Productivity Tip Focus On Time Blocking, Not Time Scheduling

Productivity Tip – Focus On Time Blocking, Not Time Scheduling – Productivity Nugget #203

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Many times, the challenge of increasing business and sales is not knowing what to do or even how to do it.
Most business owners and sales people I talk with, know what to do and how to do it. They just don’t have time to do it.

Does that sound like you?

Sometimes, it’s a matter of procrastination. Sometimes, it’s time management. Other times its just about not being able to focus on the essential and commit to doing less.

I’ve committed to creating the habit of daily exercise and had an AHA that I wanted to share with you in this Productivity Nugget. Excuse the sweat, I recorded this just as I finished working out.

Time Blocking

What is time blocking?

To me, time blocking or batching is committing to working a single project or task for certain length of time.

Let’s say you want to start exercising. You commit to first blocking out 20-30 minutes a day to do it. In the computer and programming world batch processing is setting up jobs so they can be run to completion without manual intervention. I want you to think of time blocking or batching as working on a single task or project without distraction.

Time Scheduling

What is time scheduling?

Time scheduling is committing to working on a project or task at a specific time in the day or week.

Again, using exercise as the example, with time scheduling you would commit to working out every morning at 6:00 am.

Time blocking and time scheduling can be very similar but do you see how they are subtly different?

The problem with Time Scheduling

You don’t work in an industry that you can really control your schedule. I know coaches and trainers and even your managers and brokers tell you that the way to increase productivity and sales is by controlling your schedule, but maybe they forgot what it’s like to sell real estate.

I know it was difficult for me to “control” my schedule when I sold real estate and it’s difficult even now, with my travel schedule and speaking around North America.

Is it difficult for you to control your schedule?

I’m sure you could do better and not drop everything for the urgent, but don’t you sometimes have a buyer coming in from out of the area. Or maybe your kid is sick at school. Or maybe you need to work extra long on a short sale or sit on the phone with a bank.

No plan survives its collision with reality.

So when you time block and time schedule, and then reality happens, so you don’t get to work out at 6:00 am or do your lead generation from 9-11, it is so easy to get down on yourself, feel frustrated, make excuses and say you will just try again tomorrow.

But tomorrow means, it didn’t get done today.

My solution

Commit more to the process of time blocking instead of time scheduling. Get your exercise in today. If you can’t do it at 6:00 am, do it 6:00 pm. If you can’t do your lead generation at 9:00 am, get it done at 2:00 pm. Just get it done.

As I said in the video, if you erase it, then replace it.