A quick glance over your calendar leaves you confused as to why your meeting with John today. And is that John from accounting or John your biggest client. And why again are we meeting….Hum. Does your calendar have entries like this one?

The written calendar was arguably the first productivity tool ever devised. 

Too often I’m invited to meeting and I have no idea why we are meeting. And sometimes even the where.  Most of the time the who is taken care but surprisingly not always.

Let’s talk in simple terms about what a good calendar entry looks like: 

• Time/Date – All entries will have this. It’s pretty basic if you use a digital calendar this is built in. If you use a paper planner and only have a monthly view then you need to write it down.
• Location – Make note of where the meeting will be held for obvious reasons. If you have to travel for it you will need to factor the travel time in.
• Attendees – Make sure you invite the right people to the meeting. And check that they have accepted your invitation.
• Agenda – Every meeting has to have an agenda. If you are using a digital calendar you can use the notes space for an agenda. And print this out for the meeting so you can be sure to hit all the topics.
• Duration – Give some thought to this one. Studies have shown that if you schedule a meeting for an hour it will take an hour.
• Prep Time – If you organized the meeting or were asked to bring some sort of document to the meeting schedule prep time for the meeting.

• De-Brief – Did you take notes – I hope so. Spend fifteen minutes reviewing the notes for action items and follow ups. It’s far more productive for you to do it now.

Before you ask half a dozen people or more to show up to your make sure you review this checklist.

Make your calendar entry as clear as possible using only enough text in the subject line to get your message across.

A proper calendar subject should covey the following: 

• What – In most cases this is the project or client you are meeting about.
• Why – This is the goal of the meeting.

Example: 

Budget Review for Project X

Send an email to anyone that needs to bring supporting documents to the meeting. I just had a meeting I was invited to and that person expected me to bring a document. Unfortunately I was never told to bring the document as I assumed they had it printed since they invited me to the meeting to talk about the changes they wanted to make to this document.

Take the extra few minutes to get a nice clear view of your appointments. It’s so much easier to scan a calendar that has a consistent format.
Let’s talk more about this on Twitter.