Take a look at your calendar. Is it full of scattered appointments, meetings and tasks? Thirty minutes here, sixty minutes there with varying breaks in between? You’re busy. So busy in fact that you’re probably missing one of the most important things you need to do, preserving a few big blocks of time to think and create.
It’s nearly impossible to think or create in 15-30 minute spurts. It may be difficult for you to come up with more time, but one thing you can do is to rethink how you calendar to preserve big blocks of time. Here are a few ideas:
- Make Monday a day to race through all the small tasks for the week. Every task that needs to get done, but will not take more than 30 minutes each to complete, knock out on Monday.
- At the beginning of each week, move as much of your calendar items around as you can to compress them and minimize unproductive 15-30 breaks.
- Create two recurring appointments on your calendar for your big chunks of time. Mark them as unavailable and label them “Do not schedule” so others will know not to disregard them when managing your calendar or inviting you to meetings.
- Schedule phone calls during commutes to appointments.
- Change the default calendar item duration from 30 or 60 minutes to 15 minutes. Now you have to decide for something to take longer instead of trying to figure out how to end something early.
- Force yourself and others to only schedule meetings during set windows of time or on certain days.
- Ask your colleagues to avoid leaving gaps in your calendar. Go ahead and schedule as much as possible back-to-back. It’ll be a little hectic, but the gain will be larger blocks of free time.
Do you agree that a few big blocks of time for thinking and creating are valuable? What tips and tricks can you share to combat a fragmented and packed calendar?
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