When I first met one of my closest mentors about two years ago, he was one of the “busiest” young people that I had met (I hate using the word “busy” and I will probably end up explaining why in a future post).  At the time, he was in his final year of engineering classes, launching a start-up with major customers, helping run a large national organization, and still maintaining a personal and social life.  Of course, I had to ask him how he did it.

For one thing, he was very good at scheduling his time and would be faithful to the time that he scheduled.  For example, his time for studying, working, and other aspects of his life would all be allotted into his BlackBerry Calendar, and he would stick to it.  For example, if he allotted two hours to homework but didn’t finish the assignment, he would just stop at the end of two hours, and hand in the assignment incomplete.  Sounds crazy? At the time, I thought that what he did was indeed a bit peculiar.

A year later I got my own BlackBerry and it became easy to carry around my schedule at all times.  I became very diligent at scheduling important meetings with other – appointments, conference calls, and events.  However, fast forwarding to today, I have now adopted many of those same philosophies that I first thought were crazy.  I take great care to not only schedule appointments with others on my smartphone, but to schedule appointments with myself.  If you open up my calendar, you can see exactly when I have time allotted for reading, working on Impact, or even hanging out to my parents.  You can ask me on Sunday, and I can tell you the exact times that I will be working out every single day for the next week.  Even more drastically, since I know when I am waking up each day to either go to work or to go work out before work, I have scheduled exactly 7.5 hours of sleep for every night.  Yes, that means that that my calendar has blocks set aside for sleep and I follow it exactly!

So, what are the results?  Well, they are amazing!  A funny thing happens when you schedule something with your calendar – you hold yourself accountable to it.  It’s pretty hard to just delete that work-out from the calendar, or ignore that vibrating BlackBerry reminder about the time you set aside with your parents, or reading, or anything else.  It’s amazing!

What are your thoughts on strict scheduling as a productivity tool?  Do you think that I’m crazy?

Note: there is still some flexibility in my schedule to move things around, so it’s not totally rigid!