Time block your schedule to get more done in a day!

All right, you better get ready to figure out what you're going to be doing with all of your free time, because I'm about to show you how time blocking your schedule is going to give you more time in your day. Hi, my name is Trena, and on this channel, I help creative entrepreneurs just like you figure out how to use YouTube in your business strategy. Now, if you're anything like me, your to do list is constantly growing, right? It seems like when you get one thing done, there's three more things to do. Well, there's one strategy that I have found that helps me kill my to do list and actually have free time at the end of the day. This little secret to my free time is called time blocking or calendar blocking. And before we jump into how I do this to save time in my day, I want to go through a couple guidelines. The first thing that you've got to do is write everything down that you have to do. I tend to like to sit down on a Sunday and write everything down. I look at my Google Calendar to see what appointments that I have. I look at my clients to see what tasks they need done. I look at my business to see what tasks I need to get done. If there is an appointment for the kids, I write everything down kind of on a brain dump list. The next thing you need to do is really figure out which of these tasks are similar. For me, all of my business stuff tends to be similar, but it's not just my business stuff. It's do I need to write newsletters? If I'm going to write newsletters, I'm going to save a chunk of time to write more than one newsletter so I can get them done. My brain is going to be in that mindset. And so if I'm thinking about that particular task, I want to stay in that task as long as possible to be as effective with my time as possible. That's also why I batch a lot of these videos. So when I'm researching my content, I block about two to three hours of time in my week to research because my mind is in research mode and I want to stay there. I don't want to go from research mode to scripting mode to filming mode to editing mode. I want to do one particular task in one day. That's why I then film all these videos on one day. Because I've got to do hair and makeup. I've got to set things up, and I'm just in a better groove if I shoot multiple videos at one time instead of doing One off here and one off there where I'm never really getting into the video filming mode. I also want you to start thinking about some of the mundane tasks that you do every single day to put into your calendar. Because if you are time blocking, it's important to make sure every minute is accounted for so you know what you're doing. So this includes your morning routine, your exercise routine, if there's self care that you try to do every single night, if you have to prepare for dinner, these are all certain tasks that need to be incorporated into your calendar. And then once you start thinking about all these major tasks, whether they're family tasks, business tasks, blog writing tasks, start color coding these. Now before you start getting confused, let's jump onto my computer so I can show you how I do this on Google Calendar. Again, the first thing I do is write it out all on paper because it's just more rewarding for me to get everything out of my head. It makes it easier for me to organize then on my Google Calendar. So the first thing you want to do is get a fresh Google Calendar out. Whether you want to name it, you know, block scheduling or time blocking, just get a new Google Calendar. Then the first thing you want to start with is the things you do the same every single day. So wake up time for me is 5am yes, that's early. But with two kids you gotta try to get what you can get done in the morning. I also give myself a little bit of grace. So wake up anywhere between 5 and 5:30 and then you can click more options and you can change the color if you want. I'm going to make it a nice sunny yellow and I also want this to repeat every weekday. So every Monday through Friday I'm getting up at 5 to 5:30. Then I've been really working on exercising so I'm going to schedule, yes, schedule in exercise time. I like to try to get it in before the kids get up. Now that they are consistently sleeping at a certain schedule, I can start to get these into my day. It hasn't always been this way, but we are getting better. So I'm going to schedule in my exercise time and then the other thing that I always do is lunch for me is always at 11:30. I'm just hungry by then. So I'm going to schedule my lunch in again. I'm going to go into the more options, change the color and I only usually take about a half hour for lunch and it works for every weekday. You can start to see how you can See what works in your schedule. For me, I like to log off by four and six preparing dinner and eating dinner. And it's usually about two hours by the time we're done with dinner. And it's just time to spend with my family to not get on the phone, to not be on the computer. And again, right now I'm just focusing on every weekday. Now things get a little bit different. As any mom knows, there's different schedules for different days. And on Mondays and Wednesdays I'm home without the kids and on Tuesdays and Thursdays my mom is here watching the kids and and she doesn't get here till 8:30. So I gotta block this time off for my kids from 6:30 until 8. She actually gets here at 8 and I'm gonna block that off. And this gets a little custom here. So you want to go up here to custom and click Tuesday, Thursday, because that's for me the days my mom comes, when she does get here, this is when I have time to get ready. And then I take my daughter to preschool at 9:15. So get ready. This goes from 9:30 to 9:15. This includes if I need to eat breakfast or take a shower or those types of activities. This is gonna fuss with me. So if you have a more specific time you can go to more options. Come up here and type in 9:15. And again this repeats on a custom time. So Tuesdays and Thursdays I forgot the Y already. Then I take my daughter to preschool and we're going to make this more custom. So it's going to be 9:15 and it repeats on Tuesday, Thursday. Now from this time 9:45 and the rest of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays are one particular client. So I'm going to go in here and add that client to make this custom again because it won't Let me do 945 on the homepage. I actually just work with him the entire day so I'm going to block off the entire day for him. Change the color. I just like to color code things so I can see things better. I know what's going on. Not Friday, Tuesday, Thursday. Yes, I do have lunch in there. So that's blocked out. But this is my time for him. Now you can start to see where blocks of time happen. I need to add in get ready time on Mondays and Wednesdays and it repeats on Mondays and Wednesdays and I like on Mondays, Monday mornings getting the biggest thing done. Since this is the first of the month, this might be me setting goals or me analyzing the month prior to. So you could do that in a chunk of time. But I'm going to do something more general here and I'm going to save this time for content creation. So newsletter content, blog content, social media content, so it all fits together and I'm in that zone of genius for this particular time. So, so content creation. I'm going to do that all morning. I'm just going to block this entire morning off to get my month's worth of content done. And then in the afternoon, I want to spend some time checking in on my email and my social every week. And I'm actually going to try to do this from 12 to 12:30 every day. I need to add it into Tuesdays and Thursdays. I didn't do that. But I think it's going to work best if I do the same time every day and I know what to expect every day and so do people who are emailing me. I need to find something to do on the afternoon. I'm going to go to that list, that brain dump list that we had, what was a chunk of tasks that you had that fit similar together. So for me, this might be client strategy. Now, this doesn't mean one particular client, it just means all my clients. I'm going to be doing the strategy for them during this time. So I'm going to focus on this the rest of the day until 4 o'. Clock. I'm just in that strategy mindset. I'm not bouncing back and forth to different tasks and I'm going to work through their strategy on that day. On Wednesdays, I like to schedule time for calls. So let's say, you know, call number one starts at 8am and I generally save an hour for those and then the next one is at nine. Again, this just allows me to get into a mindset that these are calls. So then I have a little chunk of time right here, 30 minutes. And I also have a chunk of time right here, 30 minutes. So what do I need to do that I can do in 30 minutes? Right, right here. The afternoon might be filming YouTube videos. I know I want to get my content done for the month. So film YouTube videos that I prepped back here in content creation. And we're going to do that for the rest of the day on Wednesday. You can also go into your evenings. For me, seven o' clock every single night is the best time of night. It's bedtime and bath time for the kids. So I'm going to go ahead and put that in my calendar. So it's just there. You want to just schedule as much of your time as possible so that you don't leave anything out of your schedule, right? You want to make sure every minute is accounted for so that you aren't missing out on some time. And then for me, I like to be in bed by 9 o'. Clock. So bedtime. This is where I jump into bed, get ready, listen to a podcast, read a book and get to sleep. And this seriously happens just about every single day, no matter if it is weekday or week night. So I'm going to pop that in there. And then one other thing important to incorporate maybe once or twice a week is some self care. So let's add some self care time in here. I want to. It only needs to be about a half hour for me and I want that to be on Tuesdays and let's say Fridays. So Tuesdays and Fridays, just so you're having that and you're not forgetting about yourself for the weekends. What my schedule looks like is I like to plan laundry at the beginning of the day. Let's get that out of the way and, and schedule enough time so I can do it and get it put away, right? That's the hardest part is getting it put away. So I'm gonna block off three hours on Saturday to do that. And then the other thing I like to get done is clean the bathrooms because that's the worst job, right? So I'm gonna take about a half hour to do that. We only have two full baths and one half bath, so I can generally get that done in the afternoon. And then you can just start blocking out your weekends. The reason why I don't have anything on Fridays is that's my kid and family day. It's nighttime to spend with my kids and every other Friday my husband has off. So I like to leave this free so we can do whatever we need to do. But the rest of the week, as you can see, is very detailed so that I know exactly what I need to be doing for how long and staying in that mindset to get as much done as possible. So some of the similar things that might work well together are client time, maybe a block, content creation, email time, social media, engagement time, monthly reports, so financial reports, YouTube analytics, blog analytics calls, editing your videos, research time. For me, kid bedtime and bath time is the same every day and even scheduling your lunch. And then some things that we don't even think about are our weekend tasks. I know you don't want to schedule anything on your weekends, but Think about it. If you have on your schedule when you're supposed to do laundry, when you're supposed to clean, it just helps you get into that routine. So you're constantly doing it and never having to catch up and have this massive amount of things to do. Minimizing your to do list. Then you've got to set your timers, right? So if you are turning off your phone and you know that you're doing content creation for the next two hours, set a timer, get a simple oven timer or a kitchen timer set, you know, 120 minutes or whatever you want to set and stay in that mindset. Don't get distracted. You're going to get more done if you stay in that task without any type of distractions. One little added bonus is every day I like to sit down in the morning and do a big thing. 3. So I actually save this in my time blocking. So it's 15 minutes, I sit down, I think about what are my big three. So I know I've got something done. That way I can look back at my week and see all of these things that I got done. So many people have asked me that question, how do you get so much done? And it's just using your time as effectively as possible if you can schedule it all out. I know it seems kind of crazy. You're going to get more done. And trust me, I've tried so many different ways to get things done on my to do list. I've crammed it to the max where I've hardly even gotten anything done on it by the end of the day. And this strategy has been the most effective way. And when people ask me, how do you get so much done? How do you do so much? This is the strategy I use now. If you want to continue to learn how to use YouTube in your business, particularly, make sure you click that video on your screen right now. Or grab the YouTube launch roadmap that's on your screen as well so you can get started using YouTube for your business. Thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video. Bye.