It’s time to prune bullsh*t from your diary

Take a look at your diary for this week. Are there meetings you have been invited to where you are unclear on their purpose or the role you are meant to play? Perhaps you have events coming up that you don’t think you will particularly enjoy and you’re not sure whether they will have a direct benefit on your career. Or maybe you blocked out time to produce a report that you have a sneaking suspicion that, God forbid, no-one will actually read?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, chances are your diary could do with a prune.

Ashutosh Priyadarshy, founder of diary planning software company Sunsama, says it’s easy to fill your workday with stuff that’s only tan- gentially relevant or, worse, has no obvious connection to helping you achieve your goals. To optimise how he spends his days, Priyadarshy regularly removes what he refers to as ‘bullsh*t’ from his diary.

An example of this in Priyadarshy’s life are networking events. While he might meet people at networking events who could help drive awareness and thus customer acquisition of Sunsama, it’s far from guaranteed.

When I speak to my friends who work in large corporates and listen to them describing their workdays, I’m often struck by how much of their day could be classified as the bullsh*t Priyadarshy describes. So much ‘work’ is produced that has no impact on the goals of the organisation, and so many meetings happen that could have had fewer people attend or have been shorter and produced better outcomes.

For Priyadarshy, getting into the daily habit of planning his day the night before was what made him more conscious about pruning tasks, meetings and events from his diary.

And who doesn’t want to have less bullsh*t to deal with every day?

Put it into action

1. Set aside time, ideally daily, to review your calendar.

2. For every meeting, event, and timeboxed activity, ask yourself, ‘Will this get me closer to achieving one of my goals?’ If the answer is ‘no’, remove it from your diary. If the answer is ‘yes’, retain it. But if the answer is ‘maybe’ or ‘indirectly’, remove it. While this may feel uncomfortable at first, if you are able to fill this newfound time with activities that directly move you closer to your goals, you’ll start to make quicker and more meaningful progress towards the things that matter.