In this video I show you how to plan your week for success and how to get more done in a week by time blocking on my preferred tool – Google calendar.
I also provide tips on how to time block effectively and schedule your day for maximum productivity no matter how you prefer to do your planning. This same time blocking technique can be used on other calendar applications as well as on paper planners such as the Erin Condren Hourly.
SETTING UP YOUR WEEK:
- Start by mapping out the hours that you’re awake.
- Schedule in your morning & nighttime routines and other self care necessities such as meal times.
- Schedule in any time taken up by a job or school also accounting for time spent commuting.
- Add any other regular recurring appointments or commitments.
- Once you have an accurate picture of your available time, start scheduling in time to work towards your goals.
- Make sure to add in free time to rest and relax every day.
- Schedule in power hours for your chores.
- Block off some time for “catch-up” in case any task doesn’t get completed in it’s allotted time.
- Use any times that you are doing mindless tasks (going for a walk, commuting, chores) to fit in some learning via podcasts or audio books.
TIP 1: HOW DO I PICK MY CATEGORIES?
Experiment with how specific or general you want your task categories to be, and how many categories is optimal for you to have clarity but still not overly complicated.
TIP 2: DO I HAVE TO USE GOOGLE CALENDAR?
Choose your time blocking platform based on what works best for your life, whether that is a paper planner, Google Calendar, iCal, or any other calendar app that you prefer.
Consider where you do most of your work, how portable you need your calendar to be, and the different devices you may need to access your schedule on throughout a typical day.
TIP 3: WHAT IF I HAVEN’T GIVEN MYSELF ENOUGH TIME?
Make a commitment to yourself to stay on task and do what you actually have scheduled to do.
Be realistic about the amount of time you are setting aside for each task. It’s always better to give yourself a little more time than you need and finish early, than abandon your plan altogether because you constantly keep running short of time for your tasks.
Don’t put things on your schedule that are not important to you and therefore you’re likely to just keep pushing it off. If you know you’re probably not going to end up doing something anyway because you really don’t want to, and it’s not a priority – just say no. Have the difficult conversations if you need to.
TIP 4: THIS SEEMS TOO RIGID – I NEED MORE FLOW!
Understand that complete flow 100% of the time is not practical, because outside of the time that you need to be creative, you have other aspects of life that still need to get done, which work better when you have SOME structure around it.
If you need to get into the flow and have the freedom to create, but you still want to manage your other responsibilities in a productive way, I suggest that you have days dedicated to “flow” and other days that are more scheduled.
So still use this time blocking technique, but block out your creative days as just “free flow” for the entire day. Having more structure on the other days will ensure that you still get everything else like your chores and admin work done in a timely manner, which actually allows you to have more peace of mind and not feel any guilt on the days that you want to spend just being creative.
You can also do this within the same day where you block off several hours at a time for “flow” time, and structure the rest of your day with more concrete plans.
