Time blocking can go hand in hand with batch working. Put them together and you’ll become a power house at getting through your to do list and mastering your time.
So what is time blocking? The concept is that block time in your calendar – each block represents achieving a specific task. Instead of flitting around from one thing to another, you’ll see that Tuesday afternoon, for example, is dedicated to client meetings / calls and Wednesday morning is dedicated to following up and completing those actions that came from the day before.
Here are some of our top tips to make it work for you and your business.
Use a digital calendar
We recommend using your digital calendar for this task – we know that life and priorities can change in a blink of an eye so rather than creating something beautifully in your bullet journal and then having to put a rather sorry scratch mark through it, a digital calendar allows you to drag and drop things accordingly.
By using your digital calendar, you’ll be able to colour code accordingly – our diary has a colour for each client, plus a colour for accounts and working on our own business.
Batching similar tasks together
If you know you’ve got a few errands to run this week, batch them all together so you’re not leaving the house 20 times! Similarly, if you’ve got a bunch of photos to take and edit or social media to schedule, batch these together and get them done at all at the same time. You can read more about batch working in this blog post.
All appointments are important!
Start by blocking out time that really cannot be changed – collecting the kids from school, a dental appointment, a gym class. Once these are in, it gives you an idea of what time is left in the week.
The concept of time blocking is that you’re going to put something on your calendar because you’re going to do it at that time. You’re going to show up for that appointment, just like you were meeting someone for coffee or go to the doctor – you wouldn’t keep pushing that down the task list for the day would you?!
Allow more time than you think
Time blocking can look quite scary in your diary when you first give it a go. We’re not suggesting that you put every single minute of every single hour into a block (apparently the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates block everything from the minute they get up, to the minute they go to bed)
Start by just adding in your non negotiables as described above and you’ll instantly see where your time is being used. We recommend that you always allow a little more time than you need. For example, Emma allocates 1 hour per week to keep all of the business accounts up to date – some times it does take the full hour but more often than not it takes 30 minutes. This gives you back 30 minutes of time to either start the next block earlier or allow yourself a bonus 30 minute break.
An alternative to this is doing what is called ‘day theming’. An example of this could be:
- Monday – podcast recording / editing
- Tuesday – client work
- Wednesday – CEO / Admin day (a day spent working on your business)
- Thursday – client work
- Friday – Adhoc day – finishing client work, finishing any podcast work etc
The best bit about time blocking stops you from wondering “what did I do this week?” Your calendar will show you exactly what you’ve achieved this week! This is a great opportunity to see everything you’ve been doing and to start to identify where your time is disappearing to…and what you could potentially outsource.
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