Empowered Productivity

Why?

If you have outlined some goals for yourself, such as how many hours you’d like to spend in a week doing “x” (volunteering, exercising, billable hours, etc.), then color coding your calendar items is a great way to see where you are out of alignment with your goals.  For example, if you’ve decided to spend four hours each week volunteering, and you’ve coded the volunteer time on your calendar as blue, a quick glance at a weekly or monthly view for all the “blue” will give you a sense of whether or not you’re reaching your goals in that area.

How?

First, in a calendar view, go to the “Edit” menu and click on “Labels.”  Jump to the bottom and click on “Edit Labels.”  Here you can change Microsoft’s defaults to the words that work best for you.  Resist the urge to color-code everything if it’s not an activity you care about measuring.  It’s ok to have some color and let everything else be white.  To color code a calendar event or appointment, open it, and the “label” field should be sort of in the center, on the right side of the window.  Here you can select the appropriate color.