Your Calendar Reveals Your Character
You want to know who someone really is? Don’t look at their goals or what they tell you is important to them. Don’t listen to what they say they value. Just tell them to show you their calendar because that’s where the truth lives. Your schedule never lies. It tells you what you really care about. It exposes what you avoid, and it reveals who you’ve actually become. I’m talking about your real schedule, by the way, not the one you use to fool everyone else. Your real schedule is a combination of what’s written on the calendar and what’s documented after the day is done.
Most people talk about priorities, but your priorities aren’t what you say they are, they’re what you actually do, consistently. If I studied your calendar for the past two weeks, I could tell you exactly what you value, what you fear, and what you’re building or not building.
So, here’s the hard truth: your calendar reveals your character, and it gives the rest of the world an honest look into where some of your contradictions may live, even if you don’t see them.
Good morning my friends and welcome back to the show. My name is Blaine Feyen, founder of the coaching academy and your host for this, and every episode of the always sponsor free, Real Value Podcast. In this episode, were talking about what really matters to you and how you might be using your calendar and your to-do list as cover for your lack of discipline, your fears of failure and success, and ho you’re probably avoiding doing the really valuable and high impact things you tell the rest of the world you value.
I often ask in coaching calls for members to describe their week to me. Sometimes I’ll have them share their screen on the Zoom call and open their calendar to get a look at what’s on it. When I look at someone’s week, I don’t need them to tell me what matters because I can typically see it in black and white. Of course, most people don’t put on their calendars what they really do all day, they only put the things that have to do or want to do.
In reality, most people’s calendars act as a form of camouflage scheduling their appointments for the day and the basic administrative tasks they need to do, like buy stamps from the post office, while tricking them into believing they’re actually accomplishing something when they get through their list. They use their calendars to document their intentions and menial tasks, but not the reality. I know this from personal experience and doing this myself, as well as seeing hundreds of other people’s calendars over the years that do not match up with what they say they want to accomplish.
It’s not uncommon to look at someone’s calendar and see it filled with ‘to-dos’; while also noticing that they posted 4 times on social media that day, they had a 2-hour lunch with colleagues and then complained about working until 10pm that night. I have no problems with people living their lives the way they wish. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of that very philosophy. The problem, however, is that there is often a big chasm between what someone says they want their life to be like and then how they’re actually living it.
If you say you want to hit certain business numbers by the end of the year, but you’re not doing anything meaningful or advised to get there, that’s not a time problem, it’s a discipline, motivation, and follow through problem. If you say your family is everything but no time blocked on the calendar for family activities and time, relationship time, or even exercise that will make you better for your family, that’s not a scheduling issue, that’s a values and integrity issue. Again, I know this from personal experience. You can say “my health matters” all you want, but if you didn’t schedule a workout, your body, mind, and soul didn’t get the memo. You can say “my business matters,” but if your calendar is full of busywork instead of growth work, you’re not building anything, you’re just a babysitter of people and minor problems.
The truth is simple: you already have time, we all do! We all get the same 1440 minutes every day. You’re just spending it on things that don’t align with what you say you want. Your calendar ends up acting much like the role of an appraiser; it simply reports the truth. An appraiser’s job is not to make or decide the market, it is simply to interpret and report what went on and most people’s calendars are the same in that they report what really happens instead of what you say you want to happen.
It may hurt to hear this, I know it did for me, but most people don’t have a time problem, they have a truth problem. I see it over and over that they keep themselves “busy” with endless tasks so they can avoid confronting what’s actually broken. They create endless to-do lists with a bunch of things that really don’t matter on the impact meter. The to-do list makes you feel productive while keeping you trapped in smallness and insignificance. Those little check boxes give you little dopamine hits, and at the end of the day, you’re exhausted but empty. You’ve accomplished nothing meaningful; you’ve just maintained a sustainable level of mediocrity.
Since we’re calling out your calendar, let’s also call out your to-do list. Friends, I hate to break it to you because many of you live by your coveted to-do lists. But your to-do list isn’t a plan. It’s something of an adult pacifier. It’s a way for people to soothe their anxiety and avoid the discomfort of making real decisions and doing hard things (listen to the episode from last week on deliberate discomfort).
Again, I know this because I do this myself, not because I think I’m better than you. This is simply an awareness I had some years ago after feeling especially satisfied with checking off that final box on my to-do list. I sat there staring at a particularly long to-do list that I had miraculously gotten through by the end of the day and feeling pretty full of myself. I stared at the list proudly, quietly reading off all the things on the list. As I reached the end of the list, I had a feeling come over me and a small voice in my head that said, “Great job, Blaine, you’re the best assistant this company has ever had!”
It was in that moment that I realized I had been lying to myself about my to-do list. In fact, I realized I had been telling myself 3 big lies about my list.
Lie #1: “If and when I finish the list, I’ll be way ahead.”
The reality? I wasn’t ahead because I had a new list already starting for the next day! The to-do list isn’t a destination exercise. You don’t get to stop when the list is completed. You just start putting useless and low impact activities on it for tomorrow. If you’re like me, most of what’s on your list may keep the broken machine running but doesn’t make it any less broken.
You’re organizing, maintaining, and reacting, but likely not leading, building, creating or growing. I get it, the office needs stamps. I get it, your taxes need to get done. I get it, you have make some calls and answer some emails. What I realized though is that there are simply things on that list that are important, but not urgent, and things that are urgent, but not important. What I also realized was that there was nothing on the list about making the business better in any meaningful way. I wasn’t really ahead because getting ahead would mean doing less of these things each month as I automated, delegated, or eliminated the things I, as the CEO, shouldn’t be doing anyway.
Lie #2: “All of this stuff is important!”
Bullshit! That’s the biggest illusion when it comes to your to-do list and your calendar. A to-do list flattens and equalizes everything even though many of the things on the list are not equal. “Buy stamps at the post office” is not equal to “write SOPs for the order intake department”, even though buying stamps was ahead of the SOPs on your to-do list. When everything’s equal, you end up serving what you believe is urgent instead of the most important.
Which one moves the business forward even a little bit? Which one creates a better work environment, happier team members, and more income? Which one leads to you not having to go buy stamps next month? Relying on your to-do list to dictate what’s important and impactful in your business is how good people waste decades. They do it by perfecting the wrong things.
Lie #3: “I’ll get to the big, important stuff later when I have some time.”
Bullshit! You won’t. “Later” is the graveyard where dreams go to die. Every time you say, “I’ll do it later,” especially when it’s important and potentially impactful, you’re training your mind to be okay with procrastination. You’re doing to your brain what the to-do list does to important things, you’re making the big stuff equal to the small stuff. You’re choosing comfort over growth, and comfort always collects its debt in regret. The longer you delay the important and impactful, the more comfortable you become with mediocrity. (I know, there are many of you who are quite ok with remaining mediocre)
Friends, your to-do list is a mirror of your fears. Look at what’s been sitting there for weeks. Look at the things you said you were going to get to six months ago and haven’t. Look at the one or two things that would have changed everything, which is exactly why you’ve been avoiding it. The big call. The hard decision. The difficult conversation. The bold move. The scary step forward. The $1000 investment. The one thing that would have forced you to evolve and your brain said, ‘shhhhh, its ok, we can do it tomorrow’. Except, tomorrow comes and you call it ‘today’, so there’s always another tomorrow.
Let’s talk about some ways to deal with the lying calendar and the BS to-do list because you definitely don’t need a longer list, you need a sharper, more impactful one.
I learned two simple exercises from one of my own coaches and, when I saw them in action I actually kinda dismissed them because they seemed too simple. The first exercise he calls his ‘daily top 3’, and the second one is called his ‘Power 3’. By the way, the coach I’m speaking about is one of the most organized, productive, and also wealthiest people I know personally; he runs two large companies, owns over 300 residential and commercial properties, has an eight-figure net worth, and has lots on his plate. What he doesn’t have is a traditional to-do list.
His Daily Top 3 and Power 3 systems simply look like this:
Every single day he writes the top 3 things he needs to accomplish before the end of his workday to feel like he has accomplished something. Only finished two of them? The day isn’t complete! Finish the third thing. In that sense, ok, he has a to-do list. But it's not your traditional to-do list with 8-20 tasks on it that appear to all carry the same weight. No, his daily top 3 are truly three top level things that he can and must do to feel accomplished and to feel like he has moved his companies and life forward in some meaningful way.
Does he have some kind of traditional to-do list with a bunch of low-level tasks and what-not? Yes, he sort of does, although at his level he has a personal assistant that is doing most of those tasks, so delegation is one of his secrets that’s not really a secret. The real takeaway from using his Daily Top 3 in my own day has been the conscious and intentional separation of three things that carry much more weight than the rest of the list. It trains your brain to be thinking much higher level than just checking a few task boxes.
Have a bunch of low-level tasks that need to get done and have nobody else to do them? Cool, put them on a list and rank them based on level of importance and impact. We all have stupid little things we need to get done that don’t add any income or efficiency to our days. The point is to not let that list be the one you outsource your self-worth to. The point is to be able to do some of those things while also having a separate short list that helps you get the ‘not as important, but still kinda necessary’ stuff done AND move your life and business forward.
The ‘Power 3’ is a separate set of three things that really help to clarify the ‘Daily Top 3’. The Power 3 is made up of this:
One thing that grows your business, another business or stream of income, or your craft.
One thing that strengthens your body or mind.
One thing that nourishes your relationships or your peace.
Let me clear something up, because people mix these two tools together and then wonder why they’re still overwhelmed. These two tools are not the same thing. They’re not even playing the same game. The Daily Top Three is tactical. It lives in the world of daily responsibility and getting tactical things done. It answers one primary question: “What must get done today so that I and the business don’t fall behind?” The Daily Top 3 are your operational priorities. They’re high-level tasks, but, yes, they’re still tasks. They keep the business moving, the house running, and the commitments honored. If you don’t do them, the day feels incomplete. The Daily Top 3 is your way of saying, “This is what I owe myself and the world today.”
The Power Three is completely different. The Power Three isn’t about productivity; it’s about alignment, it’s about identity, it’s about who you’re trying to become, and it’s about pursuing excellence every day. The Power Three answers a deeper question: “What three things will move the longer arc of my life forward?”
This exercise doesn’t care about inboxes, paperwork, or buying stamps at the post office. It cares about your life force. Your body, your mind, your soul, your peace, your relationships, your long-term wealth, your long-term health, and your sense of meaning in the world.
The Power Three aren’t tasks, they’re investments. They’re the deposits you make into the person you’re becoming and, maybe more importantly, the person you need to become to step into a life and world you imagine living in.
Think of the two exercises this way: The Daily Top Three helps you win the day while The Power Three helps you win your life. One keeps you effective and focused on what needs to get done today. The other one keeps you aligned with a vision of yourself and the world you’re trying to build. One manages your responsibilities. The other protects your energy, your health, your focus, your relationships, and your future.
And the magic is that, when you use both, your calendar starts to show balance between what you had to do and what you chose to do. What you contribute to the world and what you cultivate in yourself. Most people only live in the first category, the ‘what you had to do’ side of the scale, which is why they never grow beyond survival mode. When both lists are present, your calendar becomes a force multiplier that helps you to stop chasing busyness and start building a life, and a business, that actually feel Iike yours.
Let’s talk about freedom. I’ve lately come to realize that I’ve been on a journey my whole life learning about freedom. As I’ve shared many times, I’ve done this usually by making lots of mistakes, big and small, and then contemplating the who, what, where, when, and why of those mistakes so I don’t make them again. Some of them I did.
Nevertheless, I’ve come to learn that freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want whenever you want. That definitely can be part of the definition of freedom. I’ve shared before that my definition of wealth is doing what you want, when you want, with who you want, and for the reasons you want to do them. But both wealth and freedom need the same fuel for them to exist: structure.
Doing whatever you want whenever you want can be a kind of freedom, but for most people it’s the result of chaos in other areas of their lives and often leads to chaos in new areas. I’m not talking about waking up on Saturday morning and choosing to do whatever you want that day. Yes, that’s a kind of freedom. But real freedom is having the structure to choose what ultimately matters and then the discipline to stick to it.
The people who build extraordinary lives and businesses aren’t necessarily more talented or lucky, they’re typically more intentional. How they view their time and, thus, their calendar, largely determines who they become. Their calendar becomes their weapon and it’s how they shape reality. They don’t wait to “find time” they make it. They don’t wait until that magic day when things will fall into place, they create that magic day out of everyone else’s ordinary day.
They carve out time for deep work, reflection, health, relationships, and rest, and then they defend it like sacred ground because they know something lots of others don’t: the moment you stop designing your time and your life, someone else will do it for you. And that’s how your life quietly becomes a reflection of other people’s agendas.
If you go back and listen to the episode I did on the BOSSMAP™ framework, the ‘P’ at the end of BOSSMAP™ stands for ‘Protect The Empire’. Protecting the empire encompasses any form of preemptive defense of your methods, your business structure, your SOPs, your people, your markets, and yes, your calendar! That’s what ‘protect the empire’ means; figure out the immense value of your time, create some structure around how you invest it, and then guard it like a Navy Seal.
By the way, the ‘A’ in BOSSMAP™ stands for ‘Audit Relentlessly’, which I recommend you do with your calendar. So, here’s the real test. Pull up your calendar from the last few weeks or months and look at it like an outsider. Imagine you’ve invited me to come in and revamp your business and personal systems like a business sensei and the first thing I ask you is to show me your calendar. What will I see?
What percentage of your time went toward what you say matters most? Where are the gaps? Where are the lies? What are the things on your calendar that have been fooling you into thinking you’re more successful than you really are? What clues will be on your calendar that will give me the insight needed to do a complete overhaul?
If you say family is your top priority but they never show up on your calendar, you’ve lied, they’re not. If you say health matters but you “don’t have time” to move your body and push some weight around, you’ve life, it doesn’t matter to you. If you say growth matters but there’s no time blocked for learning, creating, writing, growth, or thinking, stop pretending and posting silly growth memes and quotes on Instagram.
You are what you repeatedly schedule and have the discipline to carry out. You are the sum of your daily decisions and actions. That’s not judgment, by the way, it's just the math. Your character isn’t written in your words; it’s written in your days, your weeks, your months and the actions you’re taking to put distance between the old you and the ‘you’ you keep telling yourself you want to become.
If freedom truly matters to you, it must be created by you. Start prioritizing the most important tactical things you need to be doing to build that freedom each day, and then start answering the three most important questions you can imagine each day:
One thing that grows your business, another business or stream of income, or your craft.
One thing that strengthens your body or mind.
One thing that nourishes your relationships or your peace.
Your calendar reveals your character. Audit the gap between who you say you really want to be and who you’re really being based on your overrated to-do list.
Until next time…
