Do you ever have those days where you know you worked, I mean you sat down to accomplish something, but by the end of the day, you didn’t get to make that oddly satisfying line across your list? Well, I was having a couple of those days and add on the vacation guilt, and I knew I needed to figure something out.
I’d read briefly about time-blocking from Skinny Confidential’s Lauryn Evarts, and Inspiralized’s Ali Maffucci and I liked the idea of one focused task, no distractions and done. So why not, give it a shot. On Sunday night, I sat down with my glass of wine, made my to-do list organized by client and then priority. Then came the time-blocking part. Went to my trusted Google calendar and started plotting my Monday and Tuesday. I wanted to be realistic if anything came up so only decided to do a couple days at a time. I have to say, it felt really good to have a plan of attack for the week. Although, in the same breath, I blocked time for driving to the gym, gym, driving home, make lunch, shower, etc.
Monday came and wow I felt like I seized the day. I estimated timing for each task correctly, I was able to keep closed that pesky email tab and worked through that organized list. I went into Tuesday thinking that we’re on to something here.
Tuesday started with an early morning text from a potential client trying to have a conference call later that morning. I dragged and dropped rearranging the day’s calendar. Oh, but I forgot to block time to shower before the call. Don’t worry, I squeezed it in but I felt the pressure. Needless to say, my Tuesday was off to a rough start but I was sticking to it. Then on my way home from an appointment, I thought I might have a nail in my tire and I wanted to take it back to where I first bought my tires. Luckily there was Wi-Fi so I could continue to work my way through the day. ( I don’t go anywhere during the workday without my computer, you never know). There wasn’t a nail in the tire but the stop caused me to run into my other scheduled blocks and felt the insane pressure to still finish everything. At the end of the day with my unexpected stop, I was feeling like maybe I took on more than I could handle.
On Tuesday night I looked at Wednesday’s calendar and decided to give myself some more breathing room between tasks so I could use that time to check in on emails if I wrapped up that block early and left my late afternoon fairly open. Thursday and Friday worked out fairly similar and by the end of the week I felt like I crushed the week but I was left concerned I couldn’t sustainable this type of time management.
What I realized after a week of time-blocking:
- Felt like I worked really damn hard
- The pressure of completing the tasks was close to unsettling
- When working on a big project that would need many breaks it’s a great tool
- It’s not sustainable to do every day
- For me, I’m better suited to pick 2-3 days a week and time-block only larger chunks of the day, not the whole day
- I don’t need to schedule to eat or shower
- I’m in the business of my time is money so time-blocking did give me a good reminder to turn my tracker on. I billed a lot that week!
So will I continue? We’ll see, that Sunday I got sick with strep throat and it left me in bed for days. So, only time will tell.
