Whenever someone asks you if you want to grab a coffee or even better, booking in a special spa day treat, you never want to forget the date and time so jotting it down in your diary is always a good idea! This is the same as all the other work you have planned, whether that be meeting a client or dedicating an hour of your day to finishing a piece of work.
What is Diary Management?
Diary management is organising your diary to ensure you understand what is business, what is general and what is your ‘you time’. To do so, we have some left some top tips which you can follow when organising your diary.
1. Putting in dates straight away
Firstly, we would say jotting down the plan straight away is important as you don’t then later want to forget the time or worse forgetting to put it in your dairy completely! By doing this it will ensure that you know exactly what time is free and what isn’t.
2. Outsource your diary management
If you feel that your diary is already too full and all over the place to have the time to put it back together or you just aren’t that good at keeping it up to date, then outsourcing your diary management can save you a lot of stress and time!
3. Colour codes
Use different highlighters to colour code your diary, every colour will mean a different thing. This will help you not to become confused and a small glance you will be able to see what sort of work is happening on that day.
4. Save your diary elsewhere
There is nothing worse than that daunting feeling when you have lost some work when your Word document crashes and you haven’t saved the latest version. Well, this is the same for your diary, especially if it’s a paper diary. Losing it could cause you the unneeded amount of stress, so back it up, take photographs of it or move it online and have multiple versions.
5. You time
Everyone needs to factor in the fact that you will at some point need some time to yourself, whether that be that special spa day treat or a gym hour 3 times a week. If you schedule this in you will helping your future self to not become too heavily booked up leading to not very nice amounts of stress. We understand that with busy diaries that this can be so difficult, we recommend booking a class somewhere or making space for a whole day trip. This will make you less likely to cancel and will ensure you have that relaxing time booked out!
Diary management can be something most people find boring, but it is such an important task to get a grasp of! We hope our tips have helped you!