If your calendar looks like this with big gaps of open time and you find yourself struggling to get things done, then this video is for you. I’ll show you how to use time blocking in Google Calendar to revitalize your approach to work and get more done faster. Let’s go. According to Deep Work expert Cal Newport, there are two reasons why you can’t get things done. Either your plan’s unrealistic or you have too much to do and you’re getting distracted. If you have too much, break it down into what’s most important for today. That will help you advance to your weekly goals and ultimately your quarterly and annual goals. But if you get distracted too often, that’s the problem with having large blocks of open time. If you don’t plan your day in advance, someone else will plan it for you. And that could be email, social media, other people asking you for your time instead of you getting things done. So, let’s find a solution. Go to calendar.google.com and sign into your Google account to access your calendar. Time blocking is very simple, so I’ll cover the core of it and then give you three bonus tips. Today is the 18th and we are going to time block the 19th. Always use the night before to block the day ahead. It’ll save you so much time getting started in the morning. Next, let me show you my to-do list for tomorrow. If I just grab this window and place it side by side, we’ll make it happen here. Let’s then expand the calendar view and this looks good. So, time blocking is the act of taking tasks from your to-do list and then setting the intention on your calendar with when exactly you’ll complete those tasks. First, I’ll show you how a novice might time block. My day starts at 7 a.m. so click on the 7 a.m. slot on Thursday. This is when I can order printer paper. I don’t know what process I need to jump through, so I’ll give myself 30 minutes by clicking on the end time of 8 a.m. and then selecting 7:30. Then I’ll click save. Next, I’ve got some bookkeeping to do, so I think I can do that at 7:30. Of course, I’ll need this to end at 8 o’clock before my meeting. Then let’s click save. By the way, if you ever just want to look at a single day on the calendar, press the D key and then we can use the arrows at the top to scroll between days. This next hour and a half slot is a perfect time for me to write the contract for our ABC partnership. I’ll extend the end time to 11 a.m. and then click save. After stand up, I can do lunch by clicking on the 11:30 slot and then typing in lunch here and pressing enter. After lunch is a perfect time slot to brainstorm new donut flavors, so click and drag from 12:30 to 2 p.m. to book the slot. Type in the name of the task and then hit the enter key to save. Finally, let’s block this last hour of the day to pull report data into the spreadsheet. Okay, so that’s novice time blocking. Let me give you a few tips to improve this. First, make sure the tasks that require the most brain power align with your most productive part of the day. I really like the mornings, so it’s really a waste to use that morning on menial tasks like ordering paper. I also have a slump after lunch, so doing a big creative task like brainstorming new donut flavors is probably not the best use of my time. So, let’s switch them. Click and drag the brainstorm new donut flavors up to the 7 a.m. slot and then drag printer paper ordering and bookkeeping down to the 12:30 to 2 slot. You can also adjust the duration of any event by clicking and dragging on the end grip handles of any event. Now, I hear you out there. I just jipped myself out of 30 minutes of brainstorming time, but you have to ask yourself, how much is one hour of peak productivity worth compared to 90 minutes of slump productivity? I can probably be way more effective in the one hour. And with my novice time blocking, I’ve totally missed something. Can you guess what it is? The whole point of time blocking was to be more intentional about work and avoid distractions like email and Slack, but I still need to check that at some point in the day. So, I’m going to set aside a special time at 1:30. Then I’ll drag this back to 2 o’clock. Here’s another novice mistake. You see this large block of time from 7 to 11:30 where I’m working straight through without breaks. You need to strategically place breaks throughout your day. So, for example, if you’re drained after a 90-minute meeting, insert a slot right after that gives you something to recover with. For example, a 15-minute walk in the sunshine can be a great way to get some energy back. Then let’s fix up our remaining time slot here. For this next tip, let me ask you a question. What do you think happens if you don’t get your contract done in this time slot? Pause the video and take a few seconds to think about what you do. The key is to adapt. Do you have to get the contract done today? If not, you may not change anything for the rest of your schedule. If you do, you’ve got a lot of options. For example, you might take a shorter lunch. You might also remove a task that’s not important to do today. You can click on it and then click on the trash can icon to delete it. Then you can add another slot so you can finish up the contract. Remember, you don’t get a bonus for completing your calendar. This is for you to set an intention behind your time and then learn over time how much each of these types of tasks normally take you. Here’s the final success tip. It is a Google Calendar specific trick. This calendar is just a giant block of blue. And sometimes it’s useful to differentiate between different types of tasks with just a single glance. To do that, you can use multiple calendars, so click on the plus icon next to other calendars and then click on create new calendar. I recommend two new calendars. The first one is for any goal-oriented actions, things that will take you, your team, your project, your business forward. Once you’ve typed that in, click on create calendar. It will take a couple of seconds. I’ll skip right through that. The second calendar is for breaks just to make sure that you are recovering throughout your day and you regain your energy that you need to attack your next tasks. So, I call this active recovery. Go ahead and click create calendar once you’ve created it. Again, it takes a couple seconds. Then click the back button so you can get back to our calendar view. And here you can change the colors by hovering over any of the new calendars on the left-hand side and clicking on the three dots. So, let’s do purple for active recovery. Let’s do green for goal-oriented actions. And for everything else, let’s do gray. Then to change which calendar a task is assigned to, go ahead and click on the task, then click on the pencil icon to edit it. Go over to the calendar icon and click on the dropdown list. Then click on the calendar you want to change it to. Then click save. And if you give me three seconds, I’ll update the rest of these tasks and meetings. And there you have it. It’s so helpful to see how your day is actually moving you forward. But before we close up, there’s one more task we need to add that shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes, but you have to do it at the end of every day. You have to plan tomorrow. Let’s also make this task repeat every weekday by clicking on the time section and then clicking on the does not repeat dropdown. Then select every weekday. You can also add this to the goal-oriented actions calendar by clicking on the current calendar name and then clicking on goal-oriented actions and clicking save. Now remember with all this productivity obsession that the goal is progress over perfection. The system that’s perfect for me probably won’t be perfect for you. But if you do have a lot of open time slots, give this a shot and let me know in the comments how it went. This is David signing out. I’ll see you next time.