Time blocking

I come from a family where everyone does at least a 1000 things a week. My mom is a singer, hairdresser, works at a lab, raises 4 kids and spends quality time with them, spends tons of quality time with my grandma AND studies, all at once. And these are just the basic things she does, it doesn't include any of the little things she does. And she doesn't slack off in any of these things, she puts her absolute 100% into all of these things, because she wants to and she's able to. So I was raised with the notion that if you want something and you're able to do it, you should just go for it and do the thing. However, I want to do a million things and I often don't know where to start. Not to mention, I already do half a million things, and I tended to get really overwhelmed when I thought about it in the morning, which made it hard for me to get out of bed somtimes. How am I supposed to go through 4 hours of classes at school, read 2 chapters for my homework, read a bit from my book, write a little for my website and also find time/energy to socialize. For me it wasn't just a matter of managing my time, but also my energy.

Why it works for me

This is where time blocking comes in to save the day (and my life).Time blocking is a way to manage your time. The clue of the whole method is to divide your time in blocks (duh), so you know what you'll be doing(-ish) per day in advance. It saves me soooo much time, i know what i'm gonna do in a day and i don't need to think about it too much (because i already did when i timeblocked that day). I get up at a certain time and give myself about two hours until I need to be ready to go somewhere (like school or the library) or to start studying. In those two hours I'll brush my teeth, shower, do my skincare thing, eat breakfast etc. and even have a little (okay let's be real, a 30-minute) karaoke session. I don't have to lay in bed and contmplate how the hell I'm gonna make sure I'll have a productive day, because I already know that After those two hours of getting ready and slowly starting up (yes I'm like an old computer that stills runs on windows 7), I'll spend 3 hours on focused "deep work", which is mostly studying. And after that I'll give myself an hour or so for lunch and a little walk outside, then there's another 3 hour-block of deep work (half of which is studying and the other half is things like writing and then it's free time after that. This is how I spend my days when I don't have to go to class and it works just fine for me. I get to wake up at 8 (which isn't too early in my opinion), I feel energized and I've done so much of deep work, I usually have all my daily tasks done by 5 p.m. if I follow this. That means I have the whole evening for watching films, talking to friends, reading books, going to the gym or whatever I feel like doing that evening.

Sure, there are days when I've got school, but that just means I'll time block that day differently. Personally, I have three typed of days: 1. Lots of deep work (the one I described earlier), 2. Little deep work and 3. School days. Days where I have an event like a big party or a trip to the zoo or an amusement park or whatever I don't time block (for obvious reasons). Basically, there's a time and place for time blocking. It should make your life easier, not harder.

Time blocking also counteracts perfectionism. I struggle a lot with perfectionism personally, and I've spent many nights working hours and hours on a single thing, because there's always one more little thing that can be tweaked. Or started out doing the dishes, which led me to cleaning the kitchen counter, my fridge, my cupboards, all the way until I'm mopping the entire place and entire hours have passed. Time blocking forces us to set a time and just tell ourselves "okay, that's enough for now" and move on to the next thing.

And lastly, I absolutely love time blocking because it allows me to set aside time to dedicate my full attention to accomplishing one task. multitasking with the human brain is like using multiple tabs in a computer browser. Sure, we say that we're doing multiple things at once, but technically we're not. We're just quickly switching from one tab to another, so we only focus on one thing at a time, even if that's for 0.1 seconds. If we do everything we need to do in a day all at once by "multitasking", our daily schedules might end up looking something like the left side of the picture down here:

Yes, this works in theory and gets everything you need to do done, but can you see how both schedules include the same tasks, and the right schedule finishes hours before the left's? HOURS. That's hours of time that you could spend on... well, whatever you want to I guess. Sure, the right includes less time on social media, and I also really think people should cut down on that anyways. But that's a whole other story, and thus a whole other post.

How it works for me

But how the hell am I supposed to do this? How do I determine the contents of my blocks, how many blocks I need, how long the block should be etc.? Don't worry, we'll get to all of that in a bit. Let's just start by creating a time table to plan in. I recommend putting the days of the week up on the first line (from left to right) and writing the times hour by hour (on the left side underneath each other). Down here is an example, but you can play oround with it to make it more colourful, or maybe divide it by half hours (6.00, 6.30, 7.00 etc.), whatever works best for you.

Now let's fill in our table. First, you start with the things that are set in stone. Things like classes you need to attend, work or other responsibilities, you know what I mean. Yes, we're in complete control of our time, but there are certain things that are fixed, blocks that can't be moved around.

Next, you should get a different note and write down everything you want to do in a week. These things can be laundry, dishes, going for a walk, reading a book for one hour p/day etc. Then, and this is optional, but if you're gonna work with colours, you assign a colour to every task. But while you do this, you should categorise some tasks together. For example, laundry and dishes both fall under "housework" or whatever you'd like to call it. You could highlight them both blue and then "housework" will be blue blocks in your schedule. This is called "task batching." There are other ways to time block, which I've listed all the way at the end of this post.

Now comes the trickiest part: To give every block a logical place. Think about what makes sense, what tasks require the most energy, are you an early bird or a night owl, how much sleep do you need and stuff like that. Know that you are in complete control of how you spend your time, but if you don't manage ur schedule, your time will be in complete control of you.

Some tips

1. I recommend time blocking flexibly. I leave 10-15 min windows of time in between blocks, so that i don't stress too much about time. Remember that time blocking is meant to reduce our day-to-day stress, not add to it. When I'm thinking about how much time a task might take, I'll round it up if it's not too small of a thing. For example, if I eat lunch for 20 minutes, I'll round it up to half an hour. Or if it takes 45 minutes to get to school, I'll round it up to an hour. Basically I block in hour and half hours. Does that mean I do dishes for 30 minutes? no. It means that I do dishes, laundry and clean my place a bit for 25 minutes and then I have a 5 minute mini-break to think about what's next on my schedule. Time blocking doesn't mean that you need to be busy every minute of the day. And my blocks aren't set in stone (except for the fixed ones of course). I play around with them all the time. If I'm on my 1-hour lunch+taking a walk-break, and I feel like extending that break by an hour or so, I'll just do that. Seriously, whatever. I'm not gonna explode if I finish my deep work by 6 instead of 5 o'clock, and neither will you. And if I planned, like, 30 minutes in to get home, but I saw a Starbucks and suddenly have the desire to spend 20 minutes waiting for a frappunccino, it doesn't matter much. Because I time block so flexibly, I don't have to worry much about a delayed train or a long line at a store.
2. Don't plan too many things at once. You shouldn't plan in an 8-hour block of just studying, because you'll end up like that guy from the Shining. Remember that whole "all work and no play"-scene? No thank you.
3. Obviously you don't need a paper time table to do this, I've time blocked in my apple calendar countless times, and it's handier if you want to shuffle your blocks around a bit
4. Measure your time accurately. I know I need approx. 7.5 hours of sleep, so I'm not cutting that down. I don't plan in a 30-minute morning routine, because I know I take 20 minute to just get out of bed and then spend another 20 minutes taking a shower. It's okay to take your time with things, after all, there's 1440 minutes in a day.
5. Reflect, a lot. We're people, not machines. In order not to feel like a soulless robot, I set aside time everyday to reflect a bit. If I get stuck in doing the same tasks at the same times everyday without taking a second to think if this is still working for me, why am I doing these things etc., I'll go insane. So, every evening I reflect on what I've done that day and I look forward to what I'll do the next day. Every morning I'll look at what I'll be doing that day and at important things that week. And at lunch I'll reflect on what i've done so far that day, what i'm gonna do the rest of the day, and give myself a little pat on the back for being so productive or amazing in general.

for who it's not/disclaimer

Like I said earlier, we're not machines. Time blocking isn't meant to put your time in boxes and chastise yourself if you ever do anything different. Don't let things like perfectionism or the pressure of others trick you into forcing a too rigid, too full schedule on yourself. It's okay to cut back on some things a little, or even a lot sometimes. We've got so much money, freedom, inspiration and time these days, the amount of things to do may seem overwhelming a lot of times. We live in an age where everything is possible for nearly everyone, and so there's a lot of pressure on (especially young) people to do lots of things. But just because you can do something in theory, that doesn't always mean that you should. magine you're a student with a job, a relationship, hobbies, friends, you go to parties, movies and restaurants, therapy and you try to take some time to meditate. That sounds busy as hell, right? Sure, with time blocking you could figure it all out, but it's okay to say "no" to a party or a friend sometimes. Or to be single for a bit to focus more on your carreer, hobbies or mental health. You don't need to excel at, or even do, anything. If you're burning yourself out, it's okay to call in sick for a couple of days. Technically the only things we absolutely need to do are eating, breathing and sleeping. And on some days those might take up all our energy, and that's fine. As long as you're doing those three things, you're doing great and, personally, I'm proud of you :)

Other ways to time block

For those who plan on giving time blocking a try (or who are already doing it), here are some things you could try to play around with it for a bit:

• Day-theming. Personally, I didn't like this. It just doesn't work for me, but I know a lot of people who actually prefer this. The concept consists of having whole days dedicated to a certain group of tasks. You can have a family day, a cleaning day, a dep work day, anythging you want really. I tried dividing my uni subjects by day. So it would be European Law on Mondays and Thursdays, Roman Law on Tuesdays and Fridays and Tax Law on Wednesdays and Saturdays. An example of day theming can be seen in the image below.

• Time boxing. This is something I haven't done much, but it's essentially time blocking by giving yourself a lot of "deadlines." For example, instead of "tomorrow I'll work on my blog post from 9-11," with time boxing it would be "tomorrow I'll stop working on my blog post by 11." So when it's 11 o'clock, I stop it and move on to the next "deadline" of that day.

Omg you read the whole thing

Or maybe you didn't. However, you at least scrolled to the end and I appreciate that too. Thanks so much for clicking on the post, and if you'd like to receive updates about the site and leave comments down here, you can hit the subscribe-button in the right corner to quickly set up an account. This is only my third post on here, but I'm still proud as hell of it. Of this whole thing really. And again, so grateful you're reading. I hope you have a great rest of your day and good luck with planning!