Why Time Block?

As a business coach I get to talk to folks all the time about time blocking. See what I did there? 🙂 I get a lot of push back on why folks don’t want to do it and trust me I get it completely. It is one of those things that can be seen as tedious or even painful. For some sales folks who tend to be of the fly by night type of personalities, telling them they need to schedule themselves in blocks goes against their very nature.

My director of coaching Tim Davis will tell you though that there is always going to be the pain, it’s either the pain of disciplining yourself to do the things that you know you need to do or the pain of the consequences of not doing them. The pain of not time blocking is living a life of reacting instead of acting. Time blocking is simply budgeting of time.

Dave Ramsey says a budget is simply telling each dollar that you make what to do. Folks often have a challenge with the concept of budgeting because they think it means that they can no longer spend money on some of the simple pleasures they enjoy like golf, hunting or shopping or watching your favorite tv show. It means no such think, it is just being proactive as to what you are spending your dollars on. So, time blocking does not meant that you don’t schedule time to relax or blow off steam or flex time. It simply means budgeting your time proactively to spend the amount of time that you determine appropriate based on the importance of and the time required to do the task. So like budgeting is telling each dollar what to do, time blocking is telling each segment of time what you want it to do.

Time blocking is like scheduling an appointment with yourself to achieve a specific outcome or for a specific purpose. Once you are convinced that you need to time block it is important to understand what types of things get blocked and how to protect your time block so other things don’t interfere. Stay tuned for the next post on what kinds of things need to be time blocked and how to protect your time block.