Time Blocking

by Joshua Botello 

Transcript:

Say goodbye to never-ending workweeks and burnout for your business. Coming up next…

I'm Josh from the University of La Verne Small Business Development Center. Here at the SBDC, we provide small business owners free one on one consulting and business tip videos just like this one. So consider subscribing to the channel. 

Running a business hard and finding the time to make sure your business runs smoothly is frankly exhausting. Many small business owners work so long and hard in their business they can never have time to work on growing their business. Which leads to 80 hour work weeks and zero vacations. In this video, I’ll show you an effective time management technique called time blocking and how to use it for small business success. 

What is Time Blocking?

So what is time blocking? Time blocking is the time management tool of creating blocks during the day or week where you can focus on a singular task or type of task. This encourages the concept of deep work, where much of your thinking power allows you to get these tasks done in a more thorough and effective way. But how do you know what to prioritize? I have this handy matrix to prioritize your tasks. So let's take a look at it. 

Prioritizing Tasks

Here is the time management Matrix you can use to figure out what tasks are ones you need to time block.So looking at our matrix there are 4 categories urgent, not urgent, important, and not important. 

In our urgent and important section, these are tasks like crises that can't be planned or have little lead time but you need to get them done. You can’t necessarily plan around the building burning down, so don’t worry about scheduling stuff like that, but be prepared to pivot. The non-emergency or non-crisis situations definitely ones you want to time block if you can. If you have an upcoming deadline or short notice project looming, these are tasks you can block more time to get it done if needed. 

What about urgent but unimportant tasks? This is where you can allow for some buffer time of 15 mins between blocks to switch to tasks. You can't control these interruptions but with the right planning, you can preempt them, such as giving an hour at the start and end of the day to follow up with customers and team emails. 

The next section is the important task that is not urgent. This is where the bulk of the time blocking will live. Functions like marketing, billing, production should be scheduled as much as possible. These need to be done to grow your business and you need to find the time. 

The final section is the non-urgent and unimportant tasks. These are things like busywork, time sucks, and trivialities. Time blocking was created to avoid these activities altogether and make the most of your work in your business. 

Time Blocking Method

This method is geared toward making the most efficient use of your time and not slaving away in your business. So now that you have an idea of what tasks you want time block and how to prioritize them let's show you what the time blocking method actually looks like. 

Here’s an example of what a week looks like using time blocking. Let’s say I run a small furniture manufacturer and I have a couple of employees to help me build products. Notice that all the different types of tasks I need to complete are color-coded. You want to make sure your blocks are at least 2 hours when planning your deep work categories.


Most of my time is spent building the product and that's labeled production, but you can label it anything you want to help you remember. Wednesday is my heaviest production day because I might need to get a specific customer order completed. So I scheduled more time.

Notice I have also set aside time for billing for jobs. Again if you are creating products and billing all the time this may be something you want to do more often depending on the business. So far all my tasks have been working in the business making sure it runs smoothly. But what about working on the business and making sure it grows?

Well, I have accounted for that too. Notice I have these two marketing days. I could use these to plan out social media posts for next week or create and schedule an email newsletter to keep top of mind with my customers for later in the week.

Finally, notice a lot of the blue sections, these are my catch-up times where I clear out my inbox or get back to customers because I missed a call. I also schedule lunchtime to give myself a break. Because you deserve one working all these hours.

When using time blocking or any time management technique you need to remember 1 thing: Be sure you have time to work on the business and strategize what your next steps are going to be. This will be crucial if you want to scale your business, not just making sure it survives.

But what do you think? Do you use time blocking in your own business or do you use another method? Let me know down in the comments below.

Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.