I don’t have time!! How to make more time…

Here is a scenario: You have too much to do, and it seems like the list never gets smaller. In the digital commuting economy, you are juggling work, the kids, that side project that just does not want to take off. They all demand time, and you want to give them more time.

So you sit down and you start working on the endless list of things to do. And just as you get into a lekker rhythm, the phone rings. Or a seemingly important email comes in. Or an unscheduled meeting comes up. Or you child pours out all the hand-soap into the basin because he wanted to wash his hands.

And all of this seems to be the new normal – a part of living in a changing world.

Getting things done is very hard.

Making lists and trying to finish them isn not enough. It fails to give your day structure or routine. Lists does nothing to give you focus. You need to bring in a very important element: time. Tasks on your list need to be associated with time. This means you have to figure out if a task will get done, and how long it is going to take. Simple.

This is where time blocking comes in. It is powerful. Imagine knowing exactly what you will be able to finish this week…Time blocking will allow you control over your life.

What is Time blocking?

It is a way for you to combine task management with your calendar. Work tasks, social events, and rest breaks are all planned and prioritized. It lets you plan what you are going to achieve in a day. It forces you to figure out how to spend your time. It is a powerfful way to be more productive without having to rely on endless to-do lists.

It is proactive. You control tasks instead of reacting to external demands. It forces you to prioritize, and it creates a platform for being more organized.

Time-blockers (the people who use this on a daily basis) discover exactly how time blocking works for them. They realized:

1. Time blocking creates deadlines – Tasks tend to fill as much time as we allow them to (Parkinson’s Law). Let’s say I give myself a week to write an article like this one, it would take that long. Would it be better? Would it be more valuable than finishing this article and four more articles? Probably not. A week to write the article doesn’t really limit my time for the task. To get this done I have to be more specific: I need 2 hours to do the research, and 1 hour to write a first draft. Then I need 1 more hour to review and update, and finally publish on a blog. So given the two time-frames (1 week vs 4 hours) which would result in a productive output?
2. Time blocking prevents procrastination – Getting started is the hardest part of doing something. If you have a huge list of things to do, it is even worse. By designed a time blocked schedule, you can figure out how to stop procrastinating. This way you don’t have to worry about what to do first. It simplifies everything. Time blocking sets the focus on allocated time on your calendar, and therefore removes the need to decide (and ultimately remain undecided, and procrastinating)
3. Tie blocking helps you focus on hard tasks – It isn’t about what you are doing at any given point. It is also about what you are not doing. When it is time to do hard. Focused work, you cannot afford distractions. And multitasking? It is a myth, as human our brains are linear processes. Women don’t multitask, they just process information a lot faster – it goes back to the primordial differences between men and women: Women were the gatherers and therefore had to be able to focus and process different types of berries, how they tasted, what plants were poisonous and what plants were not, and what to do with the meat when the men came home. Men on the other hand only had to focus on one thing: Aim spear at wild animal and throw. This is still prevalent today: Women can distinguish a larger range of colours than men. Women are essentially equipped with Intel Core i7 processors, in comparison to the men’s Intel Pentium 1 / 486 processors. Tie blocking improves our focus and helps us to achieve deep work.
4. Time blocking makes small tasks more efficient – The flip side to being able to focus is you also get more efficient at doing tedious and distracting work (shallow work) – by batching deep work and shallow work into time boxes, you get more done.
5. Block scheduling creates accountability – You become aware of how you spend your time. It is uncomfortable at first, but you unlock the biggest gains in your day. You are accountable for the blocks and how they are spent. Now there are no more excuses for not having enough time to exercise or eat lunch at lunchtime or working late nights just to catch up. Block scheduling will help you take control over your time and everything you with it.

How does Time blocking work?

Everyone should be time blocking, but we all have different goals to achieve. This means the actual execution is different for everyone. In this light, I have put together some heuristics for time blocking:

1. Heuristic 1 – Determine your goals, priorities and obligations:

To do this, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve. Think about how much time you want to spend with your family. Decide your vision for the future. Make personal goals as well as career goals, because the one influences the other. Whatever these are, you need to understand that you need goals first so you can prioritise your tasks and actvirties.

From your long term goals, you can create short-term objectives to pursue. You need targets that are achievable within 6 months, ideally.

For ech objective, come up with a set of tasks to complete in the next week. Schedule these along with all your other actvities.

• Heuristic 2 – Create a blank template for your block calendar

I recommend a layout that breaks days into individual hours. My preference is to use blocks of 2 hours, but I have found that I will block out 2 hours for a task, but then I finish it in 45 minutes, for example. You can add precise time inside these blocks if you want to.

I use a digital calendar (MS Outlook, and for time keeping purposes, Jira Tempo), but to get you started on the planning phase, you can use pen and paper.

Divide tasks into different categories and use colour coding to differentiate:

• Work = Blue
• Social = Yellow
• Admin = Orange
• Health = Green

Once you have an idea and you have everything in colour coded blocks, we can start adding specific tasks. Colour coding will give you a good visual picture of where your time is spent.

• Heuristic 3 – Fill in fixed tasks and actvities

Essentially these are tasks you cannot move or change, like recurrung meetings you cannot control, school runs, exercise, breaks, lunch, and rest. Create a morning routine and block off time for that.

By blocking out time for your personal life first, you are creating a framework your work life can fit into. It is best to block in health and family first, s these are non-negotiable in the long run. You can adjust and make sacrifices if you need more time to get stuff done.

• Heuristic 4 – Blocks for focused work

Focused work is work that requires deep concentration or focus. Block time for it at times that you will be most effective. This should typically be times that you will be able to be free of most distractions.

• Heuristic 5 – Blocks for repetitive, easy tasks and errnads and chores

This is the time you can allocate for everything else. Doing the dishes and cleaning the house is never, ever, family time or personal time. These are things that need to happen, but they are not a priority typically. They are often reactive tasks. Typically also, these are the things that creep in and distract us. They still need to be done, however.

The way to handle these is to batch them. Wait for the repetitive tasks to build up and then execute them together. If you can, push them together and do them when you are less productive.

Once you are done, your week will look busy. Don’t worry – it needs to. This is how you are going to be able to claw back time and eventually iplement the 4 day work week…

• Heuristic 6 – Hold a weekly review to evaluate and replan

Now you are ready to start following the schedule. By the end of week 1 yu should also be in a position to see how it went. Set aside 2 hours to adjust and tweak as you go along. You have to make your schedule to suit your life and the work that you need to acomplish. Sometimes you will find that you mamaged to get stuff done quicker, and sometimes you will find that you were unable to get things done altogether. This is not failure – it is exactly the opposite, in fact. This is how you figure out how to get things to work for you.

The golden rules

1. Stick to the Schedule: Only do what you intended doing in a block, and when the schedule says stop, you stop. The moment you make little exceptions here and there, you will lse the benefits of time blocking altogether. This will just unleash a chain reaction that will ruin your day completely
2. Take breaks – my work is scheduled in 2 hour bloks. My concentration span starts deteriorating after 30 minutes, so I take micro breaks to keep the focus going – for every 25 minutes, I take 5 minutes – I step away from the task. This technique helps me to sustain the work for the whole block.
3. Create Themes for each day – I have three general themes: The go zone (deep work), the slow zone (shallow, repetetive work) and the No zone (personal growth, family, etc.) – I separate deep work from shallow work because shallow work always interrupt focus and thinking.
4. Build a routine – Every week will be different, as there are certain commitments that you cannot control. This is fine, but you will get the benefits quicker if you create some kind of consistency – it builds the habit, and habit stacks is a good productivity hack.
5. Don’t schedule fun – Seriously. Enjoying yourself is not a task. But you do need to set time aside to enjoy yourself.
6. Don’t be too rigid – the reality is that it is impossible to time bock perfectly. So be flexible and be prepared to make changes.
7. Don’t plan too much detail – this is why I use 2 hour blocks – it gives me freedome to micro-manage the time towards achieving tasks within the block any way I want to. Or not, if I choose…
8. Don’t beat yourself up if it doesn’t work exactly as planned – My first try was a dismal failure, but I persisted. As time went by, I got better at it. I still fail. And when this happens I am OK with it.

Stay positive.