Plan regular events in which you take part
Will you have dinner as a family every night? Do you want to create the rituals of the family? Don’t just expect that these activities will happen—give them the weight they warrant and block time for each of them. Don’t hesitate to mention the extracurricular hobbies.
Schedule personal goals that are not regular. Place those personal priority things first before you fill your day with projects and events that do not help those goals.
Consider in your work activities
Start with tasks that are part of the function on a daily basis and then take into account goals that are not normal. If you are a company CEO, a project manager, a sales partner, an administrative assistant or an internship trainee, you are responsible for conducting main roles and events on a regular and weekly basis. They can involve meetings on a regular or weekly basis. Or maybe your duty is to arrange appointments with others. You’re going to have to prepare for these appointments. You can need to compose and transform reports or revenue numbers on a continuous basis.
You should have to contact someone for details on a regular basis. If you come to work on a regular basis and still spend the first hour of the day answering phone calls, time-block it in your calendar.
Accounting for weekly self-assessment and preparation period
Your objectives—whether a one-year business plan or a long-term retirement vision—require routine checks. Think of them as rest breaks on your journey: are you still on the right road? Is there a detour ahead? Have you noticed a more convenient route?
Using weekly strategic planning sessions—ideally at the end of the work week—to review your steps on certain near-future business ventures as well as your general professional ambitions or personal objectives. This is a chance to study the past week and jump-start the next week. I suggest spending 15 to 30 minutes a day and then holding a 90-to-120-minute self-assessment and preparation session at the end of the week.
Building іn flex time
Plug the time parts into your calendar every few hours to help you mitigate the effects of unplanned interruptions or problems. Around 15 to 30 minutes is enough time for you to work at strategic intervals during the day. Knowing that you have this free block of time will help you keep to your routine rather than get off track.
When you continue working up your time-blocking skills, incorporate 30-minute flex cycles into your routine for every two hours of time-constrained action. This may sound like a lot of flex time, but if it helps you to keep the majority of your time-block routine and keep or improve your productivity, it’s worth it. My experience is the perfect time for flex time is after a few hours of the most critical work—whether a sales call, a report-preparation, or a deadline.
Don’t plan flex time just before you start an important task time: you’re more likely to get diverted and struggle to get started on your vital business. Schedule it after work—then you can use it, if appropriate, to fix some unexpected problems.
Assess Your Progress and Change Your Schedule as Needed
Getting familiar with time-blocking takes time, and getting a glitch-free schedule that you can work with for a stretch can take half a dozen revisions. Even then, regularly review your time-blocking efforts and change them periodically to make sure you have the optimal effects. It’s not a big time investment—you can search with a few minutes a day or use 15 or 30 minutes of your weekly time to review your results.
Please ask yourself:
- What got you off the track this week?
- What interruptions have really influenced your success with your time?
- Is anyone sabotage your block of time?
- How will the productivity be helped by changes?
I address this analysis extensively in this segment below:
Check the results
One way to assess the time-blocking performance is to track results. You can see that you need small changes within just 2 weeks of launching your time-block.
The only way to keep track of outcomes is to constantly control them.
I recommend a weekly revision based on your general priorities and a monthly revision on where you are.
The weekly analysis is time to re-play the tape of the week and look at the top and bottom. I know you have days to rip your hair out when you’re faced with too many challenges and distractions.
Often, you will have smooth days like silk. In those days, what were the differences besides the result?
For the periodic analysis, check the description of your work, main activities and metrics of your performance and progress.
Then ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you getting closer to your objectives?
- In a reasonable time, can you make measurable progress?
- Are you well enough to track your performance to boost your performance?
- What adjustments do you make now to speed up your goals and reduce the total time you need?
Your progress in completing your targets informs you if the blocking time works for you.
Measurable targets
If you can calculate your targets in number numbers (for example, dollars or sales), checking performance is cinch. For instance, in order to appreciate the success of your time-blocking activities, you should track your numbers or commission reports over many months, as salesperson.
Or suggest you’re a magazine editor who has been tested for regularly achieving weekly publishing timelines. If the target is to publish three stories every month in national publications, you may conclude that your time-blocking efforts would need some tweaking if your analysis shows that you’re only seeing one story in print.
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Next Post: Productivity-13: Matching Time Investment to Return (coming up on 10 Feb 2021)
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