Control Your Calendar (Not Your To-Do List) and Success Will Follow

Stop measuring productivity by checking cute little boxes. Do this instead.

Our society celebrates getting things done. Long hours, overflowing inboxes, and maxed-out calendars become badges of honor. But this relentless pursuit of output can leave us feeling drained, disconnected, and unfulfilled. We neglect the things that truly matter to us–family, personal growth, health–because tasks, not our values, dictate our days.

When it comes to getting the most out of our time, we should stop worrying about outcomes we can’t control and instead focus on the inputs we can.

Take a friend of mine who is a freelance editor. In order to manage her work day and clients better, she tracked her word count for years to discover how fast she could edit a given number of words, then used that knowledge to schedule as many projects as she could reasonably fit into a day.

Seems reasonable, but the strategy failed miserably.

Whether each project needed a heavier level of editing than anticipated or a quick-turnover project came in from another client, my friend often found herself off track. That meant she frequently worked longer days than planned and often canceled plans with family and friends.