6 Steps to Calendar and Time Blocking

There's been a lot of social media and a lot of conversations around the whole concept of calendar blocking and time blocking in recent years, and I just wanna kind of demystify that for you a little bit and give you a six step plan to really make that work for you.

Hi, I'm Melissa Taylor with RogerandMelissa.com and we often work with our clients on this six step process to really plan out their quarters and their year so they don't miss a beat in their business and they can continually get it to drive forward.

Number one, you really have to set your priorities. So it's coming up on year, and you've got your goals, you've got your vision, you know where you wanna head, go ahead and make a list of your priorities. Not only your priorities for your business, and what you need to do and get done to more forward, but your personal priorities, your family, your social time, your wellness, all the different things that you have in your life that you wanna prioritize, and then rank them. That sounds terrible, you're like, ranking your kids above this, or that, or whatever, but you do have to kind of have an idea of how they fit into the structure, once you have than, then it's very easy to make sure that you are calendaring the right things. 

Number two, is track your time for a couple of weeks. We talked about this in our time management video, and all the excuses that we all use, this is a great way to really wrap your head around what you are doing now and that will show you what you can change. You may be surprised at how much time you're spending on social media, or watching TV, but track your time, and then you can really look at it, get an accurate picture and make adjustments.

Number three, get an annual calendar, just month by month, mark all the different milestones and important dates on it, if you have a vacation coming up that's already planned, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays that you celebrate, school calendar if your kids are in school, put all those really important dates on your calendar first, make sure those are in pen, or Sharpie, things you can't change.

Number four, now you wanna take a look at it, kinda by quarter. So look at the first quarter, or whatever quarter's coming up, and make sure that you have all your volunteer stuff on there, different maybe networking things that you do regularly, different association groups, you might decide that you want different colors for different things.

For instance, I use Google Calendar, and I use red for things for my family. That basically says to me when I look at my calendar and somebody asks me to do something, if I see a red block of time, and that red kinda like in a car, says stop, stop and think before you change this thing that's already on your calendar. Then I use orange for things that are have to do with my family or business that are important, but I could possibly move if I needed to, slow down, really think about this before you move it. And then yellow is the things that are kind of just under that in priority, things that I need to do, but I can kinda slow down and move them. Now nothing gets deleted from my calendar, I just move it, so if I have to place an appointment on top of a yellow block, that yellow block does not get erased, it gets moved to another part of my calendar.

Then step number five, take a look at a typical week. Now what I mean by a typical week, is what are those things that happen all the time, 3:30, pick up the kids from school, your workout schedule, family game night, don't forget time blocks for just life, right? Cooking, shopping for the food, doing the laundry, make sure you kinda have those sprinkled in there as well. And this is where it kinda gets fun, you start to look at that week, and you find these blocks that are really free and that's where you can set different kinds of appointments.

Now again, going back to the color system, we use green for anything that is an income producing activity. So if it's a networking event, or something that's gonna be a lead generation kind of a thing, we do it kind of in light green. Dark green is for when we actually been paid to be there, so coaching sessions, group coaching classes, speaking engagements all go in dark green, 'cause dark green means you've been paid, you need to be there, you need to show up with full energy.

It works great 'cause we can then look at our weeks, week, by week, by week, and if there's not a lot of green on there, we need to make sure we go back and add some green into our calendars. One of the things you also wanna make sure that you put on your calendar is blocks of time for you to do anything that you need to for your business, for instance, we have research block times on my calendar, we have filming, we have writing script, blocked times on the calendar, so that those things can actually happen.

Now don't forget to make sure that you have buffers, you're gonna want some time every week, if not every day, just for those things that happen, that way somebody else is not in control of your calendar by sticking things in there that you didn't have planned for, you can adjust and move things around.

Now that you have your annual, your typical month, and your typical week kind of planned out, you can really see how you now can structure your life. So if you only wanna work six hours a day, average, but a typical weeks has you working 10 hours on a Monday because of a group class that you're teaching at night, then maybe you take Tuesday morning off so you then don't work as much on Tuesday so that your week ends up averaging about six to eight hours a day, or whatever you choose, yours might be four, yours might be 12, yours might be 10, but when you see your calendar you can adjust it accordingly and make it work for you in your lifestyle.

Now we all have tons of excuses, but check out our video about excuses and how you can overcome some of those excuses so that those don't become a problem for you. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, we'd love for you to subscribe. So thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you later.