Organize Your Days Better With “time Blocking”
There are many ways to create a schedule, from using a pen and planner to using dry erase markers and writing on your watch . The goal of one method is to give you more insight into how you spend your time and help you plan your day down to the minute. This is called time blocking.
What is time blocking?
Time blocking is the process of organizing your schedule in a way that accounts for all the activities you need to accomplish during the day. Ideally, you can do this using a digital calendar such as Google Calendar. Even if you write it all down by hand on a piece of paper, pay attention to how Google Calendar looks. Each day is represented by a column divided into 15-minute intervals: from midnight to 11:59 p.m. When you add an appointment or meeting to your calendar, a space-filling box appears showing how long the event will take. of your day.
When blocking time, your goal is to fill the entire column with fields without leaving any empty space. Even rest periods should be marked as such. From eating breakfast to running errands to calling mom, no activity is too small to add to the list. Then you can categorize everything with a nice color (when it comes to time management, you’ll have to find your fun).
How to Create a Time Blocking Schedule
Start by making a list of everything you plan to do tomorrow. For example, you might wake up, check the news, take a shower, make coffee, drive to work, have breakfast, answer an email, go to a meeting, have lunch with an old friend, work on a project, drive home, take the kids for a walk. play baseball, grab dinner, eat it, watch your favorite show, get ready for bed, lie awake thinking about climate change, and actually fall asleep.
Once you’ve compiled a comprehensive list of tasks for the day, note how long each task could (or should) take. Then take the paper (or open the software) you use to block time and enter each event and responsibility according to the time you have allocated for it. If you want to see how you organize your day, choose different colors to categorize tasks, such as blue for grooming/bathing, yellow for work, and green for eating.
According to HR company Spica , the trick is to treat each box like you would an appointment: don’t reschedule it. Don’t bother with this too much. Respect the allocated time, commit to completing the task within the given time and do your best to complete it in the time allocated for it. This is called time boxing , a similar but slightly different concept that involves giving yourself a certain amount of time to do something, focusing only on that task during that time, and stopping when the time is up. I’ve written in more detail about the similarities and differences between time boxing and time blocking , but all you really need to know is that during the time you set aside to do something on your calendar, you should be fully engaged deep work , avoid distractions. and focus all your energy on responsibility. As with any pre-planned meeting or event, events may arise that will disrupt the schedule, but unless there is a major disruption (that would cause you to reschedule a work meeting), commit to sticking to your time limits.
It’s also wise to implement some way of tracking time here, whether that’s recording how long your tasks actually take or using software to monitor your work so you can make adjustments to your time blocks as you go. For the first week or two, you’ll probably be guessing how long each task will take as you build your schedule, but after a while you’ll be able to tell if something is taking longer or less time. what you have allocated, and then adjust the schedule to meet those needs in the future.
The reason time blocking works
Time blocking is a favorite among its adherents. As Harvard Business Review points out, a typical to-do list gives you too many options and isn’t structured enough. Adding an element of time will help you stay focused on the task at hand.
This will also help you meet deadlines and adhere to established rules. If you know that a certain project or task will take a total of 50 hours, time blocking will help you spread them out and make room for them in your schedule, allowing you to complete tasks on a set schedule without wondering if you actually have time. for this. If you finish something ahead of schedule , great! Come on, add a little break.
One last note about time blocking
Time blocking is often confused with time boxing, and many productivity blogs and hacks say “time boxing” when they mean time blocking. For example, the Harvard Business Review article above does this. This is an easy mistake to make, and in fact in a previous version of this article I referred to time blocking as time blocking. As long as you stick to the plan and create a detailed calendar, it doesn’t matter what you call it, but it can cause some confusion when you read other guides, so be careful. A full description of the differences between them can be found here .