Could color coding your calendar help you see if you’re spending time on the right priorities? Read this inc.com article to see how.

Bill Gates schedules every five minutes of his day. That makes the Microsoft founder turned philanthropist immune from procrastination, right?

It certainly makes him busy. But according to science, it’s perfectly possible to frantically complete tasks all day and still procrastinate. Researchers call this phenomenon “priority dilution,” and it’s an issue most of us are familiar with — you spend your whole day running around doing so many urgent tasks that you never get to your biggest priorities.

Gates is familiar with this phenomenon too. According to a new CNBC interview with Cris Capossela, his former speechwriter, he was so worried about falling victim to priority dilution that he developed a simple but effective time-management hack to fight it. It’s one anyone looking to regain control of their calendar can steal.

Beating busywork with buckets

Like many of us, Gates has confessed to feeling compelled to fill every minute of his day with work in order to feel productive. But were those tasks in line with his actual priorities, or were they mostly busywork dictates by others’ needs or minor emergencies? To ensure that his time lined up with his goals, Gates decided to divide his available work hours into four buckets, dedicating 25 percent of his schedule to each. If his schedule got out of whack with this distribution, he made sure to adjust it.

Capossela was so impressed with the results he stole the approach for himself. He “has mirrored this technique and organized his time into four buckets: people (hiring, recruiting, and team management), company strategy, the craft of marketing, and customers,” CNBC reports.

“I found it to be very freeing,” Capossela says. “It’s helped me be more strategic about my time management and ratchet down the tasks that were eating up my time.”

The essence of the idea is to be proactive about setting your priorities and creating a mechanism to check how well you’re sticking to these commitments. Gates’s buckets trick is one way to do it, but other CEOs rely on similar systems.

Or opt for colors if you prefer

Shopify founder Tobias Lütke, for example, color codes his schedule, using different colors for what Gates would term different buckets. “At one point, I started complaining about blue weeks where every single time slot was taken. And someone said, ‘Well, if you don’t like blue, I can make any color.’ And I replied, ‘Well, how about we color based on leverage?’ And that’s just what we did,” Lütke explained in an interview.

By assigning a color to each type of task — blue for people and red for product, for example – Lütke is able to assess if his schedule matches his priorities at a glance.

“The thing I’m looking for is a balanced week; a week where, ideally, I manage to devote about 30 percent of the time — at least — to the product and then as much as possible to things like recruiting, bigger-picture projects, and one-on-ones,” he went on to say. “If my calendar becomes too external or too much of anything, it’s the first thing we see when we sit down for our priorities meeting.”

Whether you prefer Gates’s buckets metaphor or like the idea of a visual system like Lütke’s, the essence of the idea is the same. Before you let the outside world dictate your calendar, sit down and proactively decide how you’d like to divide your time. Then insist that your schedule match those aspirations.