16 Refreshing Ways to Spring Clean Your Busy Calendar

Taking time to spring clean your calendar is a smart way to boost your productivity levels without making major changes to your daily routine.

Spring cleaning your calendar means deliberately removing, updating, and reorganizing your schedule to reflect your current priorities and goals.

If your calendar’s been booked solid for the last several weeks and you have little time to make headway on projects, this might be the cleanup session you’ve been waiting for!

In this article, you’ll learn why you should spring clean your calendar, the benefits of doing so, as well as sixteen practical ways to update your schedule. You’ll also learn practical ways to keep your calendar organized and up-to date during the rest of the year.

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Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Why should you spring clean your calendar?

You should spring clean your calendar because your priorities, responsibilities, workload, interests, and goals change over time.

You spend a lot of time interacting with your calendar on any given day of the week. And chances are, you’re probably adding items without reviewing or removing existing ones.

Over time, these calendar entries may become cluttered and bloated, making it challenging to get through your daily routine.

You can think of this process just as if you were to spring clean your home or office. You’re cleaning up what no longer interests or serves you in your work and personal life.

 What are the benefits of spring cleaning your calendar?

Spring cleaning your calendar has many benefits including:

• Clearer insight into your overall workload. Updating your calendar ensures entries are clean, current, and relevant to your work.
• Improved scheduling availability. It’s easier to schedule new appointments and meetings into your calendar using a clean slate.
• Removing unwanted or unhelpful activities. This is the perfect time to end engagements, cancel meetings, or remove activities you’ve outgrown.
• More visually appealing format. Eliminating old and unwanted entries adds much-needed whitespace and is easier on the eyes to read.
• Feeling more in control of your time. Your schedule is no longer running itself; you’ve firmly taken back control of your minutes and hours.

How can spring cleaning your calendar make you more productive?

Spring cleaning your calendar can potentially make you more productive because you are freeing up time, space, and energy from within your daily routine.

How freeing up time helps you be more productive

When you free up time in your calendar, you’re literally giving yourself back precious minutes you can use to your advantage.

You can use this time to make forward progress on client work, attend to outstanding administrative paperwork, or seek out new business through marketing and sales channels.

How freeing up space helps you be more productive

Freeing up space in your calendar helps you be more productive because you have more scheduling choices available to you.

You have the space and flexibility you need to structure future work days. This also gives you wiggle or buffer room for appointments, meetings, or projects that may have been a tight squeeze in your calendar.

Why freeing your energy helps you be more productive

Freeing up the mental and physical energy that’s behind your calendar entries can help you feel more energized and optimistic in your work. We don’t always consider the toll of preparing for, holding, and following up on calendar events.

But each of these entries has an effect on your overall work habits and energy levels. You may feel a noticeable difference when you declutter items from your calendar!

When should you spring clean your calendar?

You can start spring cleaning your calendar starting in mid-winter leading up to the spring season. This time of year is naturally less busy than other times of the year.

You can use this time to review, evaluate, and plan before appointments, meetings, events, and gatherings pick up in the warmer weather.

That being said, anytime of the year is a good time to clean out or update your calendar. This is especially the case if you haven’t reviewed or updated your calendar over the past several months or in many years.

Being consistently productive means being intentional every single day. Start your day off right by planning for what matters by downloading my free Productivity Mindset Planner™.

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16 ways to spring clean your calendar

Spring cleaning your calendar can add valuable minutes and hours back to both your work and personal time.

As a productivity coach, I’ve found that most professionals can gain anywhere from one to two hours back into their schedules with regular calendar cleanings.

Here are sixteen ways you can get started on spring cleaning your calendar today.

Cancel unnecessary weekly meetings

Remove those unnecessary and unhelpful weekly meetings from your calendar. You know the ones: nothing valuable or worthwhile is discussed and nothing gets done.

There’s really no benefit in holding such a meeting. Make a definitive decision to declutter your calendar and cancel these unhelpful gatherings from your weekly routine.

Consider updating standing appointments

Just because you’ve had a standing appointment at Tuesday at 10 AM for the past three years doesn’t necessarily mean you must keep it. Your schedule may have changed greatly over the several months, quarters, or years.

Consider which of your appointments could be rescheduled so that they work seamlessly with your current calendar.

Remove unnecessary reminders

Take out any extraneous reminders for tasks that you can perform on auto-pilot. Sometimes, we’ll add reminders in our calendars to help build a daily habit, such as, “Go to the gym,” or “Take dog for walk.”

Yet over time with practice these tasks become second nature to us. If this is the case for you, you may want to consider removing these now defunct reminders.

Trim away personal engagements

Reducing the number of personal engagements or activities is another way to add space to your calendar. Scale back your activities and commit to only one or two items for the present.

Feeling overwhelmed by your book group, pottery class, hospital volunteering, and tennis meetups? You’ll be better able to focus on and enjoy personal activities when you’re not being stretched in many directions.

Fix double-booked appointments and meetings

Remove double-booked appointments and meetings that may have accidentally worked their way into your calendar. You’ll need to carefully decide which appointment you’ll keep and which you’ll reschedule.

Take a moment to comb through the entries in your calendar for the next six months and fix and any troublesome appointments.

Scrub away traces of past relationships

Take out remnants of past relationships, professional or personal from your calendar. Sometimes we end friendships, break up with partners, or simply drift away from our connections.

You may wish to remove birthdays, anniversaries, and other such recurring dates and start afresh in your calendar and life.

Color-code appointments and meetings

Adding color-coding to your appointments and meetings is an easy way to quickly identify engagements. You can use different colors to categorize meetings and appointments.

You’re only limited by your creativity! A few key items to consider include work meetings, personal appointments, doctor’s appointments, administrative items, household concerns, and social events.

Unfollow or remove others’ calendar feeds

Remove or unfollow other people’s calendar feeds with whom you no longer work or associate.

Case in point: still following the work calendar of a colleague who has moved to another division or area of your company, and with whom you no longer work? It’s time to unfollow their calendar.

Consolidate various calendars

Consolidate your digital and paper calendars so that you’re not working off of two or more calendars. Doing so will make it easier for you to refer to and reschedule items, as well as manage your time.

Plus, you’ll greatly reduce your chances of accidentally overbooking and double-booking yourself on any given day or week.

Limit calendar scheduling features

Placing a limit on the scheduling features of your calendar gives you back more control of your day. Do you have items scheduled into your online or digital calendar without your approval?

Take a moment to adjust your calendar settings. Limit the number of people who have the ability to schedule items and/or personally approve meeting requests yourself where necessary.

Update digital calendar apps

Digital calendar apps tend to update automatically. But it doesn’t hurt to check these updates in case there have been any security or compatibility updates.

Be sure to back up your data before updating any apps. Then, make sure your digital calendars on your smart phone, desktop, laptop, and tablet are up to date.

Transfer information from sticky notes into your calendar

Consolidate various events, activities, and meetings from paper sticky notes into your calendar. This may be a digital calendar or a physical paper planner or wall calendar.

When you do, you won’t have to worry about losing that valuable information if you happen to misplace a sticky note.

Remove yourself from group meeting calendars

Remove yourself from any calendars of group meetings that you’re no longer attending, following, or interested in.

Clean out your calendar by unsubscribing from calendars as well an any email lists. You’ll no longer receive group meeting invitations for that local coffeehouse meet up you stopping going to months ago.

Purchase a brand-new calendar

Purchase a new physical calendar for yourself to help you plan a new project or replace a planner you’re not fond of.

Calendars and planners are now available at discounted prices. You can snag a new one without breaking the bank. Spring is the time of new beginnings, so why not make a fresh start for yourself?

Delete overlapping appointments during vacation and holiday time

Delete any existing appointments that overlap upcoming vacation and holiday time. Remember, you’re supposed to be relaxing, not working!

If you’ve got anything scheduled during your personal time off, take a moment now to reschedule items to the weeks after your return. And if you haven’t yet done so, now’s a good time to add vacations and holidays to your schedule.

Pencil in upcoming deadlines

This is a great time to add any upcoming, pending, or pressing deadlines you have at work or home. Do you have an upcoming work or personal deadlines such as business taxes or your best friend’s wedding?

Make a list of things to schedule into your calendar. Next, give your future self a bit of help and write in those deadlines or dates into your calendar.

How to keep your calendar organized during the year

You can keep your calendar organized during the year by following these simple steps. Use this as motivation to spring clean your business or personal affairs from your schedule.

Book meetings and appointments in a timely fashion

Booking meetings and appointments in a timely fashion ensures they are properly tracked and accounted for in your schedule.

Quick tip: Try scheduling your next meeting or follow up appointments at the end of your session.

Add complete event information to your calendar

Adding in complete event information allows you to accurately capture important details about your event including the who, what, when, where, and why.

Quick tip: Add travel time as well as preparation time so you can account for these chunks of time in your schedule.

Schedule reminders or confirmations for meetings and appointments

Having a scheduling reminder system in place or confirming meetings and appointments allows you to keep timely appointments and free up space in your calendar for those that no longer matter.

Quick tip: Set digital meeting and appointment reminders a day or two in advance and scheduled tasks into your calendar, like a confirmation note in a paper planner, so you don’t miss a thing.

Review your calendar at the end of every month

Reviewing your calendar towards the end of the month allows you to plan, evaluate, and reconsider existing meetings. It’s a prime time for evaluating what’s working and what’s not.

Quick tip: Schedule fifteen minutes into your calendar for every month so you have built-in time to review your upcoming events, meetings, and appointments for the following month.

Remove or reschedule items as necessary

Lastly, don’t hesitate when it comes to permanently removing or rescheduling appointments. An accurate calendar requires constant maintenance and vigilance. The more comfortable you are with removing or scheduling items, the better off you’ll be in the long term.

Quick tip: Take a moment to do delete or eliminate meetings that no longer serve you. Contact those in charge to let them know of the change. Reschedule appointments as necessary if there any double-bookings or issues.

Key questions to ask yourself when adding items to your calendar

Anytime you add new calendar entries to your schedule, be sure to ask yourself these key questions:

• Is this item still a priority for me in my professional or personal life?
• Do I have sufficient time to plan, prepare, and follow up after this event?
• How much travel time is necessary, if any, for this calendar item?
• Am I 100% confident I will be able to focus on this event?
• Is this meeting necessary or can it be solved with a phone call, email, etc?

Taking time now to consider how your calendar entries will affect your schedule can go a long way in creating a more streamlined schedule for yourself in the weeks and months to come.

FAQ: Spring clean your calendar

Conclusion

Taking the time to spring clean your calendar is one of the smartest ways you can improve your productivity. It doesn’t require a huge time investment, but it can pay you back in minutes and hours for weeks and months to come.

Removing that which no longer serves us is important not only for physical items that we own or use, but also for how we spend our time and energy on a regular basis. Spring cleaning your calendar allows you make time for what matters to you right now.

If you want to make the most of your year, start with making the most out of today, and everyday. My time management guide includes practical, actionable lessons to help you better manage your time.

Rashelle Isip Productivity Coach and Founder of The Order Expert®

Rashelle Isip is a New York City-based productivity coach, consultant, and founder of The Order Expert®. With over 16 years of experience, she helps entrepreneurs and executives replace the "hustle and grind" mindset with one of "ease and flow." Rashelle is a former contributing columnist for Inc.com and Lifehack.org, and has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, NBC News, The Washington Post, and NPR. She is the author of four books, including The Order Expert’s Guide to Time Management. When not helping clients master their schedules, she enjoys scouting for practical, well-designed office supplies. Learn more at TheOrderExpert.com.

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