Time blocking your calendar and planning your day to stay focused and get things done.
We all have busy lives and sometimes need a break from it all. Spending a few minutes a day stacking blocks will provide a necessary mental distraction and a period to recharge.
OK, ok, ok. I’m not going to take you too far down that click-bait hole. Let’s stack blocks of time on your calendar to complete needed tasks. It’s not playtime, but it may be reminiscent of arranging blocks to spell words or defying other laws of gravity and physics. A person practicing time blocking may also find benefits of getting their mind to align for the coming work a day or more in advance. Aligning their synapses early often results in less time to complete a task since their mind has ruminated on it for a bit.
Time blocking is simply blocking out time on your calendar to do specific tasks. Calendars have been helpful to keep track of appointments, meetings, and other such events. Electronic calendars extended this notion and also give glimpses of your day to others that may be requesting your time. For example, a coworker or client may see you have time blocked for a meeting and schedule around it for their meeting invite.
Blocking out time to do specific tasks will ensure your day isn’t overrun by meeting requests and can also help you focus on completing the task at hand.
Modern-day electronic calendars make it a snap to time block. Seeing your available time for the day, next day or week will help you identify those available blocks of time for task work. A client call later in the week that requires preparation can be planned and prioritized to ensure the needed attention is applied in advance of that meeting.
So what do you need to do? It’s simple on your calendar, find available gaps between other appointments and meetings to fill. Enter what you need to work on as the title, and other pertinent data in the description. Do you need 30 minutes? If the needed time is greater than 20 minutes give it the whole 30 minutes. By applying this method you’ll have time to process a few emails and take a short break to recharge before the next task.
We all know our days don’t always go as planned. The beauty of using an electronic calendar is you can easily slide these events around once created to another available slot. Popular tools like Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook offer the ability to slide (click and drag) events to a new time slot. It’s still possible to open the event and enter a new time and date if you prefer to use that method.
In future posts I’ll return to this subject with other tips on time blocking particularly using the rich capabilities of Google Calendar. If productivity ideas is helpful leave me a comment below, I’ll devote future posts to the topic and can explore it deeper than this introduction.
References:
ZNF Consulting 