Maximizing Productivity: A Strategic Approach to Scheduling
Life is crazy these days. We live in a fast-paced world, with non-stop notifications, non-stop commitments, and multiple responsibilities between our business and our lives. We are often left feeling overwhelmed and struggling to find enough time in our day to eat, let alone work on a new project or strategies to grow our business. Drawing inspiration from a real-life example, in this blog post, we'll uncover the secrets to creating a “Target Schedule” that will help you focus on your goals without feeling overwhelmed by always being told where you need to be and what you need to work on.
The Challenge: Time Constraints
During a recent conversation with a friend, we discussed her struggles with managing a full-time job, family responsibilities, and pursuing a certification course for career opportunities at the same time. She was faced with the daunting task of finding time and energy to focus on studying while not neglecting her full-time job, or spending time with her family. If you’re ready to stop reading and say: “But I don’t have a full-time job”, pause for a second and substitute "full-time job" with "operations to run your business,". I’m sure you can easily see yourself within that story.
The challenge is always that you cannot put more hours into the day. So the better question is: How can we make better use of the hours in the day that we have? How can we divide up the hours so there is dedicated time and attention to each of the important aspects of our life?
Target Scheduling
To successfully accomplish Target Scheduling, the first thing you need to do is to establish when your peak productivity hours are. (Sometimes, especially for women, they are not the same every week, as they can vary depending on the timing of the month it is)
Just like my friend realized, because of her full-time job (aka Client Meetings or Client Tasks for you), her brain worked at full capacity during the day and “normal business hours”. She had little time left during the day to focus on studying for her certification or scheduling activities for the kids. By keeping track of your most productive hours, you can start to strategically allocate buckets of tasks that you could work on during those periods.
For example, if it is difficult for you to write Marketing Content, make sure you are assigning time to do that when you are awake and alert (perhaps in the morning) before the day has gotten away with you. Whereas, sending Invoices, for example, could be something that does not take a lot of brain energy. So, although you may want to send the invoices in the morning (because it’s easy and you want to get paid!), it is not the best use of your time during your energetic and productive period.
(By the way, if you are sending your own invoices, we need to talk! If you haven’t already, make sure you check out my 5 Steps to Delegation here, so you can stop wasting time your time on low-level operational tasks!)
How to Segment Your Tasks for Target Schedule
Implementing the Target Schedule approach can sound a bit overwhelming at first, but break it down into small, digestible pieces. In order for it to work, it's essential to segment your tasks into groups or buckets. Here are some examples of some Segments that you may have in your business:
Sending Contracts and Invoicing
Podcast/YouTube Video scripts & recording
Creating Social Media Content
Checking your Inbox
Engaging your audience
Capturing your Metrics
Use a High, Medium, or Low grading scale to bucket the tasks into these categories:
Level of complexity
Amount of concentration needed
Amount of effort required
How mentally demanding are they
Identify which of the tasks you can perform effortlessly or with minimal mental effort and schedule them during your non-peak hours (typically in the afternoon or when you feel like you don’t have a lot of energy). By doing so, you can free up valuable time and mental space for the tasks that demand your focused attention. For the Tasks that were grouped into the “High” bucket, make sure you plan to work on those when you are feeling your most energetic, perhaps in the morning.
One strategy to accommodate important tasks within your schedule is by waking up a little bit earlier each morning. By setting your alarm just 30 minutes before, you can create a dedicated time slot to tackle routine or low-effort tasks that don’t need a lot of your mental energy. If you are a parent, you know these early hours can be golden for a time before your kids have woken up and can give you the opportunity to kickstart your day feeling accomplished by clearing off some to-dos from your list.
Get it on the Calendar
If it’s not on the Calendar, you aren’t going to do it! It will be too easy to forget about. Create a new Calendar on your phone or on your computer that is decided to Target Scheduling. If you have an opportunity to make it a different color, it will be helpful for your eyes to see it differently (Try a light grey or a lighter color so you know it’s not a meeting or event).
Take those larger segments that you created above and block out 1-2 hours of time on your calendar to work on them. Set them up as recurring events on your calendar so they will automatically be there each Week or Month.
Warning: Do not schedule the specific tasks directly in the calendar. Scheduling your calendar at that level of detail will get overwhelming. Keep it high level to a budget of the type of tasks that you should work on in that period.
Remember, this is a Target Schedule. If something gets booked overtop, don’t stress. Just move that time segment to another open spot on your calendar.
Mastering the art of scheduling can be an amazing tool for productivity and help you manage your time. By adopting a Target Schedule approach, based on understanding your productivity peaks and segmenting tasks effectively, you can reach a new level of efficiency and balance in your life. Take the first step towards optimizing your schedule by working on your Task Segmentation.
If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic and exploring how to make it fit specifically to your life, you can book a free call with me here. Let's find the perfect schedule that works for you and helps you accomplish more than you ever thought possible.
