I was just listening to an audio recording at this gym this afternoon that gave some recommendations to improve time management. Most important: schedule your personal events first, then arrange your business activities around those.

How many people actually do that?!

Very few, I’m sure. It’s been a while since I updated you on my current time management system. It changes from time to time, and while I was really good about sharing my systems back in 2011, I haven’t shared anything with you in quite some time. So, how did I improve time management this year?

I went back to working in blocks. I’ve divided my time up for each day using Google Calendar. I’ve color coded each type of activity, and I’ve created recurring events for each one. That way, I ensure that I do a little bit of each thing I need to do every day. And because I find it easy to work in bigger chunks of time, I can spend an hour or two focusing on just one thing.

Here’s how I divide my days and weeks. There are personal activities, like:

• Personal exercises. Kind of like meditation, but different. It takes me just over a half hour each day to do them, and they’re the first thing I do in the morning. 
• Meals. I eat three meals a day, (usually) away from the computer. So I make sure I allot enough time in my schedule for each meal. That way, I don’t feel like I’m stealing time from something else.
• Gym. After a year of roaming the woods in my area, I decided I needed to step up my exercise and go back to the gym. I’m going Monday through Friday, and I’ve reserved the forest wandering for weekends.
• Baths. If I didn’t feel guilty about the environment, I’d probably make time to have one every day. But since I know that it’s totally irresponsible to waste that amount of water, I reserve this for the weekends. This is one of my top ways to relax, and before I put them into my calendar, they just didn’t happen.

Then there are business related activities, such as:

• Email. I have a specific time each day allotted for email, and I (try to) avoid my inbox throughout the entire rest of the day. This helps me focus on the other tasks and activities that I have allotted time for. 
• Client work. This includes all of the work I do with clients.
  
• Blog reading. I spend a half hour each day catching up on all of the blogs that I subscribe to. I schedule tweets for the best ones I read by using Buffer. That way, I can share the best articles that I read without overwhelming my Twitter followers. You set up specific tweet times on Buffer, and it schedules the tweets to go out at those times.
• Business building. This often includes reading business related books, networking online, and contacting other bloggers about guest posting. It also includes time for planning where I want to be headed with my business this year.
• Product creation. This year, I ran an online ecourse on social media. It’s over at the end of the month, and I absolutely loved the experience. I’m planning a number of different online courses for both Tribal Publishing and Ready to Bloom, and this block of time is when I create them. I look forward to sharing more very soon!
• Blogging. I’ve been very erratic in my blog posting over the years. It’s like I go through bursts where I’m very prolific, and then I disappear for a time. I’m really not happy with myself for that, especially since one of the things I teach is being regular on social media and in blogging. So I’ve got a newly allotted time slot for blogging each week.

The individual time blocks are sometimes as small as 30 minutes, especially for routine personal things like my personal exercises. But for business related activities, I keep the blocks between 1-2 hours long. I have two 90 minute chunks in the morning, and two 2-hour chunks in the afternoon, plus a 1-hour block. These larger blocks have helped me improve time management this year.

I know that some systems, like the Pomodoro technique, recommend 25 minute blocks of time. As much as I like that tomato timer, it just doesn’t make sense to me. It can take 10-15 minutes to focus on the task at hand. Once I get into something, I’m hooked.

This is my basic schedule. If something extra comes up, like an appointment, I simply add it into the calendar, and reduce or eliminate one of the other time blocks. That way, I’ve made a clear and conscious decision to reduce or eliminate one activity to accommodate another, and I no longer feel stressed or guilty about not getting as much done. Reducing schedule stress should be a big part of any plan to improve time management.

Have you tried working in blocks of time? What’s the one biggest tip you can share to improve time management? Please share in the comments below.