Time Blocking

My favourite tool for managing my time is what my old life coach Natalie Bacon calls calendaring and others call time blocking.

That’s calendaring used like a verb. 

Before I learnt about calendaring I used to be the queen of to do lists. In fact I developed a fabulously complicated to do list with so many sections for the different tasks that I had to do. I shared it with people because I thought it was great. 

Looking back I realise that wasn’t the answer to my time management problems. And that is because every task takes an amount of time. That’s how our lives are measured - in the seconds, minutes, days, hours, weeks, months and years we spend on this planet. And all the things we have to do take up a portion of that time. 

The trouble with to do lists is they don’t tell us how much of our life we need to devote to each of those little lines we've written down. From answering an email to writing a PhD thesis. Each one can take up the same space on your to do list, but can be very different in the amount of time you need to allocate to them. 

That’s why I love calendaring. It gives you an idea of how much you’ve actually got on that week or that month. Every single thing I have to do has a slot on my calendar. At least when it comes to my work. As soon as a new task comes in I don’t put it on a list, I put it on my calendar. 

So when most people open their calendars they just have appointments with other people. Otherwise the time is wide open and nobody would know what they were doing when they weren’t in meetings. But my calendar looks like I’ve got a million meetings each week, but actually they’re just meetings with myself. Appointments I’ve made that I am going to honour for all the tasks that I need to do for that week. In this way I make sure that I get everything done and meet my deadlines with time to spare.

And when that happens it means come 5pm I can sign off and the evening is free to work on my side hustle. 

I can’t speak highly enough about calendaring. I really would encourage you to give it a try. It is a game changer.