Owning Your Calendar 📆

I have been thinking about time and energy output a lot lately

It was the main theme of 3 of my last 5 solopreneur meet-ups

The transition out of corporate work and mindset has been difficult for me

Even though I haven’t worked a corporate job in 11 years

The blockage stems from even before that work, it’s from childhood

School teaches us to sit down and listen

Time in equals outcome

So I find myself even now feeling guilty about finishing a work day in 3 hours

All of my projects are complete, client work is done, the team is running

And yet, guilt when I am not “working”

It has gotten much better over the past few years

I have given myself permission to succeed without continually worrying about how much time I put in each week

With this permission comes a level of freedom BUT the need to break free of a busy calendar

So I have a list of questions I use to evaluate my calendar and time commitments once per quarter

1 What on my calendar can be automated

Make.com is my third employee. It can deploy a sequence of tasks with the click of a button. Saving time and removing human error on mundane tasks.


Ex: When someone decides to work with me I click a button in my CRM. The button sends an automated email with the contract and invoice. Once the invoice is paid it opens up a new client portal in Notion and notifies my team about the new client to activate their tasks. It also adds the person to my email list and to a series of calendar events. This used to be 7 different manual steps.

2 What can be delegated

I delegate as much as humanly possible. I have worked with an EA or ops manager for over 8 years. If the task does not fit into my zone of genius I will hand it off immediately. To evaluate what gets delegated I will assign a value of the task ($1, $10, $100, or $1,000). The value is based on how much the task contributes to moving the business forward. If it is less than a $100 task I don’t do it.

If you don’t have the ability to delegate, consider deleting it altogether. You would be surprised at what you can cut without having a big negative impact on your business. So many tasks or events are scheduled due to people pleasing. It’s not your responsibility to make everyone happy, it’s to make money.

3 What isn’t urgent or important

Urgent is not important. If the event does not serve my current business focus and moving the business forward I push it back for a few months. Maybe it becomes relevant later, maybe not.

4 What can I remove

I have had a historically bad habit of accepting “connection” calls with people who want to get to know me or the business. The truth about these calls is that most people are looking for free information, and guidance, or are trying to sell something. I combat this by asking for a brief of the call’s purpose. What are they hoping to accomplish? My acceptance rate of these calls has gone down 75% since asking this question.

There are also a lot of weekly or monthly calls that we jam into our calendars that don’t serve a meaningful purpose in moving our business forward. Cut them.

5 What can be reduced by 50%

I am obsessed with 15 minute meetings. Almost all of my internal and client meetings run at 15. We often use the default 30 minutes that come up when we open a new calendar event. But do we really need it? If we enter a meeting with a clear goal and outcome in mind it becomes very easy to accomplish what you need in 15 minutes. I like to outline these two things ahead of every meeting: what are we trying to accomplish? What is the rough context of the goal?

In summary

There is a long list of things that we do because “we have always done them” and it’s a wasteful use of mental energy and effort

Challenge yourself and ask these same questions about your calendar

You will be amazed how much time you can open up for yourself

Mike