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Time Blocking
I’ve been tremendously productive every day since implementing a system of time blocking last weekend, so I want to share my methods and potentially help some people find a way to allocate time and get things done!
Let me start off by saying that I’ve tried a lot of different ways of allocating time to get things done over the past year. I’ve been fairly successful with writing up a list and crossing things off as I finish them, but while some things on the list would take 15 minutes to complete, others were things that would take many hours and potentially days to complete. When I got to working on those things, nothing else would get done and I’d get a bit frustrated.
Another method I tried was allocating a certain number of hours per week to certain tasks (music, gaming, cleaning, etc.), but the method was way too open-ended and I managed to get very little done because I couldn’t really decide what to work on. I’ve tried one hour and half hour blocks, but I’ve found that was usually too short a time to really get anything done or I had to micromanage my list a little too much.
What has worked best for me is to make a list that splits the weekend days into eight even blocks of two hours, and assign one task to work on in each of those two hour blocks. If the task assigned to a certain block is one that won’t take a great deal of time, I go ahead and assign another task in that block or move on to the next block and spend more time on it. There also might be certain projects or events that will take longer than one block, so I go ahead and schedule that event into multiple time blocks. I had one thing take up multiple time blocks last weekend, and I’ve got two things this weekend that will, so I’ve scheduled accordingly.
Of course, time is needed for all the basic necessities (food, hygiene) as well as social gatherings, shopping for food and items, and other things as well. All of that should be scheduled, as they are things that need to be done throughout the course of the day. I also schedule time for gaming at the end of each weekend night, because if I don’t have a little unwind time in there somewhere, I tend to get a bit edgy (which is no surprise).
During the weekdays, it’s harder to properly block time off into two hour blocks, so I pick one main task to work on in the morning and the evening in addition to all the usual routine things. Over this last week, I was able to clean up the Concatenation Records page some and launch a new release, I finished two songs (one of which I started from scratch) and posted them on the home page, I signed up at Zazzle and got acquainted with their artwork policies and formats, and I still had time to do my morning workouts and have a little unwind time!
Now I’m well aware that most people aren’t as overzealous with projects as I am, but someone wouldn’t have to be in order for time blocking to have a positive effect. It’s more a way of making life flow a little more smoothly and a way to feel more accomplished. I have enough erratic influences at my workplace, so it’s nice to feel relaxed and get things done on my own time.
I do think that some tweaking could be done to the time blocking, as an accompanying master list of all the projects I’m currently working on and future projects that I want to work on would be handy to have accessible while I’m putting together the weekly list. That way, it would be a way to assess what projects have more urgency to them and which ones I can work on at a later date.
All in all, I’m happy that I was able to finally find a way to schedule my time in order to get more things done!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on October 2nd, 2010.
External Links
• Concatenation Records – Concatenation Records
• Zazzle – Zazzle | Custom T-Shirts, Personalized Gifts, Posters, Art, and more
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