Time block your way to a better work-life balance

I’ve worked with a couple of different mentors over the last year or two. One, as mentioned in a previous post, is a marketing expert. The other helps with the mind game, success habits, and goal achievement.

One of the things she worked with me on was planning and organization. And no, we’re talking about the kind of organization that involves getting a bunch of little baskets and dividing things into piles of “Do,” “Delegate,” “Delay,” and so forth.

I mean organization in terms of creating time blocks to handle regularly occurring management tasks and client service. This way, I could more efficiently plan for success, and get an idea of whether I was being utterly realistic about what I hoped to achieve in a given day/week/month.

My problem was that I’d been unrealistic, trying to fit way too much into too small a time block. Seeing this, and planning better, has led me to calmer days. I don’t tend to feel hopelessly behind anymore, and I don’t feel anxious about what needs to be done.

As a manager, executive, C-level-type person, this kind of time blocking is a highly useful skill to pick up, especially when faced with interview questions that deal with prioritization, management style, et cetera.

But it’s also good from a work-life balance perspective, too. When you start blocking out your time – not just your work time, but your home time, too – you can easily identify whether you’ve become a workaholic without having realized it. You can objectively see whether you’re getting enough time to enjoy your family. You can also see whether you’re getting enough time to take care of yourself, mentally and physically.

You can use Microsoft Outlook to start time blocking, or get more sophisticated with calendars from FranklinCovey, Day Runner, or Cotton Systems. Try time blocking for a month, and you’ll learn a lot about your work and life priorities – and how different they are from what you think they might be.

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