Hello folks, welcome back to the Keep productive youtube channel now you might be
Struggling this week with being able to create some form of schedule or routine
And naturally that can be quite tricky to do you may be using a task manager?
But finding that a little bit difficult to obviously take advantage of some people don't work
Well with task managers so in today's video
We're gonna be giving you a bit of an overview of how you can use
Calendar blocking now calendar blocking is a well received technique. It's very simply blocking out your calendar
Now we're going to show you a few
Processes or little hacks that could make your calendar blocking a little bit more efficient
we're gonna jump onto the calendar over on the Mac and give you all that you need to know so hopefully
You'll be able to counter block like a master. Anyway, folks. Let's dive into today's video
So here we are on Google Calendar and I will use this one for demonstration purposes
Naturally, you can use whatever you want. Apple calendars a good one
I use the majority my time a woven which I really like is calendar application
But you can see that it can work on pretty much any experience now as you can imagine
There's a lot of different ways of doing this
The first way you can do it is by start doing it per day if your day
varies a lot
You may want to just do this
For the week ahead or just for the next few days or even for the day that you're preparing?
So for example, you may do something like this as you can see
I'm on the 8th of April. I may for example go ahead and plan at the 9th of April
so in this case
I may drag a new event
and as you can see
It's a very simple way to start adding an event and you can do this with the majority of calendar applications
That you have now in this period of time you may want to say meditate and of course
You can select the calendar that you're on but the best way to be able to color
distinguished from other tasks is by going into more and
selecting a different color
so in this case
I may want blueberry tasks for my health and I can press save
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to populate the day as if I was planning the day ahead and then I'll show
You the other method in which you can do?
So here we are I've gone ahead and planned a day and you can see this is pretty much the calendar blocking
Technique I can plan a day ahead. And this is not necessarily
Recurring so the second way you can do this is if you have a routine that you know is going to be recurring
For example, you may have set up a weekly routine
under this isolation and you want to be able to
Have that set in your calendar then all you have to do is go into these tasks
in for example, the Google Calendar is press edit and then go to
Repeat and press daily. Now. If I go ahead and save that you can see that that task is replicated across a day
so if there's any specific events that you have this is a good way to actually
Repeat them and copy them daily and you can add even to avoid weekends and details such as that
So there are two ways of doing it to be clear. You can plan your day or days ahead even your week and
Manually, which might take more time but might be a bit more
Fine-tuned and a bit more respective of some of the activities you already have in your calendar
Or you can go ahead and create these repeat options for your entire calendar
Now during that feature
What actually did was I created a few color options particularly in Google Calendar?
You can see that although this is my main calendar francesco
Which is dark blue I could go in and change the color options
I'm pretty sure you can do this on the majority of calendar applications
But in this case, I actually selected it that green was a health activity
That yellow was a bit of work activity and light blue
Was for personal time and you can see here that I set that out
And what a lot of people like to actually do is go ahead and see those colors because it helps them to distinguish
What the day looks like ahead and almost prepares them mentally
so all they'd have to do is go to that color option and
I probably would change meditate to health and you can see there that that happens there
so what's nice is if you open your mobile device you could see the day ahead and
What's good is if you have a calendar that sense notifications, you'll get reminded that these things are coming up
So you'll be able to get naturally the notifications that you need to prepare for the next activity
now during this period of time you've used something like the Pomodoro method to
Hone down on your time and make a little bit more efficient working in 25 minutes tense
To work make the most and work during this editing time
Now one of my biggest recommendations is to put out some time. That is a hefty bit of time. It's for deep work
It's for uninterrupted work. Now. You may be someone has regular meetings
So you may have much smaller
periods of time that go block in and block out which is absolutely fine to do but if you wanted some
Uninterrupted time for deep work say you're studying or you're doing something very intense that demands a lot of attention
Then that's the better way to do it now
Some people actually like to have this blocked out to the maximum allowing them to touch each other allowing them to touch
The sides of each of the blocks and that is a very popular technique and that's really to really take advantage of your time
so make sure that you go into settings and check how long
The meetings are set. So for example with me
It doesn't actually it gives me 10 minutes buffer time between meetings as I'm using these so it won't necessarily
Go all the way from twelve fifty to one
that might be quite useful to give yourself a little bit of a pause or a break now if you're someone that has a
95 workday still and you're working from home. You may want to use the colors in a different fashion
So for example, let's say with this day. You may want to dedicate a color per client. So for example, I could say
So for example, let's just Chuck on a few projects
So as it said, I may want to go into settings and change this to a different color per client
I'm working with so for example, this one could be different and I could go in and
Be able to associate the color of the project to what I'm working on the day ahead which might be a good
visual representation for some people one thing I've seen recently is people making their
Calendars a lot more attractive by adding the Mochis
It's a nice way to be able to add some sort of eye colorization some brightness to your calendar
So on Mac
all you have to do is press command control space and here I can add in a picture of a
Video camera as an emoji go ahead and press space and save
So that appears up there very nicely
Now in my application like woven I can go ahead and create templates
Which allow me to produce these meetings more regularly and I can just go ahead and press
The template button and it will reproduce that pretty rapidly without necessarily me having to recreate them
Every single time which you may do
inside of Google Calendar now if you wanted to you can go ahead and
Duplicate this which may make it easier
For example if I wanted to go and choose a separate time and be able to put that time in there
So that's one way that you can save a bit of time
So I noticed that some people do like to actually time blonk using intensity
so for example, they may want to have for example green tasks as their relaxation and
Red tasks as more intense activities. So let's go ahead and show you what that would look like
So as you can see here this might be a way to
manage the intensity of the day
You don't have to do it for say meetings because you may not be able to judge the intensity of a meeting
But you might want to do it for tasks and many people use calendar blocking as a way to
Line up the next task for the day and you can connect it
Especially with Google Calendar with applications like to do it
I know that recently fantasti re added that connection, but it's a good way to be able to associate tasks to it
But you can actually technically use this as a form of task management
Now I've shown you the long winded way on Google Calendar
But all you have to do is double tap on this and actually you can change the color icon just from here
It's not too difficult
Okay, so of course when you're creating
An experience like this. It may be different in the application
So I just wanted to briefly show you how that looks like inside of woven
This isn't sponsored my woven but it is their application that I use as my go-to
Experience so you can see that if I was doing it in Google Calendar
It would associate to what I have here in front of me
So obviously that syncs pretty well with Google Calendar
Now the one thing that you can do is go over to templates here and begin creating
templates for the certain activities you may do and be able to quickly add them in so I want to go here and create a
Template in this case. I may want to add a coffee shop. For example
And
As you can see I've added it really easily as a template
so now for example if I go ahead and press new event and
I type in coffee shop as that comes up as a template
I can quickly go ahead and add that as a template and press
schedule so we can go inside of the template and actually
Modify a bit of the details for example adding a different color of the item the location and a bit more details
so it's almost like having a google calendar template quickly accessible with all of the details that you traditionally go with and
I will be setting up my own proper templates very soon
so obviously this calendar blocking concept has been used pretty regularly and it's not something that
Some people get on with for example
I work very well with task management applications, but I know some people work well with calendar applications at the same time
So there's a lot of conversation about these
Hybrid applications and I've got two that I wanted to recommend to you folks. The first is one called Sun Sarma
I always recommend this for those who are looking to create daily tasks and
Also be able to see the day that it's associated to it
works sort of like blending Trello and todoist but with a calendar like experience and you can go ahead and prioritize on
Organize your day based on that and what's nice is you can actually manage how that looks in your calendar per
timeslot as well
And I know that some people also like the the action of clicking
Into a task and be able to actually tick that item off
Now the second toy I wanted to mention is one called focused are still a relatively
Small company and both of these are more the paid product applications
but it allows you to create a
schedule of your to dues you can add your to dues to a list and
Then drag them into your calendar so you can actually see an agenda for your day
But what's different about focused err is actually uses AI?
to
crumple down your your routine to make it fit your
daily habits and also
Take advantage of the timespan that you've given yourself
So for example, if you have an eight-hour workday, it'll crunch all tasks that are most important into that period of time
Using artificial intelligence now. It's a little bit steeper, I guess because it blends a calendar and a to-do list application
But it's $9.99 for the basic plan
But as you can imagine that Auto scheduling can be a nice way for people who go into daily planning a little bit more
Looking to get some assistance and it works with Apple and Microsoft and Google calendars
So that might be a nice experience for you folks. Hopefully you found that calendar blocking feature useful
Please do. Let me know if you're using in the description below, but I can imagine many of you may have questions or
Looking for recommendations for tools around this. So I'm more than happy to help you in the comments below
So feel free to leave any of your questions and I'll be more than happy to help but guys
I hope you enjoyed this video if you're new here subscribe, and if you would like and if you enjoyed this video
Please you'll like it here on YouTube. Anyway, folks big. Thank you. I'll talk to you all very soon. Cheers, everyone. Bye