Quick calendar test to test your proactivity level

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Quick test - Are you being proactive?

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Darrin Mourer

I was going through and organizing my calendar the other day when I decided to check in with myself on my progress towards my goal of better organization. A while back I had gone through and color coded my calendar and also started documenting where I was spending my time. I knew I needed to get a better handle on where my time was going if I wanted to manage it.

If I look at where much of my time was going, most of the entries (not including the ones I went back and added) were generated by others. Since that time, most of my calendar entries are self generated. This isn’t to say I’m spending vastly more time in meetings, but that I am generating/accepting meetings from topics or agenda items that I initiated.

Seeing it from this perspective for the first time was very exciting!

From that I devised a quick test you can perform to gain the same insight.

Select a review period. A quarter works well but you can use a typical week too in a pinch.
Tally your time. This is easy with color codes but you can do it manually too. For each entry, log the length of the meeting and label it as proactive if you set the agenda (even if working with a rep/customer) . Label it reactive if someone else set the meeting and you had little or no say in the agenda. Also included in this category is any firefighting and non-scheduled activities. Yes, this includes the last minute RFP you had to drop everything for and spend 4 hours on.
Review the comparison. The more time you’re spending on the former, the more proactive you are being with your time.
Check back in.With this quick test, try performing next week, month, quarter, etc. and see if you can start moving the needle.

It’s pretty easy to think (or even assert) that you are managing your own time; it’s another to have a datapoint that can confirm your story.

If you want to get more exact and/or automate the process, you can export your calendar and use color codes to sort your time and perform calculations. Save the template you create and every quarter you can create a visual depiction of your time slices.