One of the challenges of working from home is how to allocate your time effectively when perhaps you have less on your calendar than you might have if you were in the office.
Usually, meetings and other events of the day impose a skeletal structure into which we fit the rest of our work. When everyone is working from home, not much structure exists organically—we have to create that structure ourselves.
If we don’t have any structure, things can easily fall through the cracks.
This was certainly the case for a client of mine who was a mortgage broker (we’ll call him David). David had three crucial tasks he needed to complete every day—but when it came down to it, he never seemed to find the time to finish them.
It wasn’t that he was wasting time or doing unimportant tasks—but when we realized that the same three tasks consistently got left behind, we knew something had to change.
How to use time blocking effectively
One way to make sure you give adequate time to each of the different aspects of your job is a technique called time blocking.
Rather than jump from task to task or project to project, you allocate a certain amount of time to a project or task.
These “blocks” of time create structure for your schedule.
For example, you could allocate 30 minutes for processing email, 30 minutes on some self-development, maybe an hour doing research for a critical project, etc.
I recommend scheduling these blocks on your calendar to create an even more robust schedule.
For David, this meant blocking time for his three central tasks.
He scheduled about a half hour every morning before he made his coffee to reach out to and connect with active realtors. After that, he dedicated a block of time for client tracking before his team meeting. After the team meeting, he scheduled a block for reaching out to new leads.
Bonus tip: getting the timing right
How do you decide when to do which time blocks?
If you read my blog post on Biological Prime Time, you already know that we go through ebbs and flows of energy and focus throughout the day. These cycles aren’t necessarily the same for everyone—not everyone is a morning person!—so it’s important to understand yours.
Once you know when you generally have the highest energy and focus (and when you have the lowest) you can schedule your time blocks accordingly.
For more on how to do this, check out my blog post on setting an effective work-from-home schedule.
Does it work?
Since working from home notoriously provides little structure, it’s important to impose structure for ourselves.
Now that David is blocking out time for his most important tasks, he finds that it is much easier to maintain both a rhythm of work and momentum for his sales. This new schedule has boosted his loan origination rate from under one a day to close to two a day!
What are your most important tasks? How can you use time blocking to make sure they get done?
