Planning your own time


Outlook calendar is a great way to plan and organise your time and work. With calendar entries and possible reminders, you can keep track of the day's activities and organise your time between meetings and independent work.

You can easily get started with time management once you learn how to make calendar entries. Instead of making new calendar entries only for meetings and appointments, you can add your own entries to the calendar that are only relevant to you. Lunch times, times for exercise, days off and periods of concentration should all be marked on your calendar. This way, when booking meetings, others will know when you are available and when you need to take time for independent work, and will not book a meeting at such a time. Secondly, you will be better able to keep track of when you need to do what and have set aside time for yourself to do it. Planning has been shown to improve efficiency and success.

When making calendar entries for yourself, you should take into attention at least 1. the visibility of the calendar to others, 2. the free- busy status and 3. the notification settings.

1. If you have the option to share your calendar details with others, you may want to set some calendar entries to private. This can be done during the creation of a new calendar entry by selecting "Private". On the other hand, if you already make a private entry for a dental appointment, for example, it may be useful to either publish the location of the event or to reserve a longer time slot around the booked dental appointment, so that you are not suggested a meeting on the other side of town immediately after or before the appointment.

The picture shows the browser version of the Outlook calendar. After selecting "New Event", you will find the privacy setting at the top of the form in the toolbar.

2. For your own calendar entries, always actively choose a space that suits your purpose. This is done when creating a calendar entry by selecting one of the following modes from the "Show as" section: "free, busy, tentative, out of office". If you mark a day off in your calendar or plan to take, say, an afternoon off, you should mark "out of office" so that others know you are not available at all during that time. In general, you should use the "busy" option. But if you are going to do independent work that doesn't really care when it happens, you can put a calendar entry for yourself, but leave it as "free" so that you can possibly suggest a meeting time.

The picture shows the browser version of the Outlook calendar. Select "New Event". You can change the status from the toolbar at the top of the form.

3. You should adjust the notification settings according to whether you want to receive a daily note about lunch time or not. Recurring events, such as the daily lunch time, can be marked in the calendar by selecting the "Recurrence" button in the top bar during the creation of the calendar note. For self-selected calendar entries, it can sometimes be useful to receive a notification, sometimes not. In addition to the notification in Office Portal or Outlook, you can set either desktop notifications or mobile push notifications to be enabled based on the device you are using. This way, you can get a notification on your phone screen, for each calendar entry you have set a notification on. 

The picture shows the encrypted version of the Outlook calendar. After selecting "New Event", you will find these settings after the date/time in the calendar. You can select from the drop-down menu the appropriate notification setting and how often the event will be repeated.