Manage your expectations about what you can accomplish
Before making a time block, learn how to properly estimate your workload for the day in order for you to be able to successfully accomplish tasks.
Your tasks need to be doable within the span of time that you've assigned for it. To do so, you must prioritize what needs to be done during the day and what can wait for tomorrow.
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- Build a habit. Learn to identify the things you need to do in order to make your goals into reality and practice them daily.
- Share your intention with your team so that they know when you're available. Being able to communicate the importance of your uninterrupted productive time ultimately benefits everyone.
- Assess your work environment. Any part of your work environment that doesn't support your energy management should be dialed down. Your environment should match your needs.
- In order to have a structured work-life balance, you need to know your internal clock. Your circadian rhythm impacts your energy throughout the day and to be efficient you should match your chronotype with your work style.
- Proactively bucket your meetings into chunks. Arrange your calendar events to make room for uninterrupted focus time.
- Go off the grid. Turn on 'do not disturb' outside of work hours.
- Rely on your peers.
- Observe and reflect on how you spend your time during the day.
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We all need uninterrupted work time every day, regardless of our role. Unbroken work makes us more motivated and focused. Yet uninterrupted calendar blocks are hard to design into a schedule.
We can't productively attend to meeting-heavy days while also spending hours on uninterrupted work time. We need to manage our expectations about what we can accomplish.
You, and only you, are responsible for scheduling personal time.
- One idea is for employees to have access to one another's calendars. Transparent scheduling and communicating via your calendar can be helpful for setting boundaries with co-workers.
- For those who do not feel comfortable providing this level of transparency via their calendar, consider leaving the block as "Personal Time - Emergencies Only."
Working remotely, especially when your team is distributed across the globe, means working asynchronously, that is, across time zones. This is a skill.