Get More Done With Calendar Blocking

Are you ready to be more productive so you can finally take that three day weekend you've been dreaming of taking? Let me show you how. Hi, welcome back. My name is Trena and I am a YouTube strategist. I run my own business, I have clients, I have students. Oh, and by the way, I have two kids, ages 2 and 4 and a husband. So there are a lot of things that I need to do in the day to make sure everybody is happy. So I totally get that. You're to do list is probably, let's be real, miles long. But the thing that I found out that really helped me get more done is when I started incorporating calendar blocking into my schedule. Now we're going to break through a couple guidelines about calendar blocking and I'm going to show you how you can do this as well. But this has really changed the way that I do things and how I can get so much done. I do it on Google Calendar because I want things electronically so they're easy to move because life happens, things change and I don't like erasing and scribbling things out. First guideline I want you to realize is something is going to take as long as you set time to do it. So let's say you Want to shoot four YouTube videos and you set an entire day to do it. Well, it's going to take you that entire day to shoot those videos because you gave that day that much time to do it. So what I suggest doing is try to cut that time in half. If you want to shoot four YouTube videos that say you're gonna do it in just these two hours, that's gonna save you time the rest of the day to tackle those other things on your to do list. So remember, if you're giving a full day to do just one task, that one task is going to take you all day. So think about what realistically you could do to complete that and how long that will really take you. The next guideline is everything needs to be on the calendar. Everything. You go look at your to do list, you see you have laundry, you have a client call, you need to send a newsletter, you need to up YouTube video. All of those are to do's that need to have a chunk of time scheduled on your calendar. You even need to have a chunk of time on your calendar for when you wake up when you're making dinner. All of these things are going to fit into this calendar blocking system. Alright? The next guideline is you have got to get digital. I love a planner as much as the next person. But by going digital is where you're really going to see the change and the productivity. Now, I love my simplified planner to really plan out my week. I sit down with it on Sunday and write things down. But the key is to taking everything that's written down and getting it on Google Calendar. By being in Google Calendar, it allows me to block chunks of time off, to be able to focus on the task that I want to do and not have people scheduling calls. It also allows me to easily move things around when life inevitably happens. So if a kid gets sick at school, school or a babysitter can't watch that day, I can see where things are and where I can move them as opposed to on paper. Another guideline is you need to do what your schedule says you need to do. So you're going to take the time to make this schedule. You have to actually abide by it. So if you have a time chunk that says you're going to be working on emails and replying, you need to be working on emails and not picking up the phone and scrolling through the gram, you have to commit to doing what you set to do during that time. Another guideline is to color code things. I like to have color coded things for client phone calls for kids, stuff for family stuff for my business stuff for YouTube stuff. Everything is color coded. So when I can see my week in a glance, I can see what I'm doing each day. And I like to do similar tasks on similar days. So a lot of my calendars will see a lot of one color on one day, a lot of another color on another day. Because I'm focusing on batching similar tasks together on the same day. And the final step before we jump on over to the computer and I show you how to actually start doing this is to batch, batch, batch. The only way for you to see progress with your to do list and with your productivity is to batch similar tasks together. Like I was saying earlier, you want to batch all your YouTube filming on this day, you want to batch all your newsletter writing on this day. You want to batch all your client phone calls on this day. Because what happens is when you shift your mindset from task to task, you're actually losing IQ points. So when you go from shooting YouTube videos over to taking a client call that's coaching them or consulting with them, you're shifting mindsets and you're shifting that brain wave so you're losing IQ points and it's going to take you longer to get into that phone call. That client may not get all of you focused there because you're still tying up those thoughts you had from filming. So try to batch similar tasks together. All right, let me show you how you can start calendar blocking on your Google Calendar, right? So the first thing you want to do is obviously get a Google account so you can do Google Calendar and start a new calendar. You can see I have a bunch of different calendars. So I have my business calendar, editorial calendar, YouTube bootcamp launch. I also have Google calendars from other people as well. So they can put this all on here. The first thing I want you to do is go ahead and add in your workout time. This is going to be essential. If you don't put it on your calendar, it's not going to happen. So. So I'm going to go ahead and do workouts and each week I will go in and actually add the workout that I want to do. So routine. But I just do that every single week on Sundays when I'm planning my weeks out. But for now I'm just blocking this time as workout and also morning routine. My morning routine consists of working out, meditating and journaling. I'm going to go ahead and save that. I'm going to go into more options and it's going to repeat every weekday from 5am to 6am and I'm going to make the color green. We're going to color code things here, remember? So every weekday 5am to 6am so we're going to head and save that. And it's already in there. Now what I want you to do is decide when you want to go to bed. And my family has a pretty consistent bedtime at 9 o'. Clock. I'm also going to put in there a buffer to start getting ready for bed because I have children. So I'm gonna add in bedtime and I'm gonna make it 8:30 to 9:30 because by the time we get everybody's PJs on, teeth brushed, all of that goodness, it's 9:30 by the time we get to bed. So this is going to repeat and we're just gonna focus on the weekdays for right now. So every weekday and I'm going to go ahead and make this green as well, just to make it sandwich the morning wake up routine. So now we have from 8:30 until 6 to fill in what we need. The next thing I'm going to do is I am going to click on my appointment scheduler. This is going to start to filter in when I already have commitments for so when I click on this, I'm going to see when I already have appointments for this week. Now the next thing I'm going to do is add in commitments that I know I have. So every Tuesday and Thursday is pretty preschool. And I prefer to take my daughter to preschool. She has to be there by 9 o'. Clock. So we need to block some time right here, preschool. And we're going to make sure it's for this particular calendar and we're going to go into more options. I like to make my family stuff yellow so it stands out. I need to block this time because I know it takes me about 10 minutes to get her to school and 10 minutes back. So that gives me buffer and it repeats on Tuesday and Thursday every week. And then we'll save that. And then I prefer to go pick her up so I block the time there. She gets picked up at 11. All right. So you see, I already have conflicting schedules. I wasn't able to block this in enough time and make myself busy. So if you go in here and you go to edit, you can make yourself busy and if it's connected to your scheduling. So I use acuity. Nobody can actually book you when you're busy, busy. So I didn't get that in on time. So my mom's just gonna have to pick her up from preschool that day. The next thing I'm going to add in is when I shut down. So every day between 4 and 4:30, I'm going to be wrapping up the things that I need to get done, cleaning up my desk and getting ready to transition to mom time. So I'm going to put shut down again. We're going to make sure we go into more options. I am going to change it to to every weekday from 4 to 4:30. It needs to be on the right calendar. And again, this is kind of family time for me. So I'm going to go ahead and save that in yellow. Now this is the time that I have for work. I know that I have a call every Monday at 10:45. I like to make my business task purple. So I'm going to go ahead and save that for coaching. And I also have a call for YouTube for creatives, my membership. Every Wednesday we're gonna do that repeats weekly on Wednesdays, make it purple. Now the one thing that I do have a little bit of free space is in the mornings here, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if you have kids, you may never know when they're getting up. And so while my workout routine is 5 to 6am I may have from 6 to 7 as 5 free time to work on something or read. Or I might have a child up at 6am so I will kind of leave this as open space on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I'm just going to go ahead and clock that as open. And we're going to make that a different color so that I know I may or may not have this time in my day to schedule something. So if I put something there, it needs to be something that doesn't have to get done, but something I would like to get done. This could be something like reading a book or maybe watching YouTube videos or researching. We're going to do this every Tuesday and Thursdays just so again, I know that the kids are home again on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Kids at home. And my mom does not get here to babysit until 8 when I have to start getting Nora ready for school. So we're going to go in here again and we're going to make this yellow for family time. And. And this is gonna bump right up with preschool. So we're gonna take it out to 8:30 again. And this is going to be a custom on Tuesdays and Thursdays so you can see how your week starts to get filled up. I also have a call every week here, so team meeting from 12:30 to 1, and that's with a specific client. So I'm gonna make that the client's color. So I know. And it repeats weekly on Tuesday. So knowing and adding these weekly things in, it'll make it a lot easier. So when you bump to the 15th, a lot of this stuff is already in here so that you don't have to keep creating this over and over again. This is going to be the most difficult part in starting your calendar. Blocking is getting in those routines that happen every single week. Then you don't have to create them for the weeks following because they're already in there. Okay, now here comes the nitty gritty. You want to take a look at your brain dump of the tasks you want to get done this week. You should have grouped those tasks together into similar tasks so you can start batching them. So for me on Monday, I had all my videos script and I knew I needed to shoot them. So I knew from 7am on Monday until about 11 I was blocking that for shooting videos. Again, this is my business. So it's going to be purple and this I knew I had about 10 videos to shoot, so I was taking it up to 11 and now it's blocked. I also know that by 11 I'm going to get hungry. So at 11 till 11:30 I'm going to add in a lunch. Yes, I know that's an early lunch, but I also eat breakfast at 6am so by 11:30 I am hungry. So I'm going to block this in and I'm going to make this yellow red so that I know I need to stop here. And my lunch may shift from day to day. Like this day lunch might be at noon, this day lunch might be after one. My lunch just always changes. But make sure that you do have your lunch breaks in there or you won't end up eating or take a break. And you really need to take care of yourselves when you're working. So now I know I've got this chunk of time before I start shutting down. I just talked with my manager and I know we're gonna have a meeting at 3. So meeting with manager. We are going to make this again my business and it's only going to be about a half an hour and now I know I need to add some time for email. Again you don't want to be checking your email throughout the day. You want to set specific time to do email. So I'm going to go ahead and do email right after lunch and I'm going to block off probably an hour. Since it is Monday and email may be a little bit heavy from the weekend, I'm gonna go ahead and just block an hour for email and be done with email for the day. Now I have from 12:30 to 3 I'm gonna actually block this for video editing. I have a couple clients videos I need to edit. So I'm gonna do video editing here. And since this is client work, I'm gonna go ahead and make this blue and we're gonna extend this up until my meeting that I have because. Because that's gonna be the best use of my time is probably. I know my brain is a little bit dead from shooting videos and so editing doesn't involve as much brain capacity. Now from here I have this little chunk of time right here. I'm gonna go ahead and do Facebook response. I have a membership site so I'm gonna go into the Facebook group that we have and I'm gonna go ahead and answer all their questions until it's time for me to shut down. So I'm gonna save that time for membership site. By 4:30 I'm gonna start getting dinner ready. So start with dinner. We're gonna make sure this is for the entire week right here. So every weekday. And then we're gonna eat dinner again. This is just so you know exactly what you're doing. This is so your calendar doesn't get super crazy. You're making sure you're putting time in for what you need to put time in. You don't have to get this detailed. But for me it works. It keeps me balanced and it lets me know every single thing that I need to do. And then from here until 8:30, it's family time. So now you can see how one day is booked up. Now let's look at a Tuesday where my day is a little bit chopped up and what can I do? So I have a little bit of time between 9:30 and 11. So I'm going to look at my thing. I know I have some invoices and some reports that I. I'm going to pop in here and write, send monthly reports and invoices because I know you know this isn't going to take a whole lot of brain power. If I do need to get up and do something quickly, it's not really going to affect it. And I know I can probably get this done in an hour and then we can add some email right here since I have a half hour left. Remember my business stuff is purple and it's only a half an hour right here. I'm going to eat lunch right here before this team meeting. So add lunch, making sure that stands out so I know to actually eat lunch. And then we have from 1:30 to 4. So I have some editing and I also have a strategy to do and that's for one particular client. So I'm going to go ahead and block this time for that client. All right. And since this client work, I'm going to go ahead and block it as blue and we're going to take that through the day. That's what I'm going to be working on through the afternoon. Now Wednesdays start to get a little hairier because I generally leave from 8am until 2 open for client calls. So I have that linked on this calendar right here, the Trina Little llc. And if I click on that, you can see where I do have client calls. I didn't use this particular calendar for you to see everything since it was already done. So you'll see that this is a client call that I already have and it was set up through acuity. And you can see as you start blocking things on Google Calendar, you can link your Google Calendar to acuity so when somebody books with you, they can't book when you're busy. That's why I talked about adding that you were busy for these certain things. So nobody can book calls. I leave this open so that clients can book calls in my acuity scheduler. So you see I have some open time here at 1. I have some open time here at 11:30 so my clients and my coaching clients can get some time with me. So what I might do for this particular time frame is take a look at what client calls that I do have. Since I have one here at 9:30. I don't allow people to book with me the week of just because I am so specific on my calendar. I plan on Sundays and so if somebody comes in and books something on Monday, it's totally going to mess up this whole week. So if you don't have something on my calendar by Sunday, the rest of the week is blocked for you and you can try again on that next week when I have open availability. So now you can see how from 5am until 9:30 your entire day is blocked out again. Here's a chunk of time that I could spend on editing videos, developing strategies, working on email funnels, tweaking my sales page, creating new content for YouTube for creatives, and blocking from 6am until 93 hours of really focused work. Then again, I have a chunk of time here from 1 to 4 three hours of focused work. I do have some fluidity time. So like this is open. I also may leave this chunk of my time open for any overflow. So if there's something that I need to get done and it doesn't get done, I tend to leave Thursday afternoon open. I will block this as overflow. So if something did get blocked on my calendar and it didn't get done, I just have time to do it here. And if I don't have any overflow, I will spend this on administrative tasks like taxes or cleaning out my email inbox just so that I have that space that allows me to move into my weekend without tasks on my to do list. Because again I do not work on Fridays. I For me it's important to just work Monday through Thursday. So Fridays are absolutely blocked for my family. Now if you're interested in getting more done by Getting up at 5am, check the video that's on your screen right now because I did a video a couple weeks ago on how I started getting up at 5am as a non morning person and I hope it helps you out. So make sure you subscribe to this channel before you jump over there and I'll see you over in that other video.