Get more done with a prototype week

Productivity geeks often talk about enforcing an ideal week. If your projects have people involved in them, your week is probably less than ideal. Complicated deadlines, last minute changes, emergency meetings…

If you’re going to carry a heavy load at work, love your family well, and stay healthy it’s going to take a strategy. If you take 5 minutes, I think it will be worth your time. Please share it with a friend if you find it helpful.

Like City Zoning

There’s a reason that cities have zoning laws—they want their city to get the most value out of limited resources. Grouping factories and warehouses makes sense, high density residential and commercial is smart. Let’s apply that lesson to your calendar.

Time Blocking

After you get done with this post write down all of your big responsibilities at home and at work and personally. Group them together by location, energy level, need for focus, etc…

Get those groups on the calendar—you can see that the way I do it is that I set themes for the whole work day. It helps to make sure that when I need to focus for a long period of time, I can do it without getting interrupted by meetings.

Rhythm

By blocking large blocks of times for different genres of task it lets you set up a weekly rhythm that is manageable and can let you keep your energy level high.

Bring form to the chaos

When your project load gets huge or you’re in a particularly energy intensive season at home it can feel like life is absolute chaos. Zoning out your time helps to feel a regained sense of control.

Prepared for your blocking to fail

Time blocking is good because it makes sure that you have time to take care of emergencies when they come up you have time to deal with it.

After you’ve given it a shot, I’d love to hear how it goes.