. This is not written in stone, don't let your calendar make you crazy. Switch things around, life comes up, urgencies crop up. As long as they're important switch things around to accomodate, but the idea is that you are using your calendar to make you more productive. Enjoy using your calendar because it's the thing that can take you from a lot less productive to fify, to sevent-five to perhaps even one hundred percent more productive. Make sure you look at it a number of times throughout the day."