Most of us spend our days frantically trying to balance making and managing. With a few small tweaks, you can create a schedule that gives you time to focus on what’s important and keep up with meetings, calls, emails, and “urgent” tasks.
Show me your schedule and I’ll tell you what’s important to you
90% of people say they don’t feel in control over how they spend their time each day.
- The issue is in how different jobs see time differently
- Manager’s schedule
- A manager’s schedule follows the typical appointment book style with each day cut up into hour (or less) intervals
- For people who do more heads-down, creative work, they need a schedule with larger units of free time-usually half a day at a time
- Managers manage makers
- This means their job requires them to break up the focused time makers need to get creative
How much maker time do you get?
RescueTime tracks and categorizes every app, site, and document you work on during the day, so it’s easy to see how much of it you spend time on and when.
- Explore your categories and view how much time you spend on maker activities such as writing, designing, coding.
Create a custom “maker time” filter and alerts to protect your focus
RescueTIme can help coach you back to maker time when you get distracted
- Customize a custom time filter for maker time
- Set a custom RescueTime Alert to tell you when you’ve hit your maker time goal during that time
Make the most of your daily schedule
Make sure you’re getting what needs to get done, and feel good about it
- Try one of these strategies to own when you’ll be making and when you’ll be managing
- RescueTime is a free trial to set up your optimal schedule
Use rituals and routines to switch between “work modes”
Routines help your brain build habits and automatically know what to expect each day
- A simple workday ritual that helps you move into maker mode is a powerful tool
- Remember, you don’t have to go to extremes to transition between modes.
Balancing time, energy, and focus
If you want to get the most out of your day, your schedule and your goals need to be aligned
- Both makers and managers need time to focus on deep work
- And this requires getting strategic with how you spend your time
Master your maker and manager schedule
How we say we want to spend our time and how we actually do it are rarely in sync
- It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face the balance between deep and shallow work
- A tool like RescueTime can help coach you into being more aware of your time
Use “Daily Patterns” to see what gets in the way of your maker time
Head back to the main Categories report and then click Time of Day
- This shows you what your daily routine usually looks like
- Check out the hours where you are working on maker work
- What else is happening?
The weekly breakdown:
Split up your week with maker and manager schedule days
- This can solve a number of issues
- You go into each day knowing what your focus is
- Your team has clearer expectations
- Meetings and calls can be organized on specific days giving more time for your maker schedule
- Everyone has to think hard about what requests are truly “urgent”
The daily breakdown:
Use “office hours” to contain your daily managing time
- If you can’t commit to full days of making or managing, try scaling the strategy down to your daily schedule.
- Schedule in office hours that are free blocks for managing, meetings, and random conversations.
