You regularly declutter your email inbox, filing cabinet, and electronic files in your business.

But when was the last time you sat down to declutter your work calendar?

Most people declutter their calendars when an urgent need arises.

Just think of a recent professional, personal, or societal emergency that required you to immediately and abruptly cancel calendar entries.

This isn’t to say all your appointments should be thrown out the window in the name of productivity.

Rather, you should have some sort of regular review to determine what’s really necessary in your schedule.

Here’s a simple five-step process you can use to declutter your business schedule.

The process will help you better conceptualize how you’re spending your time every single day.

Create a list of top priorities in your business right now

If you’re like most people, you tend to automatically fill up an empty calendar with meetings, appointments, and tasks. But are these items necessarily top priorities for your business right now?

Grab a sheet of paper and jot down the top three priorities in your business right at this very moment.

These can be anything and everything from new projects, product launches, hiring new staff, securing funding, business development, or anything else in between.

Go ahead and create a list of the top three priorities. This will act as a guide to help you move forward in your calendar.

Keep in mind, that just because something is a priority now, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a priority in the future. Likewise, if something is not a current priority, it may become a priority in the future. Make a note for yourself to check on the status of items in a few months’ time.

Review calendar entries six months into the past and future

Review your calendar from the last six months to the present. What do you see?

Thoughtfully observe the scene in front of you in your calendar. Jot down any big takeaways for yourself in terms of where you spent your time.

Next, review your calendar from today to six months in the future. What do you see? Once again, take in what’s sitting right in front of you. Write down any observations or realizations from your detective work.

Now that you’ve got a broader view, it’s time to connect the dots. Where is your time being spent as an overall trend? What were you working on previously? What are you working on now versus before? Where do your future plans put you?

If there’s any meetings, appointments, gatherings, or events that leap out at you, you can make a note of those right now.

Remove commitments that don’t actively align with your goals

Next, you’ll want to actively remove what no longer serves you in your calendar.

A good place to start is those meetings, appointments, and commitments that don’t align with your top priorities.

This step is crucial because it means you are recommitting to your goals by creating time and space for them in your calendar.

Of course, if you’re building up a goal, say you want to put something into play now so you can reap the rewards of your hard work later, you’ll want to keep these items in your calendar for use.

What happens if there are meetings you need to stay abreast of, but aren’t necessarily something you need to attend? This might be something where you need to outsource someone trusted to attend the event and take notes.

Only you will know which events you personally need to attend, but you can make a decision about whether those other events should stay in your calendar.

Update outdated calendar features

We place items into our calendars with the intent of following through on them.

But over time, your business changes, the way you work changes, and you change and evolve. This is where updating existing commitments can be helpful.

What current features of existing meetings and appointments can be negotiated? You can shorten or lengthen meetings, add or subtract required attendees, hold different meeting types, and adjust dates and times.

Even making a small adjustment to one meeting feature can have a big impact on your calendar.

What small changes can you make right now to your calendar entries? What can you modify or change so it supports how you’re working in your business right now?

Make a plan to review your schedule in six months’ time

You’ve taken great care to declutter your calendar. That’s a great first start.

But it’s not the end of your work. We must routinely declutter and remove what’s no longer serving us in our lives.

This is the perfect time to set a reminder for yourself to declutter your calendar. You can do this review every quarter or six months or so to make sure things are where they should be.

Repeat the steps outlined above and think about how things have changed since your last decluttering session.

Having this updated approach will help you to gain a better understanding of how and where you’re spending your time throughout the year.

Learn how to manage your time during the year

Time management is a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and refined every single day.

My time management guide will teach you how to turn in assignments before deadlines, overcome procrastination, and arrive on time to appointments.

If you want me to help you manage your time at work and at home so you get things done and feel in control, then check out my time management coaching services.

How about you? What are you going to declutter from your business calendar? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!

This article originally appeared on Inc.com