5 steps to a work schedule that fits your business and life
If you want to move through your week in a more intentional way, I highly recommend having structure in your week. Below I’d love to offer one way that you can plan to make your schedule account for what matters but still keep your week flexible enough to fit your needs.
Step 1 – roughly outline your week
What I usually do is I draw one of those “school week schedule” type things that we had in school with the timestamps on the left and then classes blocked out – but in this case include the weekend days too.
So each day gets its own column and then over on the left write out the hours that you are usually awake.
You can also do this in a spreadsheet btw – totally up to you. I love outlining things on paper before I make things digital.
A side note: you can use different colors for different types of blocks on your schedule (something to consider)
Step 2 – fill in mealtimes
Food is a huge thing, we all need fuel and nutrition – so this is what I start with putting into this weekly schedule outline. Everything revolves around meals!
I block out time for breakfast, lunch, dinner – and these include some extra time to account for cooking and things like that.
Step 3 – fill in any regular commitments
If there is anything that happens regularly that you can’t (or don’t want to) change, block them out in the schedule. These could be things like a regular appointment of some kind, a class, or picking up kids from school, etc.
If you are employed by someone else, this is also the step where I would block off the hours you are at work as well as traveling from and to.
Step 4 – block out your free time
Blocking out time for not-working is important, because if we plan for our work first, there is a risk that self care or free time doesn’t get accounted for enough. When you block this out first, you can see how much time you actually have for work and can plan tasks for that time more realistically.
Decide on the blocks of time when you don’t want to be working – and you want to instead be resting, having fun, doing social things, or taking care tasks and chores at home, running errands etc.
If you do want to give some of these blocks a name or theme, go for it! For example, a friend of mine cleans the apartment at the same time every other Saturday. Another one of my friends has a 45 minute block for yoga set aside in the morning while her husband takes care of things with their toddler.
Sometimes the more details you can put down, the more excited you get about keeping yourself to your schedule.
Step 5 – plan your work or creative time
The time you have left is essentially the time you have to devote to your business or creative projects.
In my case, it means there’s a few hours of time before lunch and a few hours of time after (and sometimes I love to do creative work tasks on a weekend-day for a couple hours too if I’m feeling inspired and I haven’t planned anything in particular for the weekend).
I would encourage you to examine those time blocks that you have left – are there certain time blocks that are at a time when you’re more energetic, versus are there blocks where you tend to feel a bit more like a sloth?
Because I know that I’m at my most energetic and productive in the morning, I generally make sure that I work on the most focus-requiring tasks in the mornings. That usually means writing, recording, creating Instagram posts, etc – deeper work.
I have a harder time motivating myself to do deep work in the afternoon hours, so I usually plan for lighter, more mechanical tasks and that’s also when I like to schedule calls with people. When there’s another person on the other side of the screen, it is super energizing to me and pretty much cancels out my afternoon energy slump.
A little bonus tip
You can also plan to do certain types of things on a certain day of the week, for example maybe Mondays are for creative work or Fridays are for research or planning. I will speak to this more in a future blog post, but I wanted to mention it here, in case it was something you wanted to keep in mind. For now the *most* important thing is that you figure out a schedule you enjoy and that works for you – and that is a foundation that you can build on and improve upon.
Final note
So that’s it – that’s a framework that you can use to figure out your schedule, and that you can get back to every time you notice that it might be a good thing to make some changes.
You maybe noticed that I said “usually” a couple times while talking about my own version of the schedule – that’s because I’m just doing my best to follow my plans but because energy can fluctuate so much or life sometimes happens, I don’t stick to this 100% of the time. Maybe 70% of the time.
The important thing for me isn’t to follow the schedule minute-by-minute – it’s more about me having this idea of a flow I want to have throughout my day, to have these general guidelines to stick to, to have those anchoring moments in there.
