- If you know about calendar blocking
you've probably been a friend of mine for a while,
but the big questions still rears its ugly head
and I get it a lot.
Amy, what do you do when you run out of time
with your calendar blocking?
We're gonna unpack that today
so that you can try to figure out
how you can better use calendar blocking
to go after the life you want.
Good morning alive, welcome back to Amy TV.
Calendar blocking is just one of my favorite ways
to go after the life I want and get things done
and schedule my life because it gives me so much clarity.
There is nothing like looking at a to do list
and then seeing what that to do list looks like
on your calendar, it makes it so real.
So if we wanna be successful with calendar blocking
and not keep running out of time all the time
no matter how much we block to our heart's content,
we need three things.
The first thing is a goal.
We need to have a goal with what we need to get done.
When we are calendar blocking,
it's not because we need help putting coffee appointments
or doctor's appointments on the calendar,
it's because we need help scheduling things
that need to get done.
So we're filling blank space on the calendar with tasks
and giving them dedicated periods of time to get them done.
Those tasks need to be directly tied to a goal
otherwise we are not going to have any motivation.
Why?
Because a goal is a dream with a deadline,
so no matter what that dream is
and what you hope to achieve,
we've got to reverse engineer a deadline
to make it a tangible goal.
You might be saying, okay, well,
my goal is just to do my job
or to get these things around the house done.
That's fine, but it's very likely that those items
are not going to be tactfully calendar blocked,
because if you don't have like real motivation
for why everything's gonna be awesome when it gets done,
you are probably gonna waste a lot of time
during that block.
If you say you wanted to write a book,
okay, great, some day I'm gonna do that,
someday is gonna just fly by.
It's gonna be days, it's gonna be weeks,
it's gonna be months, it's gonna be years
and it's like I never got around to writing that book, why?
Well, if we say, I wanna write my first book,
I wanna have a first draft this time next year.
Well now we have 12 months
that we can reverse engineer,
calendar blocking the time we need
to become a master at writing your book.
That's what we're talking about,
we need that goal, we need something tangible.
I wanna be able to say,
I'm posting videos two days per week.
And if that's the case,
I need to find those dates that they're going to be
and reverse engineer how those videos will get done.
They don't come out of thin air,
I gotta sit down, I gotta talk and talk and talk and talk.
And then they gotta get edited
and they gotta get prettied up,
so that they can go out to YouTube land so you can watch.
We've got to reverse engineer that,
without the deadline it's not a real goal,
it's just an idea.
And ideas are good but they are not something
that we can calendar block.
The second thing we need is a calendar.
I don't care if you are a paper person
or a Google Calendar person, a Planner person,
or an Outlook person,
I don't care, it's completely up to you,
it's how you do your best work.
Probably has a lot to do how many appointments
you have on the calendar.
I prefer to use Google Calendar
for calendar blocking purposes
because I don't have to use my pencil eraser as much
and also it's something that I can work with with my team.
So they can see that tasks
that are scheduled on my calendar
are just as important as any other kind of appointment
on my calendar.
Without that calendar,
it's gonna be kind of hard
to block things on a calendar, isn't it?
So you have to decide which one is right for you
and that's very, very important.
But now we've gotta find that blank space on the calendar.
We go, okay look,
I got a big open space on Tuesday afternoon,
that's when I'm gonna sit down
and I'm gonna start outlining the basics
about the book I want to write.
Whether I know the title
or I just know what the content is
and I need to get thoughts out of my mind,
we're gonna block time on that day.
Okay Amy, but I wanted to have my entire book outlined
by the end of the day,
and I gave myself three hours,
that should have been enough.
Sure, maybe, but if we don't show respect
to the type of tasks that's at hand,
how long it might take and how much real thought
and energy needs to go into it,
then we're not going to block it appropriately.
There's also one more thing to consider Parkinson's Law.
We talk about Parkinson's Law because honey, it's true
and it's affecting us all.
It's basically an epidemic at this point.
Parkinson's Law says,
that work expands so as to fill the time available
for its completion.
So if you say that this task is going to take three hours,
it is going to take every moment of that three hours
because you've already programmed that in your brain.
Not to mention the fact that if the task is so much bigger
than what's possible with you yourself
and anything you have in terms of resources
in that three hours, you are going to hit the deadline
and you're not going to be done.
If you say I am going to write a blog post
and I already know what the outline is
and I know what I think about it
and I'm gonna give myself three hours,
that blog post will still take you three hours.
Because you have programmed your mind
to think that you need the entire time.
In all actuality, we could have taken a blog post task
and shortened it up a little bit and said,
I've already got my outline,
I've already got a good idea of what needs to get done,
I'm giving myself an hour because that's already a lot.
We just got to give it one hour to get it to a place
where we can ship it off to someone for approval,
whether we need an editor or a proofreader
or whatever the case may be.
If your blog posts are more like two or three hour ventures,
then fine, don't listen to me,
but the reality of the case is
that whatever space of time you think
something's going to take,
it will take that and it may take more.
So what are you going to do in those situations
that you're gonna run out of time?
Well, first of all, we need to take a look at the calendar
and say, we underestimated this,
maybe we're not masters in it yet,
where we don't actually know how much time
it really takes get it done.
So now we need to find more time for its completion
and start to work with things,
now we've got to prioritize.
Is this thing more important
than the task I have to do tomorrow
or the appointment I have tomorrow?
Do we need to move some things around?
Are we up against a deadline and we're not gonna hit it?
You've got to start to prioritize accordingly,
and again, unless you have a goal
that you're reverse engineering
and something that's amazing at the end of all of this.
Are you gonna bother going to all that effort?
No, you're probably gonna sit there with undone book outline
or blog posts, and we don't want that.
Which is why we need number three
and that is the ability to say, no.
You can not complete your calendar blocks effectively
and you can not find more time when they do go longer
than what they were originally supposed to
unless you have the ability to say no.
You need your goal and you need your calendar
so you can say no.
Why?
Because when you are focused on your goal
and you know exactly what you wanna get
out of all of this effort,
you'll look at your calendar and you go,
what's on this thing that doesn't belong?
What are we saying yes to that is making us say no
to getting this writing project done.
Why is that party or that event or that Netflix binging
or that whatever more important to me than this goal.
We have to say no to so many things
so that we can say yes to what we truly want to work toward.
So in order to make sure you don't run out of time
with your calendar blocks, you need a goal,
you need to structure your calendar appropriately
and that's by saying no.
And then when you do run out of time,
because you didn't plan accordingly
and you maybe haven't been sticking
with this type of task or calendar blocking for very long,
so you're just getting acquainted with,
oh, well I had the TV on during my calendar block
or it took me about 30 minutes
at the beginning of that block
to get my coffee and like sit down and okay,
we'll need to build in buffers.
How do we make this process better?
When you've gotten to the end of a calendar block
and you say, I didn't finish it,
I'm really disappointed,
I don't know where I'm gonna find the time,
definitely make note of what went wrong
and you know what it was.
The kids were bothering me,
I got too many text messages,
I ended up in a TikTok black hole.
You know what kept you from making the most
out of that two, three hours.
Or maybe if you only get 60 minute blocks,
that's really reasonable.
A lot of people only get that
but minutes go by very quickly.
Do you spend too much time in the ramp up
during your calendar block
that you don't get the task complete?
We forget that the block, the starting point,
is the start of the task,
not the start up at thinking about doing the task
and maybe closing some windows
on my oh, wow, what's happening on Twitter?
No, no, the start of the task honey,
is the start of the calendar block.
The end of the task is the end of the calendar block
if not before, that's what we're working toward.
So get your goal, get your calendar
and start saying the word no more often
when all of those things are not jelling
and you will find
that your calendar blocks work really well.
That's all for today,
thank you so much for tuning in,
I appreciate it,
as always, remember subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love
and go after the life you want.
Cheers.
(soft music)