If your calendar accurately reflects how you spend your time then it’s a source of truth like no other. More than your words and more than your intentions, what you actually do each day is the ultimate statement of your priorities and values. Twice annually I make wholesale changes to how I approach scheduling my hours, days and weeks. It’s usually a combination of correcting bad habits or observations about mismatches between my goals and my effort. But I also throw in some experiments to test hypotheses, such as in 2014 making my default meeting time 30m instead of 45-60m.

If folks find it interesting, I’ll write up what I’m trying out now, but also wanted to share some resources to help you think about your own calendars and time.

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, Investor’s Schedule – My riff on PG’s classic Maker, Manager Schedule post
• How VCs Spend Their Time. Err, How This VC Spends His Time – Beginning of 2014, trying to figure out how to divide my Homebrew hours among commitments
• I Love Days With Nine Meetings In a Row – How moving all his 1:1s to a single day made one manager happier and more effective
• The Powerful Productivity Hack I Stumbled Upon Completely By Accident – Maybe the value in tracking your time is just in knowing you’re tracking your time
• You’re Not Saying “No” Often Enough – Title kinda tells you everything
• Staying Organized With Workflow – Not how I do things but reading about other people’s systems gives me good ideas
• The Founder’s Schedule – Again, being deliberate about the activities you put adjacent to one another and time of day you do them
• Your Calendar is a Mess – Lots of good solid tips about why you’ve found yourself horribly overscheduled and how to fix