Do you often stare at your schedule and think it could be better organized? To run your business efficiently, you need to be in charge of your business schedule and the routines you do every day.

Have you ever heard of schedule blocking?  

No? That’s okay; I am here to help explain it to you.

Blocking your schedule will help you with your business, writing schedule or writing routine, blogging, or just an everyday schedule.

Every Sunday, I plan out the upcoming week. This helps give me a better idea of what I am looking at and makes me feel ready to start the upcoming week.

First, I take a look at what I need to complete first, for example, pressing deadlines, meetings, etc. When planning out your week or month, one crucial step required to remember is understanding how long a task will take you.

This will come in handy in a moment.

From there, I simply begin the process of placing the tasks I need to complete on my calendar.

I have figured out how long I take to research, write or post something. In particular, this article only took me two days, and that is with researching, outlining, gathering photos, and writing the blog post.

On the last day, I created social media content to be scheduled on the day or the day after the blog post is published.

Blocking your schedule takes away any guessing and makes putting the schedule together simple and easy, allowing you to focus on your goals and business.

While having a life.

• Why Time block your schedule?

Creating a schedule does not have to be complicated. For my calendar, I use Google.  By adding calendars and color-coding them, I can set up a schedule that works for me and my life.

The main thing I think about when creating my schedule is my life, I schedule my business around that. As an example, in the morning I write on my novel, before taking my son to school. When I get back, I then start working on pitches or networking.

Organizing yourself and your schedule takes time but, in the end, it is so worth the trouble.

For the different calendars I created, AKA tasks, I changed the colors first to match my brand and the second, so they are pleasing to me.

There is no reason to be basic, even with your calendar.

Besides, you have to look at it all the time, so you might as well love what you’re looking at.

To create your schedule, let us first do a visualization. Picture your ideal week. Decide what you want in your week, what you want it to look like, and maybe write down what you come up with, use this as your foundation.

• Create a Routine

Create morning and evening routines that work for you.

Why?

Routines help you plan out your week much easier than you realize. When you have routines in place and color-coded on your calendar, they can stay there; you don’t have to keep adding them.

Thus, helping you remain efficient and productive.

•  Knowing when you’re available

Getting the “routine tasks” on the calendar will make it much easier to see when you are available.

This will be useful when scheduling clients for consultations or meetings.

Once you know what times you are available, you can prioritize your essential tasks and learn what tasks you can group or eliminate.

Once you know what times you are available you can prioritize your important tasks and learn what tasks you can group together or eliminate.

If you really want to be organized check out my post on How to Keep Your Freelance Business Organized

• Batch your Tasks

To help you plan your week faster and more efficiently you will need to take a look at the common tasks you do each day. Such as admin or creating and sending invoices, etc.

Decide how much time it takes you to do those things then put them on your calendar, creating scheduled times dedicated to these tasks.

•  Get tasks done in one batch!

Completing these tasks in one batch will free you up to do more important things such as sending pitches or working on your novel.

• Review your work week

Decided what worked and what didn’t make changes if you need to. Learn how to deal with things that you didn’t complete and how you can improve.

Do you need to put the task in a more productive time for you? Or in my case are you fighting time zones? Should you start work later, since you are nine hours ahead?

It doesn’t matter what you use when it comes to creating your time-blocking calendar. You can use a spreadsheet or a google calendar like me.

The point is to be more productive and love to be organized.

It takes time and you have to learn what works best for you, there will be bumps in the road, but you will get through and love how productive you can be.