so this is the final Workshop of this class and what we'll be doing is applying all of the skills
that we've learned and amassed inside this class to teach you how to calendar block inside of a
calendar so I'll be sharing my screen in a moment in which we'll be diving into the Calendar app of
my choice to look into it a little bit further Now calendar applications are pretty wild in
terms of the options but I just want to remind you of three important things when choosing one
the first is if they have color coding systems this is really helpful for calendar blocking and
can be a great way for you to identify whatever you like in terms of context we'll be showing
you that in a moment the second is multiple calendars is always helpful for making sure you
capture everything in one location and the third concept is essentially making sure it's available
on the right devices if you use your Android phone mostly and your Windows device they're making sure
they're available on both of those and syncing is really helpful obviously there are some great
default ones out there but we're going to dive into this and inside the workshop and really dig
a little bit deeper into this skill so as you can see the screen in front of us we're using an app
called cron now this is a more recent calendar application but it's mine of choice for a number
of reasons however let's start calendar blocking now what I've done is I've skipped forward to
a week in the future now very simply I've got a few meetings on here already you might have more
than this you may have less than this but it's important to be able to work around these ones
and obviously calendar block effectively now the one thing I always recommend as we've talked about
throughout this class is don't overload yourself one of the things that we tend to do is block from
the start of the day at 5am all the way to the end even adding in small elements of our routine like
brushing our teeth or maybe like putting the washing on it doesn't need to turn into your
task list it needs to be a cleaner place for you to focus it's your time it's not necessarily a
task although these blocks will help you to keep orientated so let's start with Monday morning now
when I'm on a Monday morning I typically have a lot of energy but in this case I've actually
only got a two hour block before a meeting now what I'll do is I'll add what I am using is
medium sized calendar blocks so the difference is with with one way I recommend or the way I do it
is that I do large medium and small based around the Bento methodology but basically a medium task
because I have medium energy I don't have enough time to do something pretty weighty that would be
quite substantial before this meeting because I'm traveling into it so maybe need to adjust for 20
minutes to get there and I don't really want to necessarily do a small one because I have enough
time to do a medium-sized task or medium-sized block so what I'm going to do is simply drag
the first hour and 15 minutes or it could be just an hour and I might want to do something
like right medium and that's for articles right let's just spell this correctly so obviously one
of the things there that's pretty helpful is I'm allocating not just a task I'm allocating
a type of task so in this case it's right medium I tend to get three done in this period of time
but you don't necessarily say Okay I want to do two or three you just want to have a block to
be a sort of theme versus necessarily A tangible task because you know what you're going to do in
that period of time and that probably belongs in your project or task manager in my opinion so as
you can see here I've got a medium one I can add the details if I wanted to if I was avoiding the
using of the task manager but what I'm going to do down here is I'm actually going to give this one
an orange color an orange color for me indicates energy levels so that's my a medium energy level
when I get back from the meetings I'm probably going to have a bit of a sort of way to get myself
back into the day so I might do sort of some light admin but I'm going to allocate a pretty
big task for the afternoon maybe a one and a half hour slot to focus on recording and as I said I'm
trying to keep these verbs generalized that's how I work but I'm going to give this a nice red one
indicating that my energy levels need to be higher after this you may come back from the meetings and
be a bit more relaxed and need something smaller to do but I tend to like doing the small things
in the afternoon so I'm going to do a clear inbox and use this to work on certain projects that are
in my inbox and you can see yellow has given me an indication that it's the lowest energy so I've
got yellow for smaller tasks orange for medium tasks and red for large tasks they just help me
to heat map my energy levels across the day but you can apply this in any context you want so
for example if you wanted to put only stuff say you work in marketing and sales Marketing in Red
Sales and blue that could be a good start you could for example want to coordinate personal
stuff in purple and work stuff in blue it's really up to you on what's suitable so you may also want
to turn your meetings into a different color so I could turn meetings green and this might help
to be able to spot them from afar and make sure that I'm doing them in there now one of the things
that you might want to do and we've talked about is adding breaks consistently obviously we don't
want to add every micro break in here where we scroll Tick Tock or some other social media site
so what we want to do is put intentional breaks periods of time when we can actually relax so in
this case when I come come back from this meeting I might be a little bit just needed a few moments
to pause and what I want to do is potentially have some lunch that's a good time to have lunch so you
may want to add some lunch in there I might just move my recording 15 minutes for setup time during
that period of time and I might give this an indication of I'm going to call it green because
maybe it's actually no a green is a bad example I'm going to put it purple and you could go into
this and repeat this every single day or copy and paste it into the other ones but it really depends
like how you organize your day I typically say to book a full week in advance like make sure you
have some sort of level of coordination on there and if you have a task manager you can connect
them to to make your calendar looking easier to do but obviously you'll still have those tasks titles
in there but as long as you've got the gist of the theme that you're working on then this can be
quite good so obviously you want to weave in your breaks you may actually want to put a break here
maybe a shorter one and condense it down to 15 minutes so you may be able to put them across
your work day and suitably put them there and you can continue into the evening let's say you don't
necessarily want to you want this time I know that I'm going to spend time with my son so I might say
Otto in the park and in this case I'm going to put that purple because it's more of a break
Works finished and then you know you could go to the end of the day but there's not much value the
thing that's important is Canada blocking isn't about stuffing your time on here it's about giving
yourself some level of structure so that when it comes to looking at it you've got a sense of what
you're working on I think there's always good points to break and to pause and this is a good
example of say this day here it looks pretty fresh it looks pretty clean it looks it doesn't look too
overloaded and the benefit of having this is if you have a calendar that's particularly connected
to something like Google Calendar or a Microsoft calendar you can associate to this time being busy
so no one can book a meeting with you during these focused deep State periods of time and
that's really really helpful now one thing we talked about in this class is the concept of
task types and batching it's concept developed by Mike vardy but this is very simply implemented by
going up to here and tapping an all-day event so in this case if this might be a create day
because I'm writing I'm recording maybe maybe I could move the inbox out here and I could put
something a little bit different like a type of task that would be creating like create
newsletters just to get myself in that mindset so I might put this as my smaller task to do
just heat map it there we go so you can get an idea of okay this is a create day now you could
repeat this every single Monday if that's the one you're having and you could even
give it a color if you wanted and the color may be different to the way that you schemed
it before I might put it in here or you could give it a nice Emoji in the top right corner so
I'd put an art Emoji like this just being able to differentiate the day and know in
advance okay create days or a Monday type of task is quite helpful type of calendar block
type of theme of the day is helpful to be able to book that so obviously you'd implement this
across a week and it'd just be a great way to coordinate this so in this case I might say
okay to this day might be an Administration day so I might put strategy workshop with marketing
this could be obviously much more correlated to what you work on with your team so in this
case that might be my red task and I might break for lunch so it's really important in my opinion
it's really important to judge your energy levels across a day this is related to how well you work
and the best way to do that actually is to get a A4 piece of paper and as you go across a day or a
work week is to draw a sort of like line of where your energy levels are you'll have some Peaks my
typical Peaks around 11AM and troughs minus 1 pm my trough and then it comes back in the afternoon
not as strong as the morning but 3 P.M it's sort of and then it picks out for because I end the
day typically around then so it's important to take that time and basically we'll take that
graph and basically apply it to this concept heat mapping your energy levels will allow you to see
okay 11AM I've got the most energy which means I should work my biggest task or earlier depending
because you're obviously progressing up or you could potentially say okay that trough I can
work on my small ones because I'm not using too much energy but I'm getting stuff done using that
methodology it can actually really really help to make sure you're not overworking yourself
too much obviously it's really dependent on what your team allow you to do but I would experiment
with this concept for a couple of weeks and see how it places you when I started doing something
like this this sort of skill of embracing energy levels it dramatically helped my productivity so
I think I've taught you most of the calendar blocking aspects of this this is really easy
to do and can be even faster with the ability to repeat stuff but primarily that's what I
recommend for calendar blocking using all of these techniques that we've learned these skills and I
think you'll embrace it really well making sure to really just think work-life balance is all about
that energy levels so it's it's a new world we're working in with work so it'll be exciting to see
how that progresses so I hope you enjoyed this calendar blocking Workshop feel free to reach
out to us if you have any questions but there are plenty more skillshare classes that we've
produced here on skillshare thank you very much my name is Sam tresco and I'll talk to you soon