How To Block Your Time Effectively

In a world where there are a million things to do at any given moment, it can be difficult to manage your time in a way where it doesn’t feel like you are forgetting to do something or prioritizing one thing over another too frequently. But, there are only 24 hours in a day, so you’re bound to be unable to fit in everything. Unless, of course, you know how to effectively block your time, which is conveniently what we’re going to give you some tips for in this post! So, let’s dive in.

Sort your priorities

To be able to use your time efficiently, you have to know what’s at the top of your list and at the bottom. Given you’re probably coming off of a long day of school and not getting home until mid-to-late afternoon/evening, you can’t fit in everything in a single day. You have to be able to figure out what must get done, and do that thing first. Conversely, if you have an assignment due in a week, then you shouldn’t do that one right away. We aren’t suggesting you procrastinate, but rather, do the things that are due before jumping ahead.

Time your activities

If you know a class is giving you the same type of homework every night, you’ll begin to be able to discern how long it is going to take. For instance, if you have to read a few chapters of a book every night, you can regonize that will take a certain amount of time. By collecting information about how much time you’ll spend on certain repetitive activities, you can figure out what you’ll be able to get done in a single evening. This way, you can gage how much work you can get done and how you should allocate your time.

Give yourself a timeframe

Mindlessly working into the wee hours of the morning isn’t going to yield the benefits you might think it will. If you give yourself a start time and a stop time for working, you will be able to be more productive while still getting enough sleep and giving your brain a break. It encourages you to stay busy for a set period of time in order to get done necessary assignments without overworking burning you out. For example, our founder Jonah sets aside four hours every night to do homework, eat dinner, and shower, from roughly 4:30 pm to 8:30 pm. This way, he gets done only what he needs to for that night in an effort to not go past his set deadline, and by doing so, is able to work

more efficiently.

Use planners and calendars to help

All of this time blocking and scheduling doesn’t need to stay in your head. You can use certain tools to help map your afternoon out and show how much time you want to spend on each thing.

Calendar apps offer you the ability to see an hour-by-hour play of your day, and by doing this, you can also see what seems reasonable to get done. Our spreadsheet planners on the Tools page also offer the ability to visualize what can get done in a single day—in the ‘Plan For the Week’ section of these spreadsheets, we choose list the homework we have for each night. If the list extends outside of the box for that day, then it is probably too much work to get done.

Using these four strategies, your workload should feel a little more manageable in the time you have each night. Our founder Jonah is able to get to sleep by 8:30 every night and still get his work done, so it’s possible! It’s all about using logic and observations to figure out what works for you. And, if you liked this post, be sure to check out our others below or in the Blog page.