How do you handle tons of tasks, meetings, deadlines and “me” time all in 24 hours? Let’s admit it, balancing our time and being productive in the process is hard to achieve. Sometimes we sacrificed sleep, breaks, and even quality time with our family and loved ones just to get everything done. Then there are these influential and famous people from their respective fields like Elon Musk and Bill Gates that manage to be productive despite their full schedules. How do they do it? The truth is, they are not doing anything special, they do time blocking.
What is Time Blocking?
We all have different ways of how we manage our time. Most of us list the things we need to do on that day, which also works. Time blocking, on the other hand, is more detailed. It is a concept where you plan out every moment of your day in advance and dedicating specific time “blocks” for certain tasks and responsibilities.
Take for example, your morning routine consists of checking, sorting out and responding to important emails. Instead of doing it for as long as you want, set a specific time when you do it and how long it will take you to finish the task. Let’s say you schedule it from 9:00- 9:15 am. You have 15 minutes to do everything necessary before moving on to the next task on your schedule.
Why is Time Blocking Effective?
Listing down your schedules and activities is helpful in being organized. However, the downside is it doesn’t have a specific timeframe of when a task should be done. The tendency is that you chose a task, but then something distracts you and you couldn’t get it done quickly. Or because your tasks keep on piling up and you’ve decided that doing it all at once can help. You do not have total control of your schedule at all.
With time blocking, since you designate when and how long a task should be done, it prevents you from multitasking and distractions. Instead, it allows you to keep your focus on that specific thing. And since your attention is solely on the task at hand, it will make your work quicker and a lot effective. Aside from that, an article from entrepreneur.com written by John Rampton provided other reasons why time blocking is valuable:
- Helps you balance your urgent and important tasks.
- Makes you committed to your priorities.
- It discourages procrastination.
- Assists you in becoming more realistic with your time.
- Helps you get work done knowing that you have a specific amount of time to complete a task.
- Closes those open loops that don’t have the next step
- Let’s you say “no” without feeling guilty.