Many of the SES officers I coach using PEP principles decide they want to start Outlook in the Calendar View rather than the Email View. They realise that when they open Outlook in Email View it is easy to get drawn into answering a semi-important email and forget to do the important work they had decided was their priority and scheduled for first thing in the day.
Opening Outlook in the Calendar View helps to build the habit of making conscious decisions about how you will use your time.
In this 54 second video, I show you how to set Outlook 365 to open in the Calendar View.
Scheduling time to do work in the calendar is an important element of managing one’s capacity and being able to reliably assess whether one’s promises can be fulfilled. All too often, executives are overly optimistic about what they can achieve because they do not estimate and make visible the time required to fulfil commitments. Many people I work with, at first find putting time for work in the calendar confronting because all of a sudden they can see it is not physically possible to deliver everything they have promised in the promised time. Realising they are over-committed requires them to renegotiate agreements rather than make apologies for work that is not delivered. Renegotiating agreements requires a new level of responsibility; rather than “I’m sorry we ran out of time and could not deliver” the conversation becomes “I have assessed the time and resources required and am declaring a breakdown because I cannot see a way to deliver as agreed.” Sometimes one or other party may engage in the ‘blame game’ which does not help. The point of declaring a breakdown is to re-establish a shared reality about the project and develop a new agreement for moving forward.
