Work-Life Balance Series: Time Blocking and How to Create a Great Work-Life Balance Calendar

How can you leverage time blocking and better organize your calendar to “aggressively” defend your personal life? Co-hosts Hannah Robinson and Melissa Honan share their top tips and resources you can rely on and make sure that you get the most out of your time for both your personal and professional life.

[1:02] Melissa believes that a great way to “aggressively” defend your personal life is to follow five tips for creating a work-life balance calendar and to let technology assist you in that.

[1:53] For Melissa, the first step is to create your ideal, so you need to think about your availability for work, then set it in your calendar app (in Melissa’s case, that’s AcuityScheduling).

[3:48] When it comes to setting your availability for meetings and running meetings, Melissa suggests having padding on both ends so that your work days start and end at the times you would want them to.

[4:40] Creating your schedule is something you need to figure out and take different aspects into consideration. Melissa, for instance, doesn’t like Mondays, so she takes that into account when planning her work week.

[5:26] Melissa gives a breakdown of what a typical week looks like for her.

[6:48] Hannah asks Melissa how she deals with something unexpected popping up.

[9:27] Hannah asks Melissa whether she likes to combine all of her different calendars in one space. Melissa has 3 Google Calendars and a personal calendar, all of which are integrated together and map over to Acuity.

[11:19] Both Melissa and Hannah praise the power of writing things down to avoid forgetting them.

[12:25] Hannah asks Melissa about ways she relies on to create a work-life balance within her scheduling.

[13:47] For Melissa, it’s crucial that you resist the temptation of manually overriding your calendar when, for example, a client asks to have a call during a time slot that you’ve marked as booked because you wanted to have some downtime.

[14:52] Hannah shares one of her current struggles: scheduling time for self-care or for something she enjoys doing.

[16:18] Melissa and Hannah discuss the benefits of prioritising self-care and the impact of not doing that.

[20:02] Melissa touches upon the importance of having limits in the scheduling you create with Acuity, or a similar platform, as well as why using padding in your scheduler is a smart move.

[22:43] For Melissa, something you can do as an introvert is to stack your sales meetings so that you minimize the time you need to think about social interactions.

[23:25] Hannah talks about the fact that she prefers to start her days focusing on the biggest task of the day first.

[25:52] Melissa goes over her approach of creating different availability by appointment time.

Mentioned in this episode:

Acuity Scheduling

Calendly

Google Calendar

Canva

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