Time Management Tricks to Take Back Control of Your Calendar

“If there’s already all these demands placed on you, even moving the needle a little bit on your time-management skills is going to have a much larger impact,” Dr. Dierdorff says. “If not now, when?”

You don’t have to be a hyper-detail-oriented, Type-A personality to add boundaries to your day and streamline your schedule, Dr. Dierdorff says. Start with the basics, like learning to give priority to tasks that are important—meaning if you don’t do them, there’s going to be a major long-term impact—versus just urgent, meaning they need to be done fast.

We’ve rounded up five time-management concepts from productivity experts and executive coaches to help you get started:

Get personal

Does your work calendar rule your life?

“What I hear constantly is, ‘I didn’t have time to pee today,’ ” says Laurie Ruettimann, a Raleigh, N.C.-based executive coach and author of “Betting on You.”

“It’s almost like we sacrifice our boundaries, our common sense, our dignity to the Outlook calendar.”

The solution, Ms. Ruettimann says, is to plop the personal on your calendar before the work obligations crowd everything else out. Every week, put these buckets on first:

* Time for physical well-being, like exercise and eating.

* Time for emotional well-being, like sleep and vacation days.

* 60 minutes a week for continuous learning, anything from reading those titles collecting on your Kindle to chatting with someone outside your department.

* Two 15-minute breather blocks a day so you can pause between Zoom calls. Many calendar systems also have a setting that automatically defaults meetings to 25 minutes instead of 30, which can help avoid that back-to-back feeling.

Now comes the hard part—pushing back. Ms. Ruettimann says we’ve grown used to the idea that a full calendar means one has “a busy, vibrant career, instead of being distracted, wasting time.” We say yes to Zooms that should be emails, give away chunks of our days to crowded, unimportant meetings because of guilt and optics.

Instead, be ruthless. At the end of each day, review the next day and see what you can cancel. Move standing meetings to more optimal times for your productivity. You’re not saying no, or asking for permission, you’re making a recommendation and offering an alternative.

Compromise on your personal needs and you’ll be no good at work, Ms. Ruettimann says. When she skips her Pilates class or doesn’t leave time for lunch, “I’m cranky, I’m irritable, I don’t want to brainstorm and I just want to eat a Snickers bar.”

Think small

You don’t need huge chunks of time to bring some balance back into your life, says Julie Morgenstern, author of time-management books including “Time to Parent.” Instead, she recommends fitting exercise, hobbies, even parenting into micro doses.

Start by carving two 15-to-20-minute “self-care anchors” into your day—one in the morning, one in the evening, at consistent times. Pick activities that restore you and timing that helps put edges back on your workday after this year of blur. One client Ms. Morgenstern coaches writes in her journal each morning, then takes a walk before dinner.

The approach can help maximize time with kids, too, Ms. Morgenstern says. “Children thrive on short bursts of truly undivided attention delivered consistently.”

Sprinkle five connection points throughout the day—among them when your child wakes up; when she heads to school, even if it’s just in her room; dinner time. Fully engage with your kid in those moments. Ask what she dreamed about or how those fractions went in math class. Then you can spend time “together but apart.” Maybe Dad folds laundry on the couch while his kindergartner builds a block tower on the floor.

“It’s like synchronizing schedules,” Ms. Morgenstern says. The same philosophy applies to partners or roommates—fully focus on your spouse or friend for 10 minutes after work, putting down your phone and really listening to the answer when you ask, “How was your day?”

Consolidate your tasks

Those things on your to-do list that require looping in another person, say a partner or a roommate? Wrangle them in one place and have a set time to deal with them, says Jesse Itzler, an Atlanta entrepreneur who runs a calendar-coaching and goal-setting program called Build Your Life Resume.

No one likes being bombarded with a stream of interruptions and requests all day long: a morning text message about this weekend’s birthday party, an offhand comment at dinner about fixing the leaky faucet. Instead, Mr. Itzler keeps a piece of paper with “Sara” scrawled across the top. There he continuously jots down tasks and queries that require consulting with his wife, Sara Blakely, the founder of the shapewear brand Spanx. Almost every day at 1 p.m. they check in.

Together they make decisions and delegate responsibilities. And on those days when there’s nothing on the list? It’s built-in time to chat.

Shrink your to-do list

Then there’s the matter of your to-do list itself. Does every item really have to be on there, haunting you? Ms. Morgenstern recommends asking yourself these questions to help whittle down your tasks:

What can I…
Diminish?
Delegate?
Delete?
Delay?

She assures me this approach works for everyone, even single parents or those who might be struggling financially. Delegating child care could entail asking a friend to read your kid a story over Zoom while you linger nearby, getting work done or even simply reading.

Or let it go altogether

If you’re still having trouble shedding tasks, and the accompanying guilt, you might need a “proactive forbearance list,” says Kim Scott, a Silicon Valley CEO coach and author of the forthcoming book, “Just Work.”

Take the things forever lingering on your to-do list, the ones you’re never going to get to, the ones you’re forever feeling terrible about, and pop them on this white flag of a list. Then, feel good about leaving them behind. It’s a sign you’re prioritizing what matters.

Ms. Scott acknowledges that the practice feels uncomfortable at first. Have a trusted colleague or friend take a look to make sure you’re not accidentally letting go of something crucial.

And remember that in overwhelming seasons of life, you’re going to have to skip some tasks. You might as well pick which ones they are, rather than accidentally dropping something important.

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at [email protected]