PP 165: The Color Blocking Challenge

Today’s episode comes with a two part assignment for you, revolving around the topic of batching and blocking.

The Color Blocking Challenge

For this assignment, you’re going to need a printed version of your calendar from the past week, and also a printed version of your calendar for the next week. I also want you to have an assortment of colored pencils or highlighters or your preferred coloring tool, as well as a sharpie marker or a thick point pen.

Looking back at the past week, I want you to assign one color to personal tasks, and another color for each client that you worked with. When you’re looking at your calendar, when you see a client task, I want you to color that block in with the associated color. For example, you can assign client a red, client B yellow, and client C. Green.

This does not mean that client C is any better than client a. I’m just going to give you examples.

Now I want you to do the same for your personal tasks. If you have a variety of activities you are working on, for instance, accounting, marketing, perspective, client interviews, I want you to assign each of those different tasks, a different color as well. Perhaps you use blue, purple, and orange.

Now, look over your calendar from the past week in color and the time blocks that you spent on each of those activities, personal and client activities with the associated color. In working with a new client recently, I’ve asked him to do the same task. And what he was finding was that there were a lot of activities that were intermingled with each other.

For example, in one, three hour block, he would see a half hour blue, a half hour yellow, half hour green half hour yellow, half hour red half hour yellow. This is a lot of multitasking and task switching. So what I recommended is that he tried to pull all the yellow activities together to keep his efficiency maximized.

If you’re noticing a lot of task switching when reflecting on the past week, I want you to keep that in mind when you are planning the week ahead.

Using another example from my life, I’ve realized that it’s crucially important for my business to run as smoothly as it can, that I block together podcast recording sessions. I then specifically allocate time for certain clients on certain days, so that I’m not seeing the different colors scattered all through the week.

Yes, I am fully aware that emergencies pop up from time to time. However, if you’re noticing that emergencies are popping up quite often, then I want you to figure out what you need to do, and perhaps bring it up with a client to prevent these types of emergencies from happening in the future.

My goal for you in the weeks ahead is that you’re seeing significant time blocks of specific colors on your calendar. I know this might feel a little bit like a kindergarten or first grade exercise, but trust me when I say that doing this exercise from one week to the next will really help you maximize your efficiency from one day to the next.

This isn’t always an easy system to adapt, but if you’re spending time every week reflecting on your activities of that prior week, then you’ll start to see a pattern and realize the changes that you can make to your schedule to make your days flow easier in your time be used more constructively.

If you have any questions about this method, or if you’d like to leave a comment about how it’s working for you, I’d love if you would share on the show notes page at thekimsutton.com/pp165. Now with that said, go forth and make it a positive and productive day.