How the Calendar Actually Sabotages Your Time Management Efforts
We all struggle with time management, and we all want to know how to best handle the schedule. In this video, Dan Ariely , professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and friend of Lifehacker , says the calendar is definitely not one of them.
As Arieli points out in the video, the calendar almost always misrepresents how much time you actually have. If you look at your calendar two months in advance, you will be surprised how open it looks. But in fact, you have as little “free time” as you do now. Add to that our incredibly paltry ability to predict the future, and we’re still struggling to manage our time in two months.
Calendars are great for tasks , the execution of which takes 1-2 hours, for example for meetings. The point is, most of the things we want to achieve in life are (fortunately) not meetings. For larger and more meaningful projects, ditch all the “let me put this in” rhetoric. Instead, imagine what you need to do if you do what you want by next week. So you start mentally composing Tetris to figure out what you need to cancel or reshuffle (if possible) in your schedule for this to happen.
A Behavioral Economist Explains How Your Calendar Disrupts Your Priorities | Business Insider