Let Time Blocking set you free!
At Upways Accountability Coaching, we start the conversation with your core life values. What are your top priorities at this time? Most common responses are health and wellness, career and income, family and friends. Faith and spirituality. Pursuing their bucket list or a big long-term goal. Next we create their Life Pie, a foundational coaching tool that is the baseline for the work that comes next. And that next vital step is time-blocking.
WHAT IS TIME BLOCKING?
With few exceptions, the practice of time-blocking is among the most life-changing tools in a coach’s playbook. Not only is it shown to reduce feelings of anxiety, fatigue, and ambivalence, it also directly aligns a person’s daily activities with their core life values. Also called task-batching or day-theming – time-blocking is a highly-effective time management tool that helps define your top priorities and then divide your daily activities into “blocks” that more directly align with them. And since the way we spend our time quite literally dictates how much we’ll accomplish, the time-blocking habit puts you back in the driver’s seat and gets you moving ahead with more focus and clarity and opens more time for the people and activities you love most. It’s a practice that results in greater freedom!
HOW IT WORKS: FOUR STEPS
Step One: Name your top life priorities
As we mentioned above, this is the first step we take with new coaching clients. We affirm your core values and define your top priorities. We listed examples of these above. This process sets us up for step two.
Step Two: Assessing and resetting your schedule
Once we know your core values, we review both your short and long-term plans, and we examine your daily activities. This helps us assess the way you spend your time now - before we set up your intentional time-blocking schedule. This process reveals the less-productive, less-essential activities in your days, and this is where we’ll find time for your top priority activities. We’ll block the time to support them instead.
There will be tweaks and corrections along the way but just beginning this resetting process is already a practice in shifting your mindset to a progress-focused state. You’ll spend less time with procrastination and ambivalence, and more time on goal-oriented activities. It’s exhilarating.
Step Three: Set your time-blocks
We call the third step the “action step”. We’ve confirmed your priorities, assessed your current schedule, and now it’s time for time-blocking. Choosing and setting your time-blocks is the most visually validating step of all; it feels affirming and hopeful. There are several ways to set up your days, but the best way to time-block is the way that works best for you! We mentioned day-theming and task-batching earlier. Some clients color-code their blocks – red for urgent, blue for fun or personal time, green for mealtime, etc. This is a color-coded task-batching model. Others block by the day – a popular practice with retired and remote-working clients. Mon/Wed/Fri might be work-blocked days. Tues/Thurs/Sat might be personal and family days. See examples below of these models. To reiterate, the model that works best for you is the model you should use.
Step Four: Stay the course. Adjust as needed
By step four you are actively time-blocking! Congratulations! Is it going to feel awkward? Absolutely. Annoying and frustrating? Yep. This is a life-changing habit - a simple model but a major mindset shift you’re embarking on here. It’s why most people hire a life coach to get them started with the process; to provide the expertise and encouragement most find helpful with transitions like this. In the first few weeks you will witness in real time what works well and what doesn’t. You’ll make the changes you want and then you’ll keep moving forward. (We call it “practice” for a reason). And as life’s inevitable distractions and intrusions dare to throw you off course, we have you pad in a few “mini-blocks” to make space for these to-be-expected hiccups. So when a meeting runs late or your child gets sick or your tire goes flat, these open blocks will give you breathing room. These are a few of the time-protecting tricks that your coach can provide along the way.
A bonus benefit of blocking
So as we wrap up this blog, we want to leave you with some icing on the cake. An added bonus for all that hard work! In addition to aligning your days with your top priorities and creating more quality time where once there was little, time-blocking creates the added benefit of healthier boundaries with your friends and family. Because as you get focused on your core life values and immediate goals, you will naturally become more protective of the time it takes to achieve them. And as you enjoy these better boundaries and more quality time with the people and activities you value most, well guess what? You are back in the driver’s seat again. This is how time-blocking sets you free.
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