Overview:
- Time blocking is one of the most overlooked practices in all of performance.
- It forces you to actually approach your week with strategy vs shooting from the hip.
- When you look at your weekly view of a calendar you should be optimizing for as little white space on the calendar as possible.
- Today you are going to learn how to time block like an absolute pro.
There are two types of task:
- Task that charge your battery.
- Task that drain your battery.
- Every entrepreneur is different, a task that may fill me up may be something that drains you.
- it is wildly important to have awareness around what types of task fill your cup and what types empty it.
- For example, coaching my team fills me up, I am an extrovert who feeds on social interaction. I am completely drained by things such as accounting, auditing our project management & reviewing meeting notes.
- On the flip side of this let’s look at a different kind of operator, the analytical, numbers-driven type. Inside of the workplace meetings tend to drain them and looking at spreadsheets and playing with financial models is something that gives them energy to keep going.
- I use this as an example because the equation isn’t as simple as are you an introvert/extrovert and are task individual or group task. There is personal context required to truly time block like a champion.
How the Battery pertains to Time Blocking:
- Elite time blocking isn’t just about filling your calendar with shit you need to do.
- Anyone can fill in the blanks, but few people can actually adhere to the plan & execute the strategy effectively.
- This is because when most people start trying to time block they are just filling in the blanks, they aren’t accounting for the most important variable in performance…. the battery.
- If you want to be able to maximize your output you need to structure your schedule based on your battery.
- You need to be aware of when you are going to be drained to a point where charging is required and make sure that a charging task is in place at the right time.
Where this becomes a bit dichotomous:
- Now while it is true that you need to place charging task after a draining task you don’t want to just flip flop every time block because there is a change cost.
- Every time you move from a charging state into a draining state you burn finite energy.
- So it is very important to stack task that require a similar state.
- For example, for me coaching & taking sales calls are basically the same state. So I am going to make sure those blocks are together in order to reduce change cost.
- I will do the same for task that put me in a state that drains me but i will not let this run my battery all the way to empty, i will be aware of where i estimate burnout and move into a charging state before i get there.