Okay, so we’ve talked about time blocking your day and your week for success, but how far can you really time block out and still make it effective? Well, turns out, you can time block a lot of things pretty far out. I set up my calendar for the entire year, but I’m a crazy person, and anyway, that’s beside the point.
If you are just trying out time blocking and finding some success, you might consider time blocking a whole month out. You already know your deadlines, your fast and slow days, when your manuscript is going to arrive back from your editor. You know when you’re going to have family in town, when your next dental appointment is, and hopefully you also know your next vacation.
If you already know all of that in advance, why not block it all out?
This video is a little bit longer (about 28 minutes), but will be useful to you whether you are already using Google Calendar, Excel, use a different calendar app, write your calendars out by hand, or if you don’t currently use a calendar at all. If you want to skip to the introduction and get straight to the meat of the video, go to 3:00:
I love using Google Calendars because, I can use different calendars and turn them on and off accordingly, and I can drag and drop if I need to reschedule, or if I have time and want to get something done earlier in the week.
I also love that you can see large chunks of space where, all weeks being about equal, there is nothing planned.
And one more thing to note: My week and month tends to get less full the further into it I get. This is ideal because, as we learned about frontloading your schedule a few weeks back, you build in the space you need in case you have an emergency come up on a Tuesday and have to fix it ASAP.
