I do think that having an appreciation of where we’re spending our time, rather than just letting it, you know, fly by and not notice what’s happening, is important.

Why I Audit My Calendar Every Month

At the end of every month, or usually a few days after the month has finished, I do something that can take me two or three hours. I audit my calendar. That might sound like a substantial amount of time to spend looking backwards, but I find the process incredibly useful. It helps me understand where my time actually went, what needs following up, what I should perhaps stop doing, and whether the way I’m structuring my time is working for me. It also gives me some distance from meetings and commitments, which can be quite revealing.

What is a calendar audit?

My calendar audit started back in July 2023. I was visually going back through my calendar and trying to review what had happened, and I asked ChatGPT if there was an easier way to do it. It suggested that I could write a Google Apps Script, something I wasn’t even aware was possible at the time, and gave me a script to work with. I work in Google Workspace, so the script essentially takes my Google Calendar information and outputs it into Google Sheets, where I can review the month line by line.

A quick word of caution here. If you are going to run a script suggested by AI, you need to understand what that script is doing. You don’t want to introduce something that behaves in a way you did not expect or gives access to information it shouldn’t. In my case, I could work through the script, understand what it was doing, and was comfortable using it. Now I have a monthly reminder to run the script and start my calendar audit.

Colour coding is doing more work than you might think

I’m a big user of colour coding in Google Calendar. I have categories for non-billable administration, speaking engagements, podcast time, writing time, CPD, business travel, personal travel and various organisations I work with. I even have a category for Chester, my Border Collie, because apparently taking the dog to the vet also needs its own calendar workflow.

The colours mean something to me when I’m looking at the calendar, but they become particularly useful when I export the information because those categories can be sorted. I can quickly identify personal activities that I don’t need to analyse as part of my business review and remove them. Then I can look at something such as non-billable administration and ask whether those hours really needed to be non-billable. More importantly, could some of that work have been minimised?

That is where the calendar audit starts becoming much more than an administrative exercise.

Where did your time actually go?

We can be incredibly busy without necessarily remembering what made us busy. When I review an entire month, I can see how much time I spent on different activities and whether that aligns with how I want to work. I do quite a lot of advocacy work, for example, and sometimes it seems to arrive in clumps. During one particularly busy week, it can feel like an enormous commitment, but looking across the entire month gives me a better perspective.

The calendar audit also helps me identify low-value commitments. With a little distance, I might look at a meeting and think, why did I take that meeting? It took an hour and nothing came out of it. Without the audit, it would be very easy to simply forget about it and accept another similar meeting in the future. Instead, I can think about whether that person actually needed an hour, whether 15 minutes would have been sufficient, or whether I needed to have the meeting at all.

Protecting energy, not simply managing time

I’ve talked before about understanding your energy levels and recognising when you are best able to do your thinking work. For me, those productive hours tend to be in the morning, so I try to protect them. I also typically block out Monday and Friday, giving me space where things can move if necessary rather than filling every available gap.

Working internationally adds another dimension. If I have an 11pm appointment, I need to think about how I structure the rest of that day so I actually have the energy to participate properly at 11pm. I also don’t want meetings sitting on top of one another without breathing room. Looking at the calendar retrospectively helps me see whether I’m genuinely protecting those productive hours and managing my energy in the way I intended.

Your calendar audit can become a workflow audit

One unexpected benefit is that reviewing my calendar also prompts me to review my technology. I currently use Calendly as a booking solution. I like features such as putting 15-minute buffers around meetings and automatically sending reminder and follow-up emails. They are genuinely useful features.

However, Google has its own appointment scheduling functionality, and I’m already working in Google Workspace. For some meetings, I probably don’t need all the additional Calendly functionality. That raises an obvious question: am I paying for overlapping technology when something already included in my existing technology stack could do the job?

I haven’t completely moved away from Calendly, but the calendar audit keeps that question visible. It is a useful reminder that we should periodically audit our workflows and subscriptions rather than simply accumulating bright shiny technology.

What can your calendar tell you?

There is another practical layer to this process. Reviewing meetings can jog my memory about an action point, a response I’m waiting for, something I need to file, CPD I forgot to record, or a project that needs to be finalised. My follow-ups are maintained elsewhere, but the calendar audit provides a useful second check.

More broadly, though, the audit gives me an appreciation of where I’m spending my time rather than allowing another month to simply fly past. It helps me remember the meetings that produced very little, recognise the work that mattered, protect my capacity and become firmer about saying no.

You certainly don’t need my complicated collection of calendar colours, and your process may look completely different. But I think there is value in periodically looking backwards before planning forwards. Your calendar contains a surprisingly detailed record of how you are choosing to spend your time and energy. The interesting question is whether, after reviewing it, you would make those same choices again.

Hi, this is Heather Smith, and you are listening to the Accounting Apps podcast. Today, I thought I would share with you something that I do on a regular basis, which is I audit my calendar, and I thought I would explain what a calendar audit is, why I do it, how it helps me, how I do it, and what tech I use, and just any other thoughts that I have around auditing my calendar.

So for this podcast I’m actually doing a slightly different way in that I’m recording it directly into the software I’m currently using, which is Descript.com. Typically, I would record and then add it. And I used to use Camtasia, TechSmith Camtasia, and I have been testing a new platform for about six months now. So this is one of its features: is that I can record directly into it. And I’m still using my Rode microphone. It’s always interesting how these things work and how these things happen, and the actual audio quality is really important to me.

Okay, so let me talk about a calendar audit. So essentially, what it is at the end of every month, few days after the end of every month, I download my calendar and I review it in text format. So, I back in July 23, I jumped into ChatGPT and I asked it to suggest how I could easily review my calendar because I was kind of visually going back and looking at it, but it suggested I could write a Google script, which I wasn’t even aware at the time that that was a thing that was possible. I work in the Google Workspace, and I presume a lot of what I’m going to tell you can be done in in the Microsoft Workplace. But I will talk about the Google Workspace.

ChatGPT explained how I could set up and run a script, and it actually gave me the script to run. Now you have to be very careful when you’re using a script that you understand what it’s going to do, and it doesn’t have any Trojan. It’s not behaving like a Trojan horse and doing something that it shouldn’t do that you don’t want it to do. But it was a very clean script, and I could sort of work through it and understand what it was doing. And so, essentially, for me, it goes into. I get a an output that’s in a spreadsheet, and I go through it line by line, and think about the event.

Why do I audit it?

As I said, I kind of go through it line by line and just tick it off in my mind. Okay, that event happened. Was do I have any follow up now?

Follow-up is maintained and monitored elsewhere, but it’s just a kind of double-check for me that I’ve done everything that I needed to do, and it’s interesting because it can sometimes take me two or three hours to do. But that’s of my own, you know, that’s of my own choosing. And I think what happens is I do identify things that I need to follow up on or do, or it jogs my memory about something. So, sort of, if I go through some of the ways it helps me, it helps identify things that perhaps I shouldn’t be doing.

But before, in fact, before I jump into that, what I’m going to say is, I use the Google Workspace, and in the Google Workspace, each calendar event can be colour-coded, and they have recently updated it, so the colour coding, there’s actually a huge number of options of colour coding, and by colour coding it means categorisation. So if I click on something at the moment, you’ll hear me clickety-clack on my computer here. But if I click on something at the moment. I have maybe about 20 different things set up. I have non-billable admin. I have speaking engagements. I have things marked as personal, travel and accommodation marked as personal, travel and accommodation marked as business. I do a lot of work with the ACCA, the CAANZ, and the ICB. So I have them all marked separately. I do podcast time, so this would be podcast time, writing time, speaking time, CPD, And so, so various things. I even have, I even have a section for Chester to remind myself to take him to the vet, etc. So it is a bit of a mix of a personal and business calendar there.

What’s interesting about that is when I do colour code it, so I can look at the calendar and I know the colours mean something to me. All things yellow are personal, typically, and various other things have different colours. But when I download it, they actually have a number associated with them, and so then I can really, really quickly sort all personal things are marked personal. Review them all, and yes, they all were personal, and so sort of delete them because I don’t need to review them for this purpose. Okay, so I just kind of wanted to highlight what happens there, and if you do use the Google Workspace, be aware. Perhaps doesn’t need to be as complicated as I have it, but I do find it. I like that Kanban visual colour or order size style, and and you can order it for your own purposes. So it can help you identify sort of those low value commitments that perhaps doing the calendar audit can help you identify those low-value commitments that you perhaps need to stop. It helps you measure where time is going and where you are spending time, and think about:

Is this a good use of my time, or is it not a good use of my time?

And it’s interesting. I do a lot of advocacy work, and I normally find that clumps together. So in those weeks, it’s like, whoa, that feels like a lot. But then, on the overall scheme of things, it it minimises out.

I have talked in the past about the importance of understanding your energy levels and when you have thinking time and when you are best able to think, and it helps me be productive of the protective of those productive hours. So I know that those should be happening in the morning, and I will aim to have those productive hours in the morning, I block off typically Monday and Friday. So if something comes up, they can go there. But it also allows me to a buffer time between what I’m doing. I do a lot of work across the world, so it also helps me monitor if I’m going to need. Like I think I have a 10 p.m. appointment this week, so I need to manage what I do. So I have it’s an 11 p.m. appointment, so I have the energy to get to that 11 p.m. appointment.

It also helps me be structured around my meetings and the meetings that I offer people to book in with me, so I don’t end up with too many meetings in a day. And I, I’ll talk about the technology in a moment. It helps me some days. You can sort of set aside for doing the same thing over and over again. So again, you may want to have multiple meetings a day, but that’s sort of something that it does give me time to think about. So it does help me make deliberate choices, and what I find when I get the listing, it will prompt me to say. We had that conversation in that meeting.

What are the action points?

Jumping back in and seeing if they have all been activated. If I’ve received responses from them. If I need to follow up with someone that way. Another thing, maybe, maybe I need to file something in a more appropriate area. Maybe I need to be doing some work on something. So I’m pretty good at allocating that out. But normally, it’s an initial chase up has gone out there, and I might need to chase up once again with something, or organise another meeting and think about that. So, as I mentioned, I have a monthly reminder to run a Google script, and it downloads the entire month’s calendar, and then I sort it by categorisation. I I am going to pull out the ones that I don’t want to analyse for business, which are Chester the Border Collie, personal. So those those two ones initially allocate and then we’ll we’ll delete those.

I will then look at non billable hours and assess whether they all truly were non billable hours and how they perhaps could be minimised and then I will scoot through and check everything there, and in terms of like CPD, might might prompt me. I’m pretty good at recording CPD when it happens, but it might prompt me to go back in and record some CPD that I missed, and it also, as I mentioned before, it kind of it does help you see how much you did in the past month, which is like, yeah, you did so much in the past month, but also, oh, why was I doing that? I my time could have been better spent spent elsewhere, and and it’s very much personal for myself to see what I’ve done, where I’ve gone. But again, that can involve me chasing up and sort of finalising projects.

The tech I use, as I mentioned, Google Workspace, Google Calendar, Google Script goes into Google Sheets, and that’s where I do the analysis. I actually don’t keep it. I don’t. Once I’ve done it, that’s it. It’s the sort of a project. It’s a bit of an admin project for myself. The from a technology optimisation perspective, from a sort of a technology perspective, I use Calendly as a booking solution, and I think that I should really I should be using. I think there’s a Google one. There’s me typing away, but Google does actually have its own online appointment scheduling tool, and I probably should be using that more, so I don’t need to pay for the Calendly account. I like Hallandly because it off. It has lots of features and functionalities, like it buffers in 15 minutes around a meeting, so I don’t get them too close together, and it sends out scheduled emails. But if I so it could have said sends out a reminder email and then a follow up email. Now for meetings that don’t use that and I know that they’re not going to need that, then I really should try to move across to Google and save my money on that subscription. I’m not there yet, but this thinking about technology in this space that’s important. So, bright shiny tech syndrome. Yes, me using Calendly. There are some features about it I do like, but Google has a booking function, and I believe Microsoft has built-in calendars and booking functions, and it sort of highlights the importance of auditing your workflows and eliminating overlapping tools. Okay, and every time we do that, it does take a bit of time. Stop, think, review, and I know that that’s kind of sitting in the back of my head. That’s what I need to do.

I think I’ve kind of, as I’ve gone through, highlighted what I’ve learned from auditing my calendar. It probably is something that you perhaps would do with a business coach or an executive coach, and because I’m on my own, I kind of do it my own. But that’s completely fine. But I do think that having an appreciation of where we’re spending our time, rather than just letting it, you know, fly by and not notice what’s happening is important. I think it’s important. I do it monthly. I get a notification that comes in at the very start of the month, and I plan to do it in the next few days.

I’d be interested to know if you ever do a calendar audit too. If you have any suggestions on how to do it, or how you’ve benefited from it, let me know.

And hopefully, something I’ve suggested in that is useful or thought-provoking for you, I think the biggest thing is energy flow, and I also think you know, and I’ve said it before, being able to say no to things is really important, and and when you have a bit of distance from something, you might go:

Why did I take that meeting with that person-it took an hour? Nothing came out of it. Why did I let that happen?

I’m tired. I’m working too many hours, and it’d be easy just to forget about the meeting. But it helps remind you. It helps to remind you to reframe and shape those meetings. Maybe when these people want meetings with you, you give them 15 minutes rather than an hour, and and you’re firmer about you.

You have better memory about the lack of outcomes for that meeting. I know myself; I’m always being asked to meet with people, and it’s challenging to the capacity and bandwidth for all of that. Yeah, so there you have it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Accounting Apps podcast. I hope you found it beneficial, and it’ll be interesting to know how. It’ll be interesting to hear how it sounds on Descripts.

Keep up to date with the modern accounting technology landscape by subscribing to the Accounting Apps podcast, the Accounting Apps newsletter, and join the conversations happening in the accounting apps mastermind community. I’m your host Heather Smith, and I’m pretty easy to find on all social media platforms. I look forward to connecting with you.