I once had a client that was overwhelmed by the site of his calendar. His calendar was full of various activites. He constantly felt stressout that he was not spending enough time with his family.
To relieve the stress of looking at his calendar I suggested color coding his calendar by activity to see what he really had going on.
We color coded all his meetings in BLUE, actual work time in GREEN, and family activities in PURPLE…
The idea is if you see too many BLUE entries on your calendar it means you’re spending the majority of your time in meetings. If you’re not seeing enough GREEN entries it means you need to schedule more time to get actual work done —likewise for family time.
What our client realized was his calendar had a good balance of PURPLE entries and he was spending plenty of time with his family.
Now when he looked at his calendar he knew at a glance that he had family time scheduled for the week and his calendar was not so stressful to look at.
If you’d like to color code your calendar here’s how:
1. From your Calendar folder, select View > View Settings.
2. Select Conditional Formatting.
3. In the Conditional Formatting dialog box, select Add to create a new rule.
4. Give your rule a name and use the Color drop-down to pick a color.
5. Click Condition.
6. You can select from a variety of fields and criteria. For example, to shade all tentative meetings purple, select Advanced.
7. Click Field > All Appointment Fields > Show Time As. Set the Condition to equals and the Value to Tentative. Then click Add to List.
8. You can define additional conditions or click OK three times to save your conditional formatting rule.
Color coding is a great visual tip and allows an overview of your commitments at a glance.
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