(electronic music) - [Scott] Time blocking
can be a very effective way to manage all of the
things that you have to do in a given week and it can
also give you the added benefit to make sure that you have a balanced week between your work life,
your personal life, and other things that
you're responsible for. So in today's video, I'm gonna show you exactly
how to effectively time block within Google Calendar. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And let's get started off with
just a quick definition of what is time blocking. Well, essentially, time blocking
is all about putting things that are not appointments or
meetings onto your calendar. Your calendar probably
already looks a little bit like what I've got here in my example. I've got a variety of meetings. I've got interviews. I've got things that I actually physically have to be a part of or maybe a phone call that I need to participate in, but sometimes it can be very effective to put in tasks as a part
of our calendar as well. Let's say that there is a report that I've just been
deferring all week long. I've just never found time to
write this particular report. Well, if I need to get it
done before the weekend, a very effective thing to do would be for me to come in here, create an event and just
say write the report. I wanna block it out. I wanna make sure that I
don't have any other meeting, anything else that
conflicts with this time so I can get this task done. However, you can see that this
task looks very much the same as to all of my other appointments, all of my other meetings on this calendar. Now I could go in here, I could edit it, and I could change the
color if I wanted to. I can make it green for example so it's gonna stand out a little bit here. But we are using Google Calendar so there is a much more effective way to do time blocking
within Google Calendar. So let me delete this example here and the very first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over
here to my calendars and I'm gonna create a
few different calendars for the different types of tasks, the different aspects of my life. Now you'll see here the very first one is my default calendar. It's called Scott's calendar. This is the one where people are using my primary email address. They're inviting me to
meetings and appointments and I'm doing the same. All of these things here are
part of my default calendar. And the next two below I've unchecked, these are reminders and tasks which are built right
into Google Calendar, but I'm not gonna make use of them as a part of today's example. What I wanna do is I wanna create a few additional calendars. So I'm gonna go down to other calendars and I'm gonna hit the plus button and I'm gonna say create new calendar. Now the first one I'm
gonna select or create is gonna be called work. This is where I'm gonna
be putting work tasks. Not work meetings, but work tasks. I'm gonna hit create calendar
and the nice thing is it is actually gonna keep us in this menu. I'm gonna add a few
additional calendars here all at the same time. I'm gonna add a personal calendar for some personal activities. I'm also going to add a, sometimes it takes a second, I'm gonna add an exercise calendar, making sure that I fit in enough exercise as a part of my week. I'm gonna add one more in my example. This one I'm gonna call travel and you'll see I'm not gonna use it for things like my commute, but I'm gonna use it for things that maybe I don't usually
travel at a certain time of day or a certain distance and
I'm gonna put that in. So now under my calendars, you can see that I have them listed here. Now Google Calendar has chosen a bunch of very similar colors here so I'm gonna go in and change this. I'm gonna change travel to
maybe more of a blue color, work I'm gonna change to
let's use like a green color. It's nice to have some
different shades in here. There we go. It's gonna be a bit easier
to see the differences between my calendars here. So let's go back to that first example where I need to write a report. Again, I'm gonna do it
here between 9:00 and 11:00 so I'm just gonna click and I'm gonna drag and when I release, the first thing I'm gonna do
even before I add the title, I guess it doesn't matter
which order you do this in, I have the tendency to come down here. I'm gonna select the activity first. This is a work activity
so I'm gonna say work and I'm gonna say write the
report just like we did before and I'm gonna hit save. Now not only do I have
the different color, but it's actually a different calendar. Let's have a few more
examples just for fun here. Maybe let's say the first thing I need team meetings may be the
first thing on Monday, but I got a lot of email
that's gonna be coming at me on Monday morning so I'm
gonna say process email. I wanna get through all of that email first thing Monday morning. So that's another work activity. I'm gonna hit save there and maybe let's add one more thing. Maybe I'm gonna review. I'm interviewing a candidate on Wednesday so I'm gonna say over
here on Tuesday afternoon I'm gonna say review job
applicant, their application there. And again, that's gonna be a work activity and I'm gonna hit save. So right away I can tell just at a glance that these three items are different. I don't have to physically be somewhere. I don't have to call in
to a conference call. These are work-related tasks and they show up very differently than my other appointments here. Let's try and fit in a few other things as a part of our day. Exercise is very important and I like to go for a
run on a regular basis so let's put in some exercise here for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm gonna come up here. I'm gonna start again. I'm gonna say go for a run. This time of course I'm
gonna change it to exercise and I'm gonna make this one recurring. Actually, it's not a full hour. It's just a half-hour run. I'm gonna go into more options and I'm gonna go down to
my repeat option here. Instead of does not repeat, I'm gonna say, it's none of these so
I'm gonna say custom. I'm gonna say Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday and I'm gonna say done. I'm gonna hit save and now you can see, this is gonna go on beyond just this week Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And let's say on Thursdays I
get together with some friends and in the late afternoon we
play some pickup basketball so I'm gonna put that one in
here on Thursday afternoon. I'm gonna pick exercise so I
can see that it stands out. Again, the nice thing is that
I can get this overview of not only when these things are happening, but am I fitting in enough exercise as a part of my weekly routine. All right, obviously, there's gonna be some personal activities and maybe I've got a lunch scheduled with a friend on Tuesday. So I'm gonna come in here,
I'm gonna say lunch with Jane and we're gonna change that to personal. It's not work related or at least not directly
related to my work so I'm gonna put that as
a personal activity here. And then maybe on Wednesday night I've got dinner with friends. So I'm gonna put that one in here, again choose the correct
calendar and hit save. So I've got a few personal things that stand out as a part of it as well. And the only other calendar
that we haven't used in our example is travel. In this case, I'll usually
use something like this not for my everyday commute. Not for the things that I'm
doing on a regular basis. But let's say I've got
this community breakfast. This is an early breakfast and I need to travel downtown to attend. So this is different than my other days. So what I'm gonna do here is at 6:00 a.m., I'm gonna say leave for downtown and I'm gonna put that
to my travel calendar. So I want it to stand out
a little bit more here. I wanna make sure that I fit that in, that oh yeah I gotta get
there by a certain time. Sometimes another way that
I'll use a travel calendar is that if I'm leaving for
like the airport for example. I know when I need to be at the airport. I know when my flight is leaving, but sometimes we don't calculate how much time we need to give ourself to actually get to the airport. So maybe I'm leaving for the
airport on Friday afternoon. I need to be at the airport at 4:00 so that means I need to
leave my house at about 3:00. So here I'm gonna say leave for airport and again we're gonna
choose that travel calendar. So again, I've got that built in. I know when I should
be jumping into my car and leaving for the airport. So it does look like a
bit of a kaleidoscope, a bit of a rainbow I guess you could say here of different activities here, but the other nice thing
about Google Calendar in separating out your activities by different areas in your life is that you can of
course hide and minimize and just focus in on certain activities. So let's say I just want
to hide my work activity. I'm gonna hide my work
calendar and my work tasks. I can take a look and say okay, I'm gonna get my exercise in this week. Here's when I need to pay
special attention of leaving. I've got lunch with Jane
and dinner with friends. That's nice. Maybe there's something
else I should fit in there just for me or maybe
there's something else I should reach out to a friend. This is where sort of that
balance comes into play as you can zero in on
different activities. Let me enable some of
these other calendars again and I wanna show you one more tip which you may think is just for fun but I actually think it
can be very effective. Of course, the colors
help things to stand out from other calendars and other events in your time blocking calendar, but there's one other
way that I sometimes add, an additional way to make things stand out and that is by adding emojis. And no, I'm not kidding. I use a website called
Emojipedia on a regular basis. And you can just search
for emojis as you want. So in this example, I'm gonna go grab this man running emoji. I'm gonna select copy which
just copies it to my clipboard and I'm gonna go back up
to this recurring run event and I'm gonna hit edit and
at the very beginning of it, you can do it at the end as well, but I'm gonna paste it in there. I'm gonna hit save. I want it to be applied
to all of my events. And so now, it may be a little hard to see with that purple background. I can always change that color of course. I've got this little sort
of running man out in front which again sometimes just makes
it stand out that much more than everything else on this screen. So I hope you found this video helpful as you consider time blocking
within Google Calendar. I would love to hear from you next. Do you have additional suggestions as to how to time block
within your calendar? Or do you have further questions about how to effectively time
block within Google Calendar? Make sure to let me know
down in the comments below. And remember being productive
does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
