Busy But Not Productive? The Calendar System to 10x Your Time

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to One to One with James Laughlin. I'm a former world champion and now I work with and coach professional athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of billion dollar companies. I'm going to share with you in this episode some of the insights and strategies, some of the tools that I use with my clients. Every week I'll bring you an insight, an action or a tool that will help you go from great to to greatest. My mission is to cut through the noise and help give you the tools that truly transform your mindset and help you to take the right actions towards your desired outcome. So let's dive in. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ Would you like to know what the productivity hacks of the world's greatest performers are? Well, I'm very fortunate that I get to work with them, coach them, interview them, and over the years I've realized they do a few very small things very well. This is about your time. If you want to get more time back, give me a few minutes of your time right now. I'm going to give you hours and hours a week back of your life. It's going to help you be more effective, productive, focused. If you're up for that, stay tuned. So here's some very tactical things. These are things that I've adopted in my life. Some of these I've shared with my clients, some of them they've shared with me. But a few things that are critically important. Calendar is number one. You need to have a calendar, a digital calendar stored in the cloud. And here's the most critical part of it. Anyone that's on your team, that could be a family member, it could be work colleague, it could be a business partner, it could be your whole team. Everyone needs access to your calendar now. Great thing. I've got an iCal with Apple and no Apple. Do not sponsor me. I wish. But what I do with that ICAL is make sure that for anything, work Related, My whole team have access to that. I just change the calendar to that. When I add an event, they can all see it. My EA adds in all of my events, takes out shuffles. She has full scope over my personal and professional calendar. So if you're wanting to get more productive, have a calendar. What gets scheduled, gets done. When it's not on the calendar, the chances of actually happening reduce greatly. If you want to become a better performer, be more effective. You've got to have a really good calendar and make sure it actually gets done. Now, a lot of people will say no, but I want a written diary. Look, I get it. Written diaries are awesome. However, what happens if you lose it? What happens if it gets stolen? What happens if it gets thrown in the river? What happens if there's a fire that causes havoc? So if you're going to have a written, I would say also have a digital. I prefer to just have a digital calendar. Still got my journal, but have a digital calendar. It's easy to see calendar invites out. So that's the first thing. If you want to be more productive, you've got to have a centralized calendar that all of your team, colleagues, family, etc. Have access to. If there's certain things that you're doing in your personal life you don't want your team to see, then create another calendar within that ical and I know Google Calendar will be the same, allows you to create multiple different calendars within one and you can let different people have different permissions so they can save. So that's the first thing. Second thing, I like to keep things super simple. I was recently chatting to Simon Sinek's executive assistant. Her nickname is the Chief of Simon and she worked with him for 10 years. He's obviously New York Times best selling author of Starting with why. And we were chatting about systems and I said, what system did you use? And she said, keep it simple. All these people that get these amazing systems like Monday.com it ends up becoming so complex that they don't use the system. We had the legend himself, David Allen, Get Things Done was his brand, is his brand. And again, we talked about simplicity. So what do I do? Very, very simple. Simple. On my iPhone, I have a note. And that note is decisions to be made, discussions with Team James to do. And these are all titles, right? All headings underneath that. I've just got a little bullet that you can tick complete when you've done it. And I pop everything out of my head and into that. I share that note with my team. Most notably Caroline. She has full access to that. We put everything on there. We centralize everything. It's the capture place of all the TO dos. You won't catch me with a sticky note with TO DOS on it. You won't catch me with a piece of paper with TO DOS on it. Everything goes on there. Got to book flights for a keynote goes on there. Got to book a hotel goes on there. Got to connect someone that has said I'll connect you with such and such goes on there. Got to go to the dentist goes on there. These things that have to get done are on there. As soon as they're done, they either get removed or I go and schedule it on the calendar. Say I've now booked the appointment at the dentist. Boom, it's on the calendar. I take it off the capture list. So simply an iPhone note and I know Samsung etc will have their equivalent of that that you can share with your team. Okay, last productivity hack. Before I do that, like to let you know when we are going to be opening the doors for the first time in a long time to sponsors. If you would like to talk about what it would take to sponsor our podcast, please get in touch with CarolineJlochlin.com CarolineJlochlin.com or flick me a message on Insta or whatever platform you connected with me on. We'll make sure the team get that. And we'd like to chat about if you align with us and vice versa. Up until this point we've had one major sponsor, but we want to open that up and work with other people that we truly align with as well. So let us know. Okay, last hack. Very, very simple. What's my mvp? This is a question I ask every morning. This is a question I ask my clients to ask themselves every morning. What's my most valued priority? Super simple. I didn't say plural. Priorities. Priority. What's my most valued priority? Super simple. Write it down somewhere. What's the one thing that I got a nail today? My friend Jay Papasan, who wrote the book the One Thing with Gary Keller, talks about this. What's the one thing, if I did it today, would make everything else go away or better or easier. What's my mvp? I pick one in my personal life, one of my professional life. So today personally be super present with Finn. So this morning before school we played a card game. We played two actually. He beat me in both. That's what I want to do is be present. That's a win. That's my most valued priority. And professionally. What's that? Well, I had a keynote today. Speaking of a keynote here in Christchurch for a change. Often I have to jump on planes. I was able to drive today. Joyous. I wanted to be connected deeply with those amazing humans in that audience. And that was it. Those are my two MVPs, one personal, one professional. What I've shared with you are very simple productivity hacks, but they allow you to focus on what's most important. I hope they've served you. I wanted to make this short and sharp today, but make sure you have a system. Make sure you stick to it centrally, capture things, share it with the people that matter most, and keep focused on your mvp. Until next time, folks. I'll see you then. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Thanks for tuning in to Lead On Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about levelling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.