Time Blocking

Ouf, what a change!

I’ve been spending some time each weekend blocking out my “ideal week”: categorizing the hours in each day so that I know where to direct my focus.

I start with some casual “coffee time” every morning, for about an hour, where I drink coffee and do whatever creative stuff I want. These days that means watching YouTube or reading a novel. Nothin’ fancy, but it gives me some time to wake up.

Then I have my power hour, where I spend an hour working on important tasks that are not urgent. These are tasks that require substantial effort but don’t need to be completed within the next few days.

And of course this is all before I start my regular 9 to 5, which has its own general “time blocks” specific to my arts admin work.

I find having this semi-structured layout to my day, where I have hour-long blocks dedicated to general tasks, gives my chaotic brain just the right amount of order. I can still be flexible within those hours, of course, and sometimes the subjects I choose to focus on shift and morph into other areas, but the knowledge that my day is planned out in some small way relieves a lot of my anxiety or restlessness.

In addition to all of this, and I think most importantly, I set a “dream goal”: one specific task that I know would make me happy to complete by day’s end. Something that would make me feel good about the day in general.

I gotta tell ya, these small efforts make a big difference.

What sort of organizational methods do you use to make the most of your time?