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Interview Patty

7 Tips for Managing Your Schedule

Houston Growth for Women-Owned Businesses

1. - Create a routine. - No matter what you are working on, create a routine.

Block times for specific activities, and stick with the plan. Turn your calendar into a bunch of blocks, and put activities into those blocks. Whatever is not planned, you don't do. If you want free time, plan it. Your routine may change through the year, but at any given time it's better to have a plan. For example, if you are working on launching a company, and need to do customer discovery, coding and hiring, then prioritize and block specific times for each activity.

2. - Group meetings and calls into blocks. - For example, if you need to have outside meetings, block two and a half days a week for those meetings, and go to the outside meetings only during those times. Do the same thing for in-office meetings. This way you are not only creating a chunk of time for meetings, you are also creating other blocks of time that you will be able to important work. Do the same thing with calls, and book them all back to back.

3. - Optimize time for different meeting types. - Personally, I am now a big fan of 30-minute meetings and 10-minute calls. I think 10-minute calls are a great way to initially connect with someone or give someone quick advice. You can do a Google Hangout or Skype if you prefer to see the person instead of just hearing them. The reason 10-minute calls work is because people skip BS and get to the point. Try it. Ten minutes is actually a lot of time, if you focus. I prefer to do these calls on Fridays, when I am usually working from home.

4. - Use appointment slots. - There is a great feature in Google Calendar called Appointment Slots. It allows you to book a chunk of time, and then split it into pieces. For example, I can book three hours of outside meetings and then split it into three meetings -- one hour each. Or I can book one hour of calls and split it into six calls at 10 minutes each. There is also a bunch of specific tools, such as doodle, that do that too.

5. - Block time for email. - This is the most important tip in the whole post. Email will own you unless you own it. To own your email you must avoid doing it all the time. To do that you need to schedule the time to do your email. It is absolutely a must. In fact it is so important that I wrote a whole entire post about managing email.

6. - Plan your exercise and family time. - Unless you put it on the calendar, it won't get done. Well, that applies to your exercise and time with your family. Whether you go in the morning, afternoon or evening, do it three times a week or every day, put exercise time on the calendar. My friend and mentor Nicole Glaros makes it very clear that her mornings, until 10 a.m., belong to her. She hits the pavement or the gym, depending on the weather, and rarely deviates from her routine.

7. - Actually manage your time. - I think about my time a lot. I think about where it goes. I think about where can I get more of it, and how to optimize it. Taking ownership of my calendar and planning my days and weeks made me a happier and more productive human.

Source: Entrepreneur

Patty Block, President and Founder of The Block Group, established her company to advocate for women-owned businesses, helping them position their companies for strategic growth. Charting the course for impactful, sustainable, profitable businesses, the beacon is control: of your strategic direction, your money, your time, your staffing, and your ability to bring in business. The Block Group brings together the people, resources and ideas that build results.

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Houston Growth for Women-Owned Businesses.

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