The Power of Calendar Blocking for Productivity

1. The Art of Calendar Blocking: How to Get Started with Skills: Welcome to this Skillshare class all about the power of calendar blocking. Calendar blocking is an effective technique that has been used in the last ten years to get more done. And we all know our schedules are fairly busy. So being able to use our time more effectively when it comes to looking at calendar and seeing what we need to get done can sometimes be the difference between getting that promotion or maybe even excelling in a certain area of your job. So I'm going to take you through as your instructor diving into the benefits of calendar blocking, how to apply the skills and lessons that have been used and adapted for calendar blocking and the mistakes that commonly people make with calendar blocking. We can refine the skill and really help you dedicate and improve your calendar. So I'm excited to dive into this class. Let's roll in. 2. How does the Technique Work?: Calendar blocking, what is it if you're new to calendar blocking, it might sound a little bit complicated, but it's actually very simple. Calendar blocking in. It boils down to taking a calendar and blocking periods of time out on it for the work that matters most to you. Now we all know a calendar, how it works. A lot of people have them on their desks. They may even have them in their Notepad, or they may even have an application that allows you to block the time. You can use any of this when it comes to calendar blocking, the technique spans across all of the different tools, but the skill itself can be refined much further, which we'll dig a bit deeper and say, I wanted to start with a quote from Cal Newport, who wrote a fantastic book about deep states of work that will help set the scene for this class. A 40 hour time blocked workweek, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60 plus hour workweek pursued without structure. I really loved this quote because it really defines that actually something more organized, more structured in a calendar can be really much more beneficial than just sporadic and no structure to something. And I think this can be really beneficial when applied to calendar blocking. So very simply, calendar blocking is a technique that you can use to save yourself time and really focus on the time that you have in front of you. And really to block that time on that calendar and to make better use of that. 3. Picking Your Calendar Application: Best Techniques: So creating your calendar experience. Now, we'll talk later in the class all about the planning your full day, sitting down and going through a full day, we calendar blocking. But you might need to find the tool whether that'd be digital or physical, and it is a difficult decision. So I wanted to give you some advice about the selection of what calendar most suits you do. Now, obviously it's gonna be different for all of you. But hopefully this advice spans across the board. For my own experience, I would say the best thing to do is to do your research if you found a calendar application that suits you already, this is fantastic. That's great. News. Calendar applications are hard to find and I guess it's hard to find which one matches you. But the most recommended are the ones that tend to match multiple calendars altogether. If you have a work calendar, personal calendar, or a friend's calendar, this is really helpful if you find the calendar application that brings all of these together and houses under one roof. Now, this is more from a productivity technique in Getting Things Done by David Allen. He recommends to have all of your inboxes in one place and the rule applies here, your events, meetings, and activities are all inbox items, and it's also important to have them under one roof so that you just sign into your calendar application and everything. Is that. And that's really important when it comes to productivity because you don't want to miss anything in your system, especially when it comes to work, personal life, and all other aspects. Obviously, a good calendar application will allow you to switch between them, but having them under one roof is really key. The next thing is color options. Color options are something you think, oh, it's just a design folks, but in calendar blocking, inside of a digital experience, at least, making sure you have a range of colors is actually very, very helpful. This can either be, and we'll talk about this later, associated some of the work you're doing and help you at a glance to see what is coming up on your calendar. Color is a great way to associate stuff in productivity because we can see in advance what we're actually working on, the choice of tools is really important. If you're going with a physical option, I recommend something that's designed more for calendar blocking. There are some great tools out there that are not just no pants, but templatized so that you can get started straight away. There's nothing worse than having to redraw a structure every single day. Although this might be a nice mindfulness practice to start the morning, something that has a structure to it already or a layout that you can use from day one and you can rip the sheets off for the next day is something that will save you time and valuable effort every single day. And the colors still apply in the physical world. Buying some range of colors for some of the activities that you use will help you to allocate and assign things that you do during your day. And we'll come to that later and talk about it with GTD contexts. 4. Understanding Your Limits: Taking Breaks & Overloading: Before we go into the calendar blocking techniques a little bit more, one of the biggest skills to understand and learn is the ability to understand your limits when your calendar blocking, one of the worst things you can do is apply too much pressure to yourself. We look at our calendars and we look at this calendar blocking technique and we go, Let's just fill all of the time up because it's there and I can allocate every 15 minutes. I know what I'm doing. I can open my phone or see it in front of my desk. Every 15 minutes is taken up. And this isn't necessarily the best approach for some people. It helps to have that structure, to see an advance. For a lot of people. It will overload them and cause more anxiety than benefit to your productivity. So one of the first recommendations and skills to learn is to really take it easy with what you actually apply to your blocks. Don't overload your blocks made more intentional, be more meaningful with what you add to your time. If there are gaps, that's potentially good, you might want to add in things like breaks we'll talk about in a moment. But it's just a really healthy practice to make sure you're not snacking or entire week from the moment you wake up all the way to the end. Be very conservative about what you add. Making sure that you get really just breaks and pauses from your mind isn't really healthy practice talking about brakes. Brakes are a great way in calendar blocking to just take yourself away from the desk and take yourself and plan them in. Because one of the biggest things and I was banned for this in the past is actually going across the calendar and not having breaks in because you don't really allocate them to what you're doing. And that can be really beneficial if you're using techniques that you can combine with the calendar blocking process like the Pomodoro Technique. This is something that promotes having breaks When launch tasks that you're working on, tasks that require a lot of time and attention need breaks. There's that role of 202020 or something like that. Where for every 20 minutes to work on, you have to look away from the screen for 20 seconds. That's sort of practice, is exactly the same of brakes. Having those breaks can recharge you as you go into the day. One of the other things so there's beneficial to learn is that meetings aren't necessarily the be-all and end-all. Obviously, sometimes meetings can be detrimental to planning a day. If you've got a day full of meetings, you're likely not going to have time for blocking stuff in your calendar. But the benefit of blocking your calendar is so that you can allocate your time is busy. People can't book meetings with you during those periods of time, so you're working on stuff. This is in particular very good in the workplace when you're trying to focus on certain projects. And you want to get into what Cal Newport calls Deep Work states. Now, it's typical for us when we're working on certain tasks to be looking at different things and switching our mindset, and this is called context switching. It's gone from different things. We're doing, checking our phone, checking e-mails, and that can be really distracting for our workload. So making sure you take regular breaks to be able to do that context switching. But going into states of deep work can be really beneficial. And thinking all of these blocks and focused periods of time is really helpful. So that applies to meetings. So make sure when you're in the settings of your digital calendar application to make sure people know that you're busy. That's one of the best ways to do that digitally. It's harder to do it physically. But I know some people that have had, for example, have a light on their desk or something on their desk or some sort of told them that indicates that they're focusing on something and they shouldn't be distracted during that period of time. Whether that's calling them in for a meeting or asking a quick question, trying to work more asynchronously is something that a lot of people are trying to do. So there were a few of the mistakes that can be really beneficial and skills to learn that will help to improve your calendar blocking. 5. Colour Schemes: How to Use Them with Contexts/Types: Okay, We talked a little bit about colors near the start of this class. And colors can be so useful when it comes to calendar blocking. Now, there's sort of an underrated feature, but you can use colors in a wide variety of ways. So here's an example. Let's say you take the traditional GTD, Getting Things Done by David Allen, a classic nineties productivity book, a technique called contexts where he associates a certain tag to a task. So for example, if you're right e-mail, you could do that in the taxi. Its low energy and it's also pretty easy to do on your phone. So you can associate these tags to it when you're in those contacts situations. For example, you've got your phone, you've got low energy. You're sort of like a relaxed state or you don't, you haven't got the energy to focus on something, then you can start doing that task. And this is something you can apply it to the color system inside of your calendar blocking. So very simply, take your calendar and when you start blocking timeout, you can give your tasks that you put on there or your blocks of time. You can give them color system based on what best works for you. Some people do this with tasks, types of tasks. So for example, you might have like, like me recording. I put them in red because they're quite like those types of tasks. I know that I'm going to have a lot of required energy for them. And I just like having that color system and maybe orange for writing, blue for analytics. For example, you can create a color system that matches a task that you have. You could create it to the context where, for example, you've got your phone or your laptop, you know, by looking at it, okay, I need these different devices for these different situations. Another really effective one is energy levels. So for example, you can have one tasks that are really high-energy levels. And you can have them with red, orange, and blue. You can really change the colors of it suitable for you, but this might give you a heatmap of what energy levels you're working on. And you can move them about based on how your energy is working that day, which is a really effective productivity technique. So take a look at getting things done contexts, and look at applying this scale to Calendar Block. And I think it's really beneficial. And you can adapt this to how best suits your needs. 6. The Different Types of Calendar Blocking: Time Blocking/Batching/Day Themes: So we've talked about calendar blocking and it's weird because calendar blocking is also referred to different things in different spaces. Some people talk about different types of calendar blocking, like time blocking and also Task batching. And I want to distinguish them. And how can you use these skills in sign of calendar blocking to just go that step further. So if you haven't heard Time blocking yet, it's a technique that is used by Elon Musk and a lot of other working professionals to help allocate their time. Essentially, they dedicate three things that they want to work on today. They have an area of the brain dumping for ideas that crop up during the day. But you don't want to take action on and a real half an hour per day allocation of what you're gonna be working on. Now, these tend to work best in physical formats of productivity. So there are some great templates and layouts that you can use in person, but there are also applications that do map to this as well. But this skill of time blocking is not so similar to Nazi, similar or very similar to calendar blocking. It can be used in a similar fashion, but takes two techniques a step further. It helps you to prioritize three tasks that you're working on. Something that you could do with the colored scheme system inside of calendar blocking. And it allows you to have an area for brain dumping something that is actually commonly difficult in the workday because you struggled to find time to be able to just buy stuff on the page. So being able to have that is really, really helpful. So another technique that I mentioned is Task batching, and this can be really helpful for calendar blocking. Something that I do is give my days a theme. Today is a Wednesday. I normally have a good block in the morning, 34 hours where I can focus with the house empty and I can do some recording. I call this my recording day and you can allocate a type of task per day. The reason why you might do this is actually documented really well by Mike Vandy, a calm, another Skillshare creator, but also a productivity expert out there that produces some fantastic content. But he explores this topic of how you can allocate a daily theme and the daily thing can be helpful because say you wanted to start on Monday and you want to just write all day. That can be in different formats like writing a report, writing an article, writing emails. But the act of writing is a task that they're, He's batching. The reason he's doing that is because sometimes there's this physical setup that you need where, for example, you could have to set up the desk for recording, setup the light and space, set up your energy levels, like mapping your energy levels to recording is difficult. And the same writing and the same with analytics, the same with different types of activities that you do. So being able to use a day per one can be really helpful for that. For example, with a writer, you might go to a coffee shop for the day because you work best at and stay there all day. But it gives you this opportunity and flexibility to think, how can I map my tasks fast my day? Now, you might not get this flexibility in our workplace, but it can be really useful for that if it's something you find beneficial. Another technique that we actually created is called the Bento methodology. And it's very simply a technique that helps you to pack your diet and it really maps to calendar blocking. So here's a good example with the Bento methodology. And the methodology, you take a launch, a medium and a small task. Large being something that's heavily creative, something you need a lot of focus for, that's going to take you more than 90 minutes long, immediate task. Some of these routine based, we'll take probably between 4560 minutes long and a medium level of energy. And finally, a 15 to 30 minute task, administration based or personal well-being. Then you can work on during the day, limiting yourself to these three tasks can be super-helpful and the Bento methodology explores this a lot further. However, using this in calendar blocking, being able to allocate a large task and medium ones and small task can be the definition between what you get done being more effective and better for your productivity in terms of more meaningful stuff on your list. To do so, hopefully you found those useful techniques helpful to combine with calendar blocking to extend it further. 7. The Workshop: So this is the final workshop of this class. And what we'll be doing is applying all of the skills that we've learned in a masked inside of this class to teach you how to calendar block inside of a calendar. So I'll be sharing my screen at a moment in which we'll be diving into the calendar app of my choice to look into it a little bit further. Now, Canada applications are pretty wild in terms of the options. But I just wanted to remind you of three important things when choosing one. The first is if they have color-coding systems, this is really helpful for calendar blocking and can be a great way for you to identify whatever you like in terms of context. We'll be showing you that in a moment. The second is multiple calendars is always helpful for making sure you capture everything in one location. And the third concept is essentially making sure it's available on the right devices. If you use your Android phone mostly, and your Windows device, they're making sure they're available on both of those. And sinking is really helpful. Obviously there's some great default ones out there. But we're going to dive into this and inside workshop and really dig a little bit deeper into this scale. So as you can see the screen in front of us, we're using an app called Cron. Now, this is a more recent calendar application, but it's mine of choice for a number of reasons. However, let's start calendar blocking. Now, what I've done is I've skip forward to a week in the future. Now, very simply, I've got a few meetings on here already. You might have more than this. You may have less than this, but it's important to be able to work around these ones and obviously calendar block effectively. Now, the one thing I always recommend, as we've talked about throughout this class, is don't overload yourself. One thing that we tend to do is blocked from the start of the day at five AM all the way to the end, even adding in small elements of our routine like brushing our teeth or maybe like putting the Washington. It doesn't need to turn into a task list. It means to be a cleaner place for you to focus. It's your time. It's not necessarily a task, although these blocks will help you to keep orientated. So let's start with Monday morning. Now, when I'm on a Monday morning, I typically have a lot of energy, but in this case, I've actually only got a two-hour block before a meeting. Now what I'll do is I'll add what I am using is medium-sized calendar blocks. So the difference is with the way I recommend all the way I do it is that I do large, medium, and small based around the Bento methodology, but basically a medium task because I have medium energy, I'm don't have enough time to do something pretty weighty that would be quite substantial before this meeting because I'm traveling into it. So maybe need to adjust that 20 minutes to get there. And I don't really want to necessarily a small one because I have enough time to do a medium-sized tasks or medium-sized block. So what I'm gonna do is simply drag the first hour and 15 minutes, or it could be just an hour. I might want to do something like write medium. And that's for articles. And it's just spell this correctly. So obviously one of the things there that's pretty helpful is I'm allocating not just a task, I'm allocating a type of task. So in this case is right medium. I tend to get three done in this period of time. But you don't want necessarily say, okay, I wanna do two or three. You just want to have a block to be a sort of theme versus necessarily a tangible task. Because you know what you're gonna do in that period of time, and that probably belongs in your project or task manager, in my opinion. So as you can see here, I've got a medium one. I can add the details if I wanted to, if I was avoiding the using of the Task Manager, what I'm gonna do down here is I'm actually going to give this one an orange color. And orange color for me indicates energy levels. So that's my medium energy level. When I got back from the meetings, I'm probably going to have the believers way to get myself back into the day. So I might do some light admin, but I'm going to allocate a pretty big task the afternoon, maybe a 1.5 hour slot to focus on recording. And as I said, I'm trying to keep these verbs generalized. That's how I work, but I'm gonna give this a nice red one indicating that my energy level needs to be higher. After this, you may come back from the meetings and be a bit more relaxed and need something smaller to do. But I tend to like doing a small things in the afternoon. So I'm going to do a clear inbox and use this to work on certain projects that are in my inbox. And you can see yellow has given me an indication that it's the lowest energy. So I've got yellow, Thor, smaller tasks, orange for medium tasks, and red for large tasks. They just helped me to heat map my energy levels across a day. But you can apply this in any context Q1. So for example, if you wanted to put only stuff, say you work in marketing and sales, marketing and rent sales and blue, that could be a good start. You could, for example, want to coordinate. Personal stuff in purple and work stuff in blue. It's really up to you on what's suitable. So you may also want to turn your meetings into a different color. So I could turn meetings green. And this might help to be able to spot them from afar and make sure that I'm doing them in there. Now, one of the things that you might want to do, and we've talked about is adding breaks consistently. Obviously, we don't add every micro break in here where we scroll TikTok or some other social media site. So what we wanna do is put intentional breaks, periods of time when we can actually relax. So in this case, when I come back from this meeting, I might be a little bit, just need a few moments to pause. And what I wanna do is potentially have some lunch. This good time to have lunch. So you may want to add some lunch in there. I might just move my recording 15 minutes for setup time during that period of time. And I might give this an indication of anger, call it green because it's, maybe it's actually a green. That's a bad example. I'm going to put it purple. And you could go into this and repeat this every single day or copy and paste it into the other ones. But it really depends like how you organize your day. I typically say to book a full week in advance, like make sure you have some sort of level of coordination on there. If you have a task manager, you can connect them to to make your calendar blocking easier to do. But obviously you'll still have those tasks titles in there. But as long as you've got the gist of the theme that you're working on, then this can be quite good. So obviously you want to weave in your breaks. You may actually want to put a break here, maybe a shorter one, and condense it down to 15 minutes. So you may be able to put them across your workday and suitably put them there and you can continue into the evening. Let's say you don't necessarily want to you want this time. I know that I'm going to spend time with my son. So I might say auto in the park. And in this case, I'm going to put that purple because it's more of a brake works finished, then, you know, you could go to the end of the day, but there's not much value. The thing that's important is Canada blocking isn't about stuffing your time on here. It's about giving yourself some level of structure so that when it comes to looking at it, you've got a sense of what you're working on thing there's always good points to break and pause. And this is a good example of, say, this day here, it looks pretty fresh. It looks pretty clean. It looks, it doesn't look too overloaded. And the benefits of having this, if you have a calendar that's particularly connected to something like Google Calendar or monks off calendar, you can associate this time being busy. So known to book a meeting with you during these focused deep state periods of time. That's really, really helpful. Now one thing we talked about in this class is the concept of task types and batching. Its concept developed by Mike Varney. But this is very simply implemented by going up to here and tapping it an all day event. So in this case, this might be a create date because I'm writing, I'm recording. Maybe, maybe I could move the inbox out here. And I could put something a little bit different, like a type of task that we'll be creating, like create newsletters just to get my having that mindset. So I might put this as my smaller tasks to do. Heat map it. There we go. So you can get an idea of, okay, this is a Create day now, you could repeat this every single Monday if that's the one you're having and you could even give it a color if you wanted. And the color may be different to the way that he schemed up before. I might put it in here or you can give it a nice emoji. In the top right-hand corner. Said put an art emoji like this, just being able to differentiate the day and know in advance, okay, create days are Monday. Type of tasks is quite helpful. Type of character block type of theme of the day is helpful for them to bump that. So obviously you'd implement this across a week and it just be a great way to coordinate this. So in this case, I might say, Okay, this day might be in an administration day. So I might put strategy workshop with marketing. This could be obviously much more correlated to what you work on with your team. So in this case, that might be my red task and I might break for lunch. So it's really important, in my opinion, it's really important to judge your energy levels across a day. This is related to how well you work. And the best way to do that actually is to get a, A4 piece of paper. And as you go across a day or work week, is to draw a line of where your energy levels are. You'll have some peaks. My typical peaks around 11 AM, and troughs minus one PM my trough, and then it comes back in the afternoon, not as strong as the morning, but 3PM it and then it peaks out for because I had the date typically around that. And so it's important to take that time and basically will take that graph and basically apply it to this concept heat mapping your energy levels will allow you to see, okay, 11:00 AM, I've got the most energy, which means I should work my biggest task or earlier, depending because you're obviously progressing up. Or you could potentially say, okay, that trough, I can work my small ones because I'm not using too much any BJ, but I'm getting stuff done using that methodology. It can actually really, really help to make sure you're not overworking yourself too much. Obviously, it's really dependent on what your team allow you to do. But I would experiment with this concept for a couple of weeks and see how it places you. When I started doing something like this, this skill of embracing energy levels dramatically helped my productivity. So I think I've told you most of the calendar blocking aspects of this, this is really easy to do and can be even faster with the ability to repeat stuff that primarily that's what I recommend for calendar blocking using all of these techniques that we've learned, these skills. And I think you'll embrace it really well. And making sure to really just think work-life balance is all about that energy levels. So it's a new world we're working in with work, so it'll be exciting to see how that progresses. So I hope you enjoyed this calendar blocking workshop. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. But there are plenty more Skillshare classes that we've produced here on Skillshare. Thank you very much. My name is Sam fresco and I'll talk to you soon.