by Michael Holland
There’s a point in time when you have to decide if you will take ownership of your time or allow the beast (the company, the boss, the customer, the colleague, the employees, the family) to own you and your time. Awhile back, I adjusted my perspective from seeing time as a critical asset, depleting every second, to a perspective of time being a tremendous investment opportunity, awaiting my direction.
A great blog post by Michael Hyatt helped me to take a new look at how to “theme out” the week, akin to time blocking but with more substance. The concept is to create broad themes for large blocks of time in the day and themes for each day of the week. Here are the writer’s broad themes:(Click here to link to his post and see a visual and/or download an Excel copy of his template.)
- Broad Themes for the Waking Hours
- Self – 5:00 am to 8:00 am
- Work – 8:30 am to 6:00 pm
- Family & Other – 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
- Broad Themes by the Day
- Monday – Team meetings; direct reports and team huddle
- Tuesday & Wednesday – Extended meetings and travel themed out further by weeks of the month. So Week 1 is travel for these days while Week 4 is for ad hoc meetings.
- Thursday – Ad hoc and lunch meetings
- Friday – Planning and lunch meetings
- Saturday – Personal
- Sunday – Church
The exercise of reorganizing your time and schedule reaps the rewards more than the final picture or plan. Tweaking your habits and approach to the investment of time motivates your brain muscles to re-sync with your priorities, which have also been adjusted slightly or dramatically, depending on how satisfied you have been with your blended time allocation.
