3/15/24
Ok friend, truth time. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the words Time Blocking? If you are anything like the way I did when I began taking my real estate career seriously, you get uncomfortable.
To me, time blocking sounded like a chore, something that other people did. Something that didn’t really make any sense in my life of chaos. Something restricting and limiting.
What if I told you that protecting your blocks of time actually frees you up to do more things? Weird, right? It sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out…
When you select a block of time to complete a task, you’re allowing yourself to be completely free of that task until the time you blocked to do it. You don’t need the mental burden of worrying about it. You don’t need to add it to list of stressors because you can pretty much consider it done… sort of.
Imagine you have your very own personal assistants, standing in line, waiting patiently for you to give them a chore. You have like a hundred of them, and they cannot WAIT to help you. Now, let’s say you have a task or an action item in a metaphoric box, and you physically HAND it to one of your minions and tell them to go stand in their respective calendar space and you politely ask them to do that specific task at that specific time. You KNOW they’ll do it because they are honest and trustworthy and they are 100% devoted to you. Because they ARE you…
Now I’m not saying I’ve got this whole schedule thing completely mastered because I truly believe that time management, like goal setting, is more of a practice than something one might master. I am saying that thinking about my time in terms of leverage instead of just a list of chores has helped me build a successful real estate career, a coaching business, a transaction management business, hit my fitness goals, keep my house clean and my family fed.
I gamified my own system and I treat each item/task lit it’s something somebody else will absolutely do. Nuts, right? That “someone else” is actually me, but it’s “Tuesday at 10am Linsey” instead of just, “Me”, all the time.
Let me give you an example:
When the floors are messy (Wednesday Linsey’s job), I don’t stress about them on Monday because I know they will get taken care of on Wednesday. When the laundry piles up on Friday I know that Linsey will handle it on Sunday. When Listing photos need to be ordered, Monday Linsey will handle it because I put it in her calendar and she loves me and respects my goals enough to honor that task. This significantly removes my own mental clutter, fretting and overwhelmed about my ‘to-do’ lists. This gives me freedom to assign these things to someone else at a specific time.
This isn’t revolutionary. We aren’t re-creating the wheel. What we ARE doing is gamifying our calendars and that is such a satisfying thing to do. If you keep an electronic calendar, even better. If something gets sidetracked, cancelled, or moved, all you need to do is drag and drop that block to someplace else in your schedule where it makes sense. Remember the time honored saying: “If you erase, you must replace!” Side note, if you don’t have space in your calendar to move things at all, that’s a different conversation altogether. You’re likely over-committed and need to revisit your Big Why.
Listen, if time blocking is a challenge to you, maybe try looking at it from a different perspective. You aren’t loading your calendar, you’re honoring it and protecting it. You aren’t adding to your work, you’re strategically moving it to places that make the most sense.
I hope you find this helpful.
As always, it is an honor and a privilege to be in business with each and every one of you.
Yours in Success,
Coach Lins
