Exactly How I Time Block My Super Busy Work Day (with Pictures)

If you’ve never tried time-blocking your day because it sounds too complicated and you have no clue where to start, this is the post for you.

This is a step-by-step guide with visuals for structuring your day in a way that makes sense to you and is easy to follow.

What is Time Blocking?

Time blocking is creating different chunks of time, each with its own purpose or category.

Types of morning time blocks:

• Prep for school: getting the kids ready for school.
• Before work: your morning routine before your workday starts.
• Morning meetings: self-explanatory
• High-energy, medium-energy, and low-energy time blocks: You separate your day into three big chunks of time and categorize tasks according to their difficulty. I discuss this in detail in this post right here (click).

The Most Important Detail of Successfully Time Blocking Your Day

Your time blocks should have something that unites the tasks in the time block. They should all have the same purpose or belong to the same category.

Let me give another example!

I can have the following different tasks:

• taking photos of books for my online bookshop;
• posting blog posts to Flipboard;
• checking stats for traffic;
• downloading and saving my monthly invoices.

At first glance, these four tasks have nothing in common. They cover different businesses and have different work-space. But they are all easy and low-energy tasks. They don’t ask for too much brainpower, so I group them in my “low-energy level” block.

Your lists can and should look differently, but they need to follow the rule of having “something” in common.

How to Time Block Your Work Day When Working From Home

This post focuses on time blocking your work day only. I am not going to talk about your morning routine, what to do on your lunch break, or how to cook your dinner. I have different posts for those things; there is no need to talk about them here.

With that said, let me show you one of the ways I time-block my day through color coding and time blocking. The photos in this post are of my personal planning page. You can get the printable page for pennies from my Etsy shop right here.

Step 1: Write it all down

I grab my time-blocking template and write down all the things I need to do on that day. I do not follow any rules; I just write everything down before I forget about it.

Step 2: Choose your categories

This is when I decide how to categorize my tasks for the day. I could use the “high-medium-low-energy level” method or choose something different, as I’ve done in the photos above. Those categories need to make sense to you and only to you.

Here are my categories for this example:

• deep focus work;
• communications;
• products;
• social media;
• low-energy.

Now, after I’ve written them down like that, I think they’re illogical, but at the time I wrote them, that was what made sense, and it worked.

Step 3: Assign colors

I give each category its own color. Five categories would mean five colors.

Step 4: Color the tasks

Each task from my to-do list needs to have its own category, too. I grab my highlighters and carefully assign those tasks to their categories.

Step 5: Time block the day

Then, I turn toward the right side of the planner page and separate my day into different chunks of time. Each time, the block is a different category, and I color that block in the assigned color.

Step 6: Write the tasks

I transfer all of those tasks to their respective chunks of time. All “products”-related tasks would go to their blue block; the deep focus tasks would enter the yellow block, and so on.

Step 7: Follow through

The end result gives me clarity and structure – something much needed when there is too much to do. Now, all that’s left to do is follow through.

I do not mix tasks. If I’ve finished all the tasks in the block, I use the rest of the time to relax and congratulate myself on the job. I don’t punish myself by adding more stuff to that block.

Conclusion

That’s all! The process is super simple; you do not need anything fancy to make it work, just a page and a few highlighters. You can do it in any planner or a simple notebook, but if you wanted this planner page, it’s super cheap on my Etsy shop (thank you for your support)

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