Google Calendar Time Blocking Schedule | Brittany Wang // Hey friends this is part 2 of a miniseries where I'm sharing all of my
favorite productivity tools and hacks that I personally use as a writer and
entrepreneur but really as long as you're trying to accomplish some goals
these tips and tricks are gonna be totally helpful for you last time I
shared all about my bullet journal and I'll link that video below in case you
want to check it out but in this video I'm going to be sharing all about my
Google Calendar and how to create a time up block schedule that works for you and
your goals I've talked about my Google Calendar in the past and showed you
actually in action how I use it day to day with my bullet journal in this daily
blog right here but many of you including my awesome patrons like Kyra
hunter and JJ Otis have been asking for more of a step-by-step deep dive into
how to actually create a schedule for you that looks something like this
alright so when I set up my Google Calendar I use it for two main uses one
is to set up an ideal schedule which you can sort of see here with time blocks
that I believe will help me accomplish my biggest goals the second is to track
how I actually spend my time because I think we all know we all shoot for an
ideal and like a clean schedule that sort of looks like this but that doesn't
always happen so if you don't track your time in real time what I found is I run
the risk of creating an ideal schedule that doesn't work for me that will just
make me frustrated in the end so what I'm gonna do is sort of show you how I
set up an ideal schedule give you guys some ideas depending on your personality
and the type of work sort of format that you find best works for you and then
also showing you how I track in real time and how that's benefited me as well
so let's first set up an ideal schedule and I've taken everything off of the
Google Calendar for now so that if you're just starting with Google
Calendar and you're a little lost on how to sort of get it set up I can walk you
through that process and the first thing that I found really helpful is to create
categories that sort of make up your writer life and your personal life so
that when you put things in here again you see
color-coding and you see the separation and you can sort of move things around
and just make it really easy to set up this schedule visually so even before I
get in here as well I would just take like a blank piece of paper and write
down everything in your life that you have to schedule out everything all your
personal stuff so if you have a job outside of writing or just different
side hustles that we're gonna talk about in a little bit so like if you have your
day job if you have family stuff if you have anything at all Church whatever
make a category for it and how you would do that is going to other calendars at
the bottom here pressing the plus button creating new calendar and titling it and
then just clicking create calendar and it will show up over here so I would
just make that list on a piece of paper first of all those different things and
then then put them in as calendars and then we can start giving them different
colors and all that jazz after I have these categories or sub can special
routines first that already have claim on my schedule because it's hard to tell
how much time I have left over for my goals until I do this step then I set
any of them to recurring that would be recurring and you can always go in to
any of these and click here and then go into edit and you can make them you know
recurring weekly on a Monday or every week day Monday through Friday every
week you can also do a custom and set it like Monday through Friday like until
March or until whatever and so there's a lot of different kind of things that you
can set up here as well to help you out and then I would go in and start looking
at the free time that you have looking at the time that is flexible so that as
you're setting up your routines for writing and any other writing related
things you know where it can fit most likely and I also really love sort of
dividing my writer life into three main categories and I think you saw it before
a little bit but I have my books my income because I do some side hustle
kind of things so I can work from home and hopefully when we have
I can continue to do that cuz I'd love to raise my kids at home and work from
home and work for myself and then I also have stuff for my platform and
networking and building all of that so those are the three categories for me if
you're wondering how I came up with these three categories you can
definitely check out my goals video for 2020 I do talk about a goals workbook
that I sort of put together for myself with an eight step strategy of how I
came up with my three main goals for the year and how I broke that up into
quarterly and weekly and monthly and all those different kind of stuff into tasks
that would go into those different times of the year so I could accomplish the
bigger goals that I had and so if you're just struggling to sort of narrow down
your goals and figure out how to accomplish them all of my patrons get
access to that workbook and so you can definitely check that out I'll link that
below as well as my goals video so you can take a look at that if you want but
anyway again I would take those three main goals and I would give each of them
a color and obviously you're going to break this down every week into even
smaller tasks which I'll talk about in a second but right now we're just setting
up these blocks so I marked anything book related or publishing related or
writing craft like learning related in blue and then anything that had to do
with income and side hustles in green and then anything in platform planning
and networking in like a purpley blue and I actually use this also in a Kanban
board that I've started in Trello actually so it's a digital Kanban board
that I showed a little preview of in last week's video and my bullet journal
video and you guys a bunch of you got really excited about it I wanted to see
more and so I am gonna be doing a couple of videos on how I'm using Trello and
sort of using these same kind of color systems to sort of work on my
productivity even more and because I just have so much fun with this stuff
and it really does help me make the progress that I want to make so if
you're interested in that definitely make sure you're subscribed let me know
down in the comments what kind of things you'd like to see in that video or what
questions you have and hit the like button on this video so I know to make
more productivity videos like this but then I will start filling out
the space with these time blocks that I'm going to sort of set aside and be
like this is going to be the time to work on this goal and what I also want
to say too before I get too ahead of myself is to just make sure you have
some breathing room too you can see that not every single hour especially after
the quote-unquote work day I'm not packing with everything because if you
don't have some breathing room then you're and drive yourself crazy so even
here like I should probably just take a lunch break and not make it a working
lunch so to listen to my own advice what I
probably should do here is have a real lunch break and move this down and let
it affect everything going forward not just this event and say okay and then
move in come down so I have a little less time for that but I will probably
have a lot better sanity because of it but if you're just getting started
depending on the kind of person you are here are some of my ideas for how she
set up at these time blocks the first is for the people that thrive on focusing
on one thing at a time and working slowly on that one thing and I would
suggest for those people especially if you only have a hour a couple hours a
day is to focus only on one goal each day and then you can layer in sort of
more specific tasks so for those kind of people your schedule might look
something more like this where on Monday and Tuesday I want to focus on book
stuff for Wednesday I want to focus on platform and then for Thursday Friday I
want to focus on income now that'll probably shift and change again in real
time but for those kind of people that really thrive on okay just give me one
thing to focus on and that's gonna really help me be successful then you
might want to separate it day by day then as you're going through your day
you can layer in the different tasks that you're doing for that part of your
life so here I might say that I'm editing my book and I'm gonna do that
for two hours or if I'm tracking my time I can say that I did that for two hours
and then maybe here you know I'm getting feedback from my CP and so they've been
giving me feedback and now I'm gonna like go through it and do some editing
and maybe I want to do that till twelve so that I can take a lunch break and
then you have that time sort of blocked off for that main goal but now you're
putting in the actual tasks that are going to help you accomplish that goal
if that makes sense but if you're more like me you might be
a person that drives on a little more variety and changing from thing to thing
after a couple hours just helps reinvigorate you and gives you more
energy and so if you're that kind of person then I might break up your time
or your day into three or more blocks so for me I think the schedule that I'm
going to try to stick to going forward is to start off with my book and
publishing stuff in the morning and for me I've realized that if I get too much
into this other stuff earlier in the day then the book stuff just gets pushed off
and pushed off and I don't want that to happen so I'm going to plan to start to
make that a priority in the inning of the day then in the middle of the day
I'm going to check in on my social platforms going to try to stay off of
social media as much as possible during the morning so you can just focus on
book stuff but I'm going to connect with people and work on building my author
platform in the middle of the day after lunch and then spend maybe the rest of
the day working on side hustles and things that I've committed to and people
and clients that have committed to the rest of the day now with this it might
change from season to season even this kind of schedule might change from
season to season because maybe you have a book deadline coming up or a launch of
a book that's going to be published or maybe you're working on a side hustle
that you are launching a new program for and it's just you know all of this most
of this like 90% of this is going to become green because you're working on
that or 80% of this is going to become blue because you're working on your book
stuff so it really I would really make it depend on what is most important to
you during this season if things are mostly equal then you can set it up set
it up equally but if yeah if your book stuff is mostly important to you in this
season then might work in percentages and sort of
say that okay I'm gonna maybe you're in an editing stage and you have a deadline
you're like fifty percent of my time is gonna go to editing my book so I would
make the book sections a lot longer during each day or if again you're
launching some kind of new income stream then maybe that needs to be warm
percentage but you only have a certain amount of time every week so that's why
I like thinking about percentages and figuring out okay for me if I have forty
hours a week that I'm going to be doing this and I want fifty percent of my time
to be on my books then I should be or maybe more than I should be focusing on
making sure that these blocks represent 50 percent of my time which would be
twenty hours but if all of that is just like a little too overwhelming for you
and you're like I don't even know like what is most important right now or what
kind of schedule would work better for me if like doing this in the morning
would work better or in the afternoon or whatever I would suggest tracking your
time first and then figuring out a schedule from there so I would start
sort of with an experiment where you start with a blank slate here and each
week block off events and time-sensitive things first so again if you have like
for me I might have a live stream or a meeting or a call or any of those kind
of things that are pre scheduled I would put those in first then I would write
out my two dues for the week and then post them in the free spaces one after
the other so if I wanted to do editing book I would put that here and then if I
wanted to do you know film YouTube video that I would put that here and obviously
I would then click here and say save and I would just put everything one after
the other in no particular order just so you have a block for each thing and then
you can go in and be like you know what I really need to get this video filmed
because I want to put it out on Thursday so that's definitely say on Monday but I
think the editing of the book stuff is going to happen on Tuesday so and maybe
that's gonna take me you know I'm gonna block off a few hours here and filming
usually takes me about two hours so I'm gonna
do that here and you can sort of just move things around but I found it really
helpful when I'm like trying to redo my schedule a lot of the time and whatever
schedule that I preset isn't working then I go back to this sort of basic
format and I put in like all of my stuff with one-hour blocks and then I just
play Tetris let me move it around and then I experiment and I try go
throughout the week and I see if it works and what works and what doesn't
work and I sort of evaluate that and then I sort of stand back and say okay
can I make a actual like kind of ideal schedule out of that so again whether
you are just creating this for the first time or you have an ideal schedule and
going forward again I would be tracking real-time but I'll just be really
transparent here and just show you a quick look here we go at the last few
weeks and how I've been spending my time and I've been trying to refigure out
what kind of schedule works for me but now after going through a few weeks I'm
now at a point that I'm like okay I think that this schedule might help me
focus a little bit more and separate my goals and figure out what will work
whereas the last few weeks I've been very book focused because I've been
preparing to get ready for author mentor match but now I want to get back into a
rhythm where I'm sort of making sure that I have a little bit of time for
each one and each part of my goals but that's why I think it's so important to
again use your calendar not just as like to pre set everything up but to actually
track your time in real time so again each day I start with my ideal schedule
but then I update my calendar as I do things so I can track where my time is
actually going and I love that Google Calendar also has an app so I can do
this when I'm not near my computer as well and when I track my time I just
learned so much about what's really working for me and then I can create a
better routine accordingly if you're excited to dig in and create your own
ideal schedule let me know below in the comments and once you create it if you
want to post a picture of it on your Instagram or Twitter account be sure to
tag me and I'd love to give you a shout out if you want to check out even more
productivity tips you can out my full playlist on the screen here
and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any future productivity
videos like this one including how I use my Trello Kanban
board which is coming soon