You can’t get anywhere without a plan.
To make progress, you need to get good at segmenting your day and using smart tools like a calendar to stay focused.
Psychologically, you’re wired to complete easy wins without doing what it takes to invest in long-term success — the daily meditations, reading time, or workouts you promised to start at the beginning of the year.
You do the easy things. And push the long-term goals.
You can do both. Because it’s on the calendar.
Here are 5 calendar apps you should check out. They are guaranteed to help you stay focused on being awesome:
- Fantastical [link] — It’s an amazing bit of witchcraft. Use their handy calendar sets feature to view your work and personal calendar all on one screen, even if they’re separate email addresses. Click on a location and Google Maps will put you there. Create groups to manage your teams and use natural language to type in something like “dinner with Matt at 6pm Wednesday at Steve’s” to create an event. Easy as that.
- Trevor [link] — Trevor is a personal assistant that connects your task lists with your calendar,
to help you manage your time, the same way you already do in your mind. It’s the coolest mobile calendaring app you’ve never heard of yet. Figure out how you want to spend your day and Trevor will slide all those important calls and follow-up into available openings in your day. A new web app is on the way soon. - Google Calendar [link] — It’s free and easy and available everywhere — even when you don’t have access to the internet. Add multiple personal or work calendars and search through Google’s directory of important events (everything from foreign holidays to NFL games) to find a place for everything that is going on in your life. And the best part is that it works with everything else in your Google account.
- Plan [link] — Plan intelligently organizes projects and tasks from all the tools you and your team use: your Google and Outlook calendars, email, JIRA, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Github. Think of it like a work concierge. Plan brings together action items from all of your work tools, so you never have to worry about dropping the ball on any task, project, or meeting. It provides two-way sync to all of your favorite tools.
- Any.do [link] — Any.do is the easiest life manager according to the more than 15 million users who use it each day. It works seamlessly with Google Calendar, Exchange, and iCloud. The new Any.do Assistant uses AI to automatically review your tasks, and mark the ones it can do for you. With your approval, you’ll be connected to a combination of smart robots and diligent humans who can help you accomplish that task. What?
One more big idea for you.
When you have a calendar picked out, use it.
Block off your calendar. Block off moments to keep yourself accountable for the important time you’re going to spend doing related tasks — like processing emails and returning phone calls.
If you’re like most people, you’re barely accomplishing half of what you could do.
Don’t let your big goals and frustrating to-do lists overwhelm you.
Put it on your calendar.