Applications like Mac iCal, Windows Outlook, and open source tools like Evolution and KOrganizer can alert you when an appointment grows near (this is useful if you are always near the machine running said software).
Set some kind of alarm for your next appointment, either on your watch or cell phone.
Users of Unix systems such as Mac OS X, BSD, Debian Linux, and HP Tru64 Unix have the "leave" command to alert them when to leave for an appointment.
Program a server to send a reminder to your cell phone or pager at the appropriate time. Unix/Linux users will find it useful to enable the "at" service and use it to send email to your cell phone at a certain time: $ at 11:50 > echo Meet Bob for lunch | mail 19085552323@teleflip.com > ^D
Remember, when setting an alarm, always set it to give yourself enough time to get to the appointment, whether that is two minutes to walk down the hall or two hours to drive to another location.
Repeating Tasks
History repeats itself. So do status and staff meetings, oil changes, El Niño, and a good burrito. A lot of the routines developed in the previous chapter become recurring events. One of the benefits of a PDA over a PAA is that recurring events can be scheduled once, and the PDA does the work of calculating all the subsequent dates.
Here are some of the things you might want to put into your calendar:
Weekly meetings.
Regular appointments.
Upcoming conferences.
Vacation plans.
Deadlines.
Party invites. (I record them when I RSVP. I even record them when I so that I don't accidentally repeat my rejection.)
Your kid's soccer schedule.
The date your company's quarterly report tends to come out.
Every single birthday you ever hear mentioned. (Include celebrities! It can be fun to point out, on April 20, that today is Tito Puente's birthday.)
Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19), Towel Day (May 25), and System Administrator Appreciation Day (July 28).
Take a moment to record those things in your PDA right now. Then develop the habit of recording any new date the moment you hear it.
We Record What We Value
Writing something in your calendar is also a demonstration that you value it. When you agree to meet a customer at a certain time and place, it shows that you value the appointment when you record it right in front of her. This is true for work-related and social appointments. Imagine if you asked someone out on a date and then, after negotiating a mutually agreeable time and place, she opens her organizer and writes down the date. Feels rather validating, doesn't it?
An instructor at a time management class told me how he discovered that his very young daughter understood that a recorded appointment is one that won't be forgotten. After agreeing to take her to the zoo the following weekend, she pulled out a big green crayon and leaned over to his PAA and wrote "ZOO!" in two-inch-tall letters. It was completely adorable.
Repeating Tasks on a PAA
If you use a PAA, there are ways to not forget recurring events. It basically comes down to being your own reminder system. I keep a weekly, monthly, and yearly list of reminders in my PAA. On every Monday, I read the weekly sheet and fill in any items for the remaining week. On the first of each month, I read the monthly sheet and fill in this month's commitments. On the first day of the year, I fill in the yearly items.
Not to put too fine a point on it, here's exactly what I do:
The bookmark I use in my PAA is a clear plastic holder for a small piece of paper. On that piece of paper I have recorded all my weekly meetings. On Monday I mark my weekly meetings on the schedules for every day this week. If I'm having a light week, I just use the list on my bookmark for reference each day.
The monthly commitments are processed when I load the next 30 days' worth of sheet-per-day filler into my PAA. That can be any time of the month. Though, for monthly meetings, it can be better to just mark the calendar for the remainder of the year. One nonprofit I work with publishes a list of all its meetings for the next year every December. When I receive that sheet, I just mark all the meetings in my calendar right then and there.
The yearly commitments are mostly birthdays and such. Those I keep in a list on my computer. (I lied earlier. It made the sentence structure more readable.) When I buy new filler paper each year, I use that list to mark these dates. My tradition is to spend time on New Year's Day every year copying the yearly dates into their space on my calendar.
A PDA can also record dates far in the future, such as conferences, etc. The filler paper I buy for my PAA comes with a sheet for listing dates in future years. When I change paper each year, I refer to those pages and fill in the appropriate calendar spaces for this year. I have been able to reschedule conflicts for graduations and weddings two and three years in advance.
Know Your Personal Rhythms
Nature is full of rhythms. As you accept requests for meetings and appointments, it's a good idea to consider your personal rhythms .
There are two hours each day that I'm able to get a lot done.
The first is the hour before most people arrive in the office. I'm not a morning person, but I find that if I can drag my lazy self into the office an hour early, in that first hour I can get more work done than I can the rest of the day because there's nobody else around. It's important not to waste that hour on things like email. Use it for a project that can't get done without your full attention. (See Chapter 2 for more examples.)
The other hour is your high-energy hour. There is a part of the day that you are able to concentrate better than you can the rest of the day. I call this my "big brain hour." This is a different hour for everyone. For some it is the afternoon, for others it is late at night or early in the morning. This is a real biological phenomenon (Google "circadian rhythms"). NASA uses it to schedule shift work in space missions. Many people take advantage of it to schedule their most difficult tasks during the time of day when they naturally have more energy and ability to concentrate.
Take some time in the next week to find when in the day you are most able to concentrate. You might set your computer to beep once an hour. When you hear it beep, write down on a scale of 0 to 10 your energy level and your ability to concentrate. Find the time that both of them are high.
Once you find a pattern, try to modify your schedule around it.
Schedule your brain work around the time of day when you concentrate the best. Reserve that time for the most important (high-impact) projects. Try to schedule meetings away from that time, unless your meetings require serious brain power. Most don't.
Your high-energy time might change as you grow older. When I was younger, that time for me was right around 2 a.m.; now, it's more like 2 p.m.
Know Your Company's Rhythms
Business is full of rhythms, too. If you identify the rhythms of your company's year, you can make sure your plans are in concert with those rhythms. Anything else is like trying to swim upstream. Your calendar is the long-range planning tool that lets you do this.