Examples of Time Blocking or Time Boxing

One common time management strategy is time blocking. This can also be referred to as time boxing. It’s a tactic that involves making an appointment with yourself for a set amount of time to complete your tasks. The time block can be anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes (more common) to the entire day (rare that anyone has this much open calendar space).

If you want to kick your time management skills up a notch, you’ll specify what you want to work on during this block. If you want to go “next level” with your time management, you can batch your tasks – use a specific block for one type of task to maximize your brain efficiency.

At some recent breakout sessions, I promised to share examples I used on my PowerPoint slides, so here they are.

Below is an example of overall time distribution for the upcoming week. This person is not promising that they will work on documentation only on Monday morning, analysis only on Tuesday morning, etc. Instead, this represents a draft of how many total hours this client wants to work the following week in each of their job responsibility areas.

This is an example of time blocking for employees of a construction company who work at the job sites. A good portion of the work day is spent on collaborating with various crews who are assigned to that site on that day.

The next two examples are for those in IT or anyone who works in a trouble-shooting/customer service position and is on call to come to the rescue, but realizes that they’d have fewer emergencies if they could have some proactive maintenance opportunities.

Version A – every day allows you to time block the same responsibilities at the same time:

Version B (more common) – You play it by ear each day, with the understanding of proportionally how much time you want to spend on each of your responsibility areas.

Need more examples? Here’s a prior post with additional time blocking examples.

I’ve had clients ask me what my time blocking looks like as the week progresses, and I shared an ugly chicken-scratch example of that here.

You can view more posts related to time blocking here.

Here’s to being intentional about your time!

For more tips on how to better manage your day no matter what industry you work in, check out The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer.