How to easily plan your day to be more productive

Are you ready to be more focused, organized, and patient? This step-by-step strategy will help you easily plan your day to be more productive.

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Whenever I talk to the moms inside of the Smart Productive Mom Facebook group I hear over and over again, “I need help trying to fit everything in.”

And my response to that is, “stop trying to fit everything in.”

It’s not possible to get everything done every single day.

The key is to focus on the most important tasks, not all the tasks.

This is a method I call the Time Blocking Framework, and it’ll help you block your time without creating a strict schedule.

Table of Contents

Does time blocking work for moms?

Time and time again I hear that time blocking doesn’t work especially if you’re a busy mom.

I don’t think that’s true.

The old way of time blocking doesn’t work if you’re a busy mom. But there’s a different way you can block your time that’ll create the structure you’re craving without causing more stress and anxiety of trying to stick to this super strict minute by minute schedule.

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Why routines are better than schedules

The first time I tried to time block my daughter was about six months old and I really needed some type of structure to our day.

I felt like I was completely losing it and everything was a hot mess.

I needed a way to create more structure in our day so I attempted time blocking and I blocked my day down to the minute.

That lasted for all of two hours.

We were completely thrown off the schedule because life is unpredictable with small humans.

So that’s why I no longer focus on scheduling our day. I focus on creating routines.

Routines are so beneficial, especially when you have young kids, because they don’t know how to tell time.

Whenever you’re using routines your kids…

Know what to expect
Have less anxiety
Throw less tantrums

Your day will go so much smoother.

The 3 simple steps to plan your day

Let’s walk through the simple 3 step process to plan your day without being on a super strict schedule.

This will allow you to have a lot of flexibility in your day and have less stress and anxiety because you feel like you’re behind or off schedule.

When you block your time this way, you’re mostly going off of routines and not necessarily time.

1. Plan your month

The first step is to plan your month. Whenever you’re planning your month, you can use your paper calendar, your digital calendar, or a combination of both.

Put in specific events, birthdays, or anything like that.

Inside of the Time Blocking Blueprint I show you how to plan your month using a color-coded digital calendar along with 5 different methods of creating reminders for these events.

So the first step is to plan your month.

2. Prioritize your time

The second step is to prioritize your time. I like to use the Prioritization Matrix to put tasks into 4 categories.

Urgent

To start prioritizing your time you have to figure out what’s urgent.

These are things that you need to do right now. If you don’t get them done right now, it’s going to throw a lot of things off.

Examples of urgent tasks would be…

Your refrigerator stopped working so you need to get it fixed.
Your son needs help with his science project that’s due tomorrow.
Your daughter wakes up vomiting.

Urgent tasks make us reactive and we’re not able to plan ahead.

They make us feel like we’re not in control of anything.

Important

Most of the tasks you’ll want to complete in the important phase.

These are tasks like…

Grocery shopping
Household chores
Meal planning,

These tasks help you stay ahead of the game.

When you focus on important tasks you won’t feel like you’re behind.

Delegate

The third part of the prioritization matrix is delegating.

A lot of times we feel like we need to be doing everything and that’s not the case.

If we take the time to teach other people how to complete a task then we can delegate it and get it off of our plate.

Examples of things to delegate could be…

Dishes
Laundry
Vacuuming

if you can teach your kids (or partner) how to do these tasks it’ll alleviate so much time for you.

So things you can delegate is the third part of the prioritization matrix.

Skip or limit

The fourth part is things that you can skip or limit. These are mostly your time wasters like…

Netflix
Social media
Online shopping

These tasks are usually unnecessary and a way for you to procrastinate doing more important things.

You can either limit or completely eliminate these tasks from your day.

So that’s how to prioritize your time and that’s step two of planning out your day.

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3. Block your time

The third and final step of planning your day is to use the time blocking framework.

And this is a three part framework that will help you plan your day based on routines rather than creating a strict schedule.

Anchors

So the first part of this time blocking framework is your anchors.

These are your non-negotiable tasks.

If you wake up at a certain time every day then that’s one anchor.

If your kids still take a nap around the same time every day, that’s another anchor.

If you guys have dinner around the same time every evening that would be another anchor.

These anchors are to help you recover when things feel like they’re getting chaotic throughout the day.

The key to remember about your anchors is that these are routines.

They are not based on time.

So if sometimes you wake up at 7:30 and other times you wake up at 8:30, that’s when your wake up block of time would start.

It doesn’t matter exactly what time you wake up because your block of time is based on the tasks that happen once you get up.

Create your blocks

Part two of the time blocking framework is to create your blocks.

You already have your anchors which would be things like wake up, nap time, school drop off, school pickup, dinner time, and bedtime.

Those would turn into your time blocks.

If you’re using time then you can put in a specific time.

So if you wake up at 7am every morning then that’s when your morning routine block would start.

If you do nap time at noon then make your block at noon until whatever time.

So from your morning routine block, until the nap time block, that would be one block of time.

That’s how you build your blocks.

But if you don’t have any times, then you already have your blocks just using your anchors.

Your blocks could say…

Morning routine
Nap time
School pickup
Run errands
Dinner time
Bedtime

There wouldn’t be any time attached to those.

Add in specifics

Once you have your blocks created the last step of the time blocking framework is to go in and add your specifics.

For your morning routine block you would add in exactly what you want to get done during that block of time.

Quick recap…

Those are the 3 simple steps for planning your day.

Step 1: Plan your month
Step 2: Prioritize your time
Step 3: Block your time

If you want to see this process step by step, the Time Blocking Blueprint walks you exactly through the entire process.

I show you on my phone what I’m clicking and how to set this up digitally.

So if you want a more in depth tutorial about planning your day, definitely check out the Time Blocking Blueprint.

Usually I get this process done in less than 10 minutes!

Once you figure it out and create a routine it’s so easy and will end up saving you a lot of time.

If you’re feeling up to it, go ahead and try to block your day for tomorrow and use the time blocking framework.

And if you have any questions, come let me know inside of the Smart Productive Mom Facebook group.