In today’s world, everyone has seemingly endless to-do lists and too little time to get it all done. Many people wake up each morning with an idea of what they want to accomplish in the day, and then go to sleep unsatisfied when they are unable to follow through. Whether it be unexpected meetings at work, school assignments that take longer than anticipated, constant emails or notifications causing distractions, or not having the correct supplies available for the task, there are many reasons why this may happen.
If you ever feel like…
- you are always stressed about time,
- you are not in control of your schedule and struggle to say “no”,
- you aren’t accomplishing enough in your day,
- or you are constantly distracted by notifications or those around you
…time blocking may be the perfect solution for you to maximize productivity.
What is time blocking?
Time blocking is a time management method where you intentionally schedule blocks of time to accomplish different tasks throughout your day. This can include both school or work tasks as well as personal items such as exercising or spending time with loved ones. You should also try to group similar tasks together in order to develop a consistent flow to your schedule.
The benefits of time blocking are enormous, but it can be a daunting task to start. Before you dive in headfirst, you may want to consider if this tool would be useful for you. In this article, I will provide several examples of people who could benefit from time blocking. If any of these sound like you, I encourage you to give it a try!
Is time blocking right for you?
For the person who is constantly stressed about time
One of the major indicators that time blocking could benefit you is time stress. Time stress is when you find yourself constantly worried about not having enough time in the day, week, or year.
Example of time stress at work: worrying about missing a deadline for a big project or not replying to an email in a timely manner.
Example of time stress in your personal life: worrying about breaking a commitment with your loved ones or yourself. This may look like canceling plans with a friend or skipping your workout because you procrastinated on a school or work assignment.
In general, time stress becomes more prevalent when you have a lot of priorities. You may begin to feel overwhelmed by the mountain of work in front of you which could lead you to procrastinate or mindlessly bounce between tasks in an inefficient manner.
By setting up time blocks, you take the decision making out of what you are going to work on at each point throughout the day. This will help to ease stress because you have clearly defined your priorities and when you will tackle them. Therefore, time blocking can help you see the bigger picture of your path to accomplish tasks and achieve goals.
For the person who struggles to say “no”
The first step to effectively time blocking is learning when to say “no”. Remember, when you say “yes” to one thing, you are really saying “no” to something else.
Saying ‘yes’ to one thing means saying ‘no’ to another.
Sean Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
For example, if you agree to take on a new project at work, you might need to sacrifice other things such as sleep, time with family, exercise, or eating lunch. By sacrificing in these areas, you will experience more and more time stress and will ultimately feel dissatisfied by what you are able to accomplish in a day.
There are three questions you should always ask yourself when you are scheduling your time:
1. Whose priorities are reflected in your calendar?
Do the priorities in your calendar reflect your goals or someone else’s? For example, we may struggle to separate our priorities from those of our:
- Boss
- Teacher
- Coworker
- Parent
- Children
- Spouse
- Friends
Some priorities are out of your control. You can’t skip school or work assignments without major consequences, and you need to set aside time to complete household chores or take care of your family.
Therefore, your follow-up question should be:
2. Are there things you are currently saying “yes” to that you shouldn’t?”
This may look like:
- signing up for more college classes than you can handle in a semester,
- agreeing to take on a new project at work even though you are already struggling to keep up,
- or completing all the household maintenance tasks without the help of you partner.
3. Are you prioritizing personal goals and self-care?
Even though we all have daily tasks that we need to complete that are out of our control, it is important that you intentionally schedule time in your day to work on your most important priorities. Also, remember that this means you must include time for yourself to work on personal goals and self-care! When you are working strictly off a to-do list, these areas may fall to the end of your priority list in favor of priorities set by others. This will ultimately lead to long-term stress and dissatisfaction.
When you schedule a time block for personal priorities, such as exercising, spending time with loved ones, reading, or sleeping, it is important that you treat these as equivalently important to school classes or meetings at work. If you wouldn’t skip a class or an important meeting at work, why are you skipping commitments with yourself?
For the person who feels like they aren’t accomplishing enough in a day
Most people’s first thought when it comes to time management is making a to-do list. The to-do list is a very important tool for organizing your thoughts and keeping track of tasks but it is a very ineffective tool for managing your time. Typically, people who rely solely on to-do lists will end up feeling they didn’t accomplish enough by the end of the day. The two main reasons for this are:
1. To-do lists do not factor in how long a task will take
Just having a list of tasks that you want to accomplish in a day will often set you up for failure because you are not considering the length of time each task will take. Therefore, you may set out with a list of ten items you want to accomplish in a day and then only have time to complete two. This will leave you feeling very dissatisfied with your productivity for the day.
On the other hand, if you were to time block these tasks and set aside an appropriate amount of time for each item, you would have a bigger picture view of the time it will take to finish your to-do list. The key thing here is understanding how to identify a reasonable amount of time for completing each task. When you first start time blocking, it is better to overestimate the time for each block. Then, you can refine your time blocks as you gain experience with the process.
2. To-do lists are typically not organized by priority
Also, to-do lists typically contain every task that you could or should do regardless of whether or not each task is actually a priority. It is important to recognize that every task does not matter equally. For example, responding to a low priority email is likely not as important as completing a large project that your boss is expecting by the end of the day.
This is similar to the Lean principle of defining value. Time-blocking allows you to pick out the “value-add” items that you need to prioritize. You can then designate a specific time for completing these important tasks. By doing this, you will take all the in-the-moment decision-making out of your to-do list. This will eliminate time wasted deciding what to work on and help you complete high priority, high value items first.
So…How do you decide what items are high priority?
Now you may find yourself in a position where you have an endless to-do list, and everything seems like a high priority. If this sounds like you, try asking yourself the following questions for each item on your to-do list:
- What is the due date for this task?
- Who asked me to complete this task?
- Is this task something that will either boost my career or help me to achieve a personal goal?
By asking these questions, you will get a better idea of how to rank tasks by priority. For example, if you have a task that your boss asked you to complete in the next week that is imperative for the launch of a new high-demand product, you should definitely schedule time to complete that first. The same goes for items in your personal life. For example, if you have the goal of running a marathon, you should prioritize scheduling time to complete your training runs over other tasks that are less important to you.
For the person who is constantly distracted
Distractions are a constant in our daily lives. If you want to maximize your productivity, it is imperative that you find ways to limit these distractions. Time blocking can help with this by allowing you to dedicate all your attention to one task at a time.
The two biggest causes of distractions are unplanned situations and self-sabotage. Let’s take a deeper dive into how time blocking can help in both of these cases.
Unplanned Situations
Unplanned situations in our daily lives are by far one of the most difficult aspects of sticking to a schedule. For example, if you work in a customer-facing job or are a parent to young children, you may have unplanned situations that arise and require your immediate attention. If this is the case for you, there are a few things that you can do to help protect your schedule.
1. Delegate
The first thing you can do in these types of situations is to delegate. For example, if you are a parent and consistently find yourself pulled away from your schedule to care for your children, you may look into delegating responsibilities with your partner. This could be as simple as discussing times with your partner where one of you is available to care for the children. Therefore, you can schedule specific blocks of time for focused work and know that your children won’t distract you during that time.
You can also use delegation at work. For example, you may find that coworkers are constantly interrupting you for help with a specific task. If this is the case, you should see if anyone else has the knowledge to handle the task when you are busy with other focused work. If there isn’t anyone else that can handle the task, you should look into developing other’s skills so that they can complete the task on their own in the future. The time it takes you to teach someone how to complete the task will be trivial compared to the time you will save in the long run from avoiding distractions.
2. Schedule buffer time
Another thing you can do when you find yourself constantly distracted by unplanned situations is to schedule buffer time into your time blocks. There is nothing worse than showing up to work with a list of things you want to accomplish and then only getting one or two of them done because so many unplanned tasks popped up. If you find this happening to yourself a lot, you will benefit from adding buffer time into your schedule.
For example, if you work in a customer service role where you find that you typically have to handle unexpected calls from customers for two hours everyday, you should either:
- Leave two open hours between your other time blocks
- Schedule a two-hour time block specifically for taking calls
By doing this, you have already planned the expected time where you will be distracted from other tasks into your day. This allows you to gain a more realistic picture of what tasks you can complete.
It may take some time to figure out what a reasonable amount of time to set aside for these unplanned situations is. When you are first starting out, you should overestimate all of your time blocks. Therefore, if the task does not take as long as you have planned, you are freeing up extra time in your schedule. This is far better than underestimating and needing to cut into other planned time blocks.
Self-sabotage
Beyond the unplanned situations that are out of your control, it is important to recognize that the largest saboteur of your time is almost always yourself.
Self-sabotage is when you do (or don’t do) something that directly impacts your ability to accomplish your goals. Self-sabotaging can have many different forms, but the two dominant categories of self-sabotage are distractions by notifications and environmental disturbances.
1. Distractions by Notifications
Arguably the largest source of self-sabotage today is getting distracted by notifications. At this point in time, everyone relies heavily on technology. Between social media, instant messaging applications at work, and email, it is very difficult to go even a short amount of time without being distracted.
For example, social media is designed to send notifications that will take your attention away from whatever else you are doing. I’m sure everyone is guilty of getting distracted on social media at least once or twice per day, and studies have found that it can take an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to completely refocus on a task after a distraction. This may be an over-exaggeration in some cases, but the fact remains that repeated distractions lead to a huge amount of wasted time throughout the day.
Beyond social media, we also have built in distractions that are required in many work environments such as instant messaging applications and email. I know I am definitely guilty of dropping everything I am doing to reply to a colleague’s question over IM or email. I do this in an effort to be helpful, but it ultimately decreases my overall productivity.
One thing you can do to avoid notification distractions is simply to turn off your notifications. You can then schedule one or several short time blocks during your day specifically to respond to emails or instant messages. This ensures that you remain focused on the tasks you had planned while still setting aside time to address any questions or issues that arise throughout the day.
2. Environmental Disturbances
Another major source of self-sabotage is environmental disturbances. Environmental disturbances are anything in (or not in) your surroundings that distracts you from completing a task.
“Where are my glasses?”
For example, one type of environmental disturbance is not having the tools readily available to complete your planned task. An example of this is the typical “where are my glasses” trope. You will end up wasting a lot of time if you constantly need to track down the required tools and supplies for a task.
The easiest way to avoid this is to intentionally add it into your time block. For example, if you find you are constantly missing the supplies you need for a task, set up a time block the night before you plan to do it where you intentionally set up your workspace.
When you do this, you may also want to consider following the 5S method from Lean. This organizational method revolves around ensuring that only necessary tools are located in a given space and that all tools are placed in the optimal position for efficiency. This will prevent environmental distractions and allow you to be more productive.
Sensory Distractions: Sound
Another type of environmental disturbance is sensory distractions. One major sensory distraction is sound. For example, many people like to listen to something while doing work, but it is important to find something that will not pull your attention away from the task at hand. If you are working on writing a speech, you likely won’t be productive if you are listening to a podcast or audiobook at the same time. It is also important to make sure that the space you have setup for a task is located somewhere where there won’t be outside noises distracting you.
So, what should you do if you really want to listen to that newly released podcast? You can add a time block for it! By intentionally adding it to your schedule, you are designating it as something that is important to you while still ensuring that it won’t distract you from other tasks. You can also try grouping it with something that you know you can accomplish while listening to the podcast, such as cooking or cleaning.
Sensory Distractions: Hunger or Thirst
Hunger or thirst is another type of sensory distraction you may experience. Drinking water and eating food are basic human needs. This means your brain will always focus on meeting these needs over other tasks. Therefore, you must ensure that you are planning adequate time to eat and drink water throughout your day in order to remain most productive. You should also have a glass of water and potentially a small snack readily available in your workspace so you can easily access them whenever needed.
Once again, you can avoid hunger and thirst distractions through time blocking. Add blocks of time into your schedule where you just plan to eat a meal or snack. This will prevent you from being distracted by hunger while completing other tasks. It will also ensure that you aren’t skipping meals in an effort to get more items on your to-do list done.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why time blocking might be right for you. If any of the cases above resonate with you, why not give time blocking a try? I know I, and most people I know, fall into at least one of the categories listed in this article. Therefore, many people can benefit from this powerful time management tool.
If you want to be more productive and feel more in control of your schedule, check out my article on how to start time blocking so that you can learn some tips and tricks to be successful.
Do you think you could benefit from time blocking? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
