You may have heard of, or even tried, time blocking before. It can be a great way to take control of your to do list and get things done, but it can also get really overwhelming. Role-based time blocking is a streamlined version, designed specifically for roles (like academic jobs) that have lots of different components. Check it out, and discover why I'm committing to NOT making a bunch of tiny personalised hats....
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 33 of the PhD Life Coach. Today we're going to be talking about a type of time blocking called role based time blocking. So for those of you don't know, time blocking is where you look at your diary in advance, sometimes a week in advance, sometimes just the day before and decide what things you're going to do when.
It doesn't sound like rocket science does it really? But it’s deciding not only what meetings and things like that with other people you've got, but also what tasks you are going to do in particular time slots. It takes your to-do list and turns it into something actionable.
For years and years I tried to time block. I knew that it would probably be useful for me and when I tried, it would go one of two ways. So I'd either start the week super energized and enthusiastic, and I'd cram in way too much because I'd be like, “oh, I get this done here and this done here. And it's like, oh my goodness. By the end of this week it's going to be incredible. I'm going to have so much done.”
And on those weeks, what would usually happen is I'd get a few hours into it, realize I've massively over-committed, that I've forgotten half the things that were actually going to take time. I hadn't allowed time to walk between meetings. I hadn't allowed time to have a break or anything and just not allowing for those kind of transitions.
Within a day or two, I'd fallen off and wasn't sticking to it and then usually I'd ignore it for the rest of the week. So I'd sort of be like “Ugh, I'm rubbish, you know, I've sacked off this week, rubbish. I'm just going to do whatever, we'll try again next week.” And I'd beat myself up for that.
Then the other way a week could go would be that I'd start the week going, right, what am I going to do when? And I'd be looking at all of these to-dos that I had and just feeling super overwhelmed. And part of my brain will be going, “oh, stop faffing about planning. Just get on and do something. You just need to do something. Why don't you just write that thing? Just get on with it.”
And part of my brain would be going, “no, we have to fit 'em in. We have to fit them in.” And then it'd be like, “this doesn't fit, nothing fits.” And my solution to that would then be stop planning and just get on with doing something.
In those weeks, I'd sort of rush through the week doing things, doing things, doing things, and I'd end the week with no idea what I'd done and having not really decided what things were the priority this week versus not, but just get to the end of the week and see which ones I'd done or not.
The other thing I did when I was time blocking was I would block off time to do my own tasks, but then when somebody asked me for a meeting, I would give those slots as available because I felt very uncomfortable with telling somebody, “no, I don't have time to meet with you till next week, next month, whenever it is, just because I had planned to do something then.
I would immediately break those appointments with myself if somebody else needed me during that time, and I know this is something that my clients struggle with too. All the way through this, I would beat myself up about the fact that I wasn't doing this well.
Those were my experiences with time blocking. Now as I've learned more about it and I've learned more about my coaching, I've realized there was a lot wrong with how I was implementing time blocking.
I was very, all or nothing about it. If you want to know more about all or nothing thinking, check out my podcast from a couple of weeks ago. I was very all or nothing about it in terms of I either stuck to it or I didn't. And as soon as I realized I hadn't stuck to it, then I would start to neglect it again.
I expected myself to go from not to time blocking to time blocking. Again, very all or nothing and so I'd time block every element and not really see it as a skill to be built. I just saw it as I'm either doing it or I'm not. So there's a lot that I would do differently if I was implementing standard time blocking now.
But when I was first trying all this stuff and I didn't know any of that, it just wasn't working for me. And yet I also knew that it should work. We try and avoid “should” words usually, but I knew in principle this could be really effective for me. I knew that I struggled with long empty days, so I always used to find the summers the hardest.
Everyone kind of like, “oh my gosh, shall we? So lovely. Once we get to summer and things calm down a bit,” I'd go nuts in summer because I didn't have that structure. I had long days. I was indecisive about what to do in them, and I found it really difficult to prioritize and I knew time blocking would help with that.
I also knew that I had a tendency to focus on things I enjoyed doing or things that were urgent or things that were for other people. And part of this is my probable ADHD coming out, but a lot of this is really common amongst lots of people that I coach.
I found it much harder, and lots of people find it much harder, to prioritize the things that are for our long-term good or to improve the processes of how we do things, and all these things that are sort of deferred gratification type tasks.
They were really hard to prioritize and so I knew time blocking probably could in some way help me with these things.
That was when this idea for role-based time blocking came along. And so this is something that I sort of started thinking about when I was an academic, and I used it quite successfully for a while, while I was still an academic, and it's something that has popped back into my mind. I'd kind of forgotten about it for a while and it's popped back into my mind now that I'm running my own business.
And this is the idea that whether you, you're an academic, whether you're a PhD student, or whether you're a small business owner like me now, we have multiple roles in our job.
It sounds like your job description is “academic”, but actually you are a module organizer or whatever you call them at your institution. You are a principal investigator. You'll have some sort of admin roles within the school. You'll be a reviewer or an editor for journals. You'll have a whole bunch of different roles, different types of roles, that are all part of this wonderful world of being an academic.
As a PhD student, you may find that you have fewer of them, but you might find that you are a data collector or a data analyzer. You might find that you are a writer. You might find that you are doing some teaching, some research assistant roles that are slightly separate, you may have a paying job that's a different role entirely.
So you can still divide up your professional life into a variety of different roles. And the reason that's important is that these roles are really quite different from each other. The headspace and the person that you need to be when you are reading current literature in your research area is very different than the person you need to be when you're filling in the quality assurance form at the end of your module for the year.
It's very different from the person you need to be when you are marking dissertations. It's very different than the person you need to be when you are planning a public engagement event. These are all very different tasks, and when they're all on one massive to-do list, it's really hard to prioritize and it's really hard to time block.
Now some of you will have already thought about that kind of golden hour principle where you pick the time of day when you are at your best and slot in the things that need the most cognitive load. That's the beginnings of role-based time blocking.
But what we're going to do is take it one step further. We're going to really identify what all of our different roles are so that we don't divide our lives into like the golden important things that we do in our golden hour and the rest. We've got more than just a role that's important and a role that's everything else. There's different chunks to what we do, and we may prioritize more than one of them. We may value more than one of them.
So what we do in role-based time blocking is we identify those different roles. We identify what the job descriptions of each of those different roles are, and then what their current priorities are. So you almost start to see yourself as a series of people who have these different jobs and have these different elements to do. And what you can then do is divide out your to-do list to each of those different roles.
What this then enables you to do when you are time blocking is you get to decide how much of your week you want to spend in each of these different roles, or how much of your week you need to spend in each of your roles, depending on what the time of the academic year is for you at the moment.
Because it changes, right? With the seasons, depending on what area, time of semester we're in, holidays and so on. You might be able to change up your proportions in different roles, but you can look at over the next couple of months, I need to be spending about this percentage of my time being module organizer, this percentage of my time being a principal investigator, and so on and so forth.
You can even use this to analyze your meetings. So most of us, when we look at our calendars, even if we're not doing time blocking, we have meetings and other commitments in our diaries. So one thing you can do is go through your calendar and classify them. If you use something like Outlook, which I use, you can change the colours. I know you can do that in, Google Calendar and things as well. Whatever system you use, I'm pretty confident you can change the colours of your different meetings so that you can see which meetings or which roles. That can give you a bit of an overview of what's going on in your week already. Then you can start to plan in when you are going to be your other roles.
And having classified the meetings, one of the things that really, really helps is to go, “okay, I have two meetings on Monday, which are both to do with module review, for example, this time of year maybe, and I've got some marking to do. So actually I'm going to slot in some module organizer time into my Monday, because then I'm in that headspace for the day. I've got module organizer meetings. I'll do my marking in amongst that, and I'll be in that kind of module organizer headspace all day.”
Tuesday, maybe you've already got PhD student meetings, so maybe you would want to slot in some PhD supervisor time or you slot in your researcher time, so perhaps because you're meeting your PhD students that day, and you're going to be talking about research anyway, maybe that's where you'll plot in some time, where you'll be doing things like your ethics applications or your reading or doing writing on a manuscript or on a grant proposal, for example.
So you get to plot in when you do which role. And the key here is you haven't got to decide exactly what tasks you're going to do within that slot, and you haven't got to decide, therefore how long those tasks will take you. You can decide that as you go along.
Beginning of the session, I am going to be module organizer. I look at my module organizer to-do list. I decide which things are the things that are most priority at the moment. I crack on and do them. We'll talk next week a little bit more about transitioning between tasks and how you can decide how long something's going to take rather than just waiting to see how long it takes, but you can just work through the to-do list for that role.
It takes away so much of the decision making of exactly which task am I going to do on Thursday. Well, I don’t know. Other things might have come up by then, mightn't they, it takes away so much of that it takes away from, but what if it doesn't take me that long? What if I then have something else I need to do? All of those things you can say, I'm going to do as much module organizer stuff in that two hours as I can.
A few things with this. Don't try to have too many different roles. The first time I did this was towards the beginning of the pandemic. I was Head of Education for my school and Deputy Head of School, and I think I worked out, I had 38 roles at that stage and that wasn't including personal roles. It was a little bit ridiculous.
One of those roles was Head of Education. Yeah. Got a bit out of control. And that was stupid. I couldn't do anything with that. And so what I ended up doing was kind of consolidating roles together. I was a module organizer and that covered multiple different modules. I was an article reviewer and that covered multiple different journals, so I kind of clustered them together.
There's no hard and fast rules about how many to have, but I would probably aim for somewhere in that kind of six to nine kind of number. You know that there's that thing about how many numbers you can hold in your head. So like if someone tells you a phone number, there's a certain number you can remember back. That's kind of the number. You need to be able to think of all these roles. If you can't list them off, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, then there's too many.
So to give you an idea, for me, currently in my business, I have strategic leader, by the way, I've given them silly names just because it makes me happy.
So I have strategic leader, I have content creator, I have, operations whizz, financial guru - told you I came up with stupid names - marketer, coach, and personal assistant to the CEO. And that's because during the day sometimes I need to get personal jobs done during the day. And so I decided to give myself a role of personal assistant to the CEO and I do things like dry cleaning and returning things I've bought from Amazon in those slots too. So those are my, so what's that, seven I think, those are my titles at the moment.
See how many it works out for you, but I really encourage you. Don't have too many. It needs to not feel like a massive pick n mix when you put it into your calendar. It needs to be a sort of manageable amount.
The other thing I want to put in your mind is that you can do this in a fixed way or in a variable way. And what I mean by that is you could decide to have a weekly structure. You could decide, and a lot of small business owners do this, that Mondays is camp is content creation day, that Tuesdays is operations day. I coached Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or something like that. That can sometimes be difficult in the university world because we don't get to decide what days we teach and what days we have meetings and those sorts of things.
But you might decide that there are certain times a day that are always particular roles, or you might decide that actually at the beginning of each week or the beginning of each month, you decide what role-based time structure works for you.
There's no rules here. I've literally made it up. You can make it up for you too and you can play with this. And that's one of the biggest things with any of these productivity tools is not to see it as something where you are doing it right or you're doing it wrong.
So I teach a process called Monday Hour one, which was taught through one of the places where I trained as a coach and it's great, but people get really het up about whether they're doing it right or not.
One's not a thing. Monday hour one's not really a thing. Somebody just made that up too. But it's just a thing. I don't care how you do it. It's up to you. Play with it, see what works. But what I'm going to take you through is a bunch of benefits that I see from role-based time blocking, over standard time blocking that might be worth pondering and seeing if you want to give it a try.
So, I find role-based time blocking massively less overwhelming to schedule. You are not trying to go, “oh, there's this task, that task. Where should I put that task and we're going to have time to do that task? Or I don't know,” looking at your huge to-do list, you just go, I've got like seven roles. When am I going to do them this week? It’s quite straightforward. Everyone can plot that in. So it really reduces that cognitive load. Especially if you're doing that - I try and do this on a Monday morning, you know, you've just come back after the weekend. You're still trying to get your brain in gear, getting working on things.
Rather than having to be like, right, “exactly what am I going to be doing at three o'clock on Friday?”, we can just go three o'clock Friday - operations. That feels like a good time to be tidying things up, closing things down, making sure my policies are all straight, all of those sorts of things. So it just really simplifies that scheduling process.
It also means you can keep separate to-do lists. So if you could look to my side over here, I have a whiteboard, it's divided into eight at the moment, and I have my seven roles plus one corner is personal jobs, like ongoing big like house projects and that sort of thing. Patio building at the moment.
And I have my role descriptions for each of my little roles, so what things that person is responsible for. And then I have a to-do list. I have them on those little cards, you know, the little index cards. And so for each one, I have it labelled up like for the month, and I put my tasks. So as a content creator, making this is one of the things that is currently on my to-do list, so I can already tick off Plan podcast 33. I am currently ticking off record Podcast 33, and that's on that card.
But when I look at my content creator one, I can't see that I need to invoice that university that I ran a course for or follow up with so-and-so to see if they want to coach with me after all, or not. I don't have to see all those to-do lists. I only have to see the things that are content creator relevant, so it keeps me focused when I'm in that mode. I'm not looking at a to-do list, seeing a million different things. They're only the things that are in-keeping with this current job.
I can also at a glance at my calendar, see what proportion of my time I'm spending on different things. So one of the things that brought me back to this process was realizing that since I've been started doing this back in September last year, that I've spent a lot of time coaching. I have quite a few individual clients now. I'm doing more and more university workshops. It's wonderful. I love it. Super exciting.
And I was spending lots of time in coach mode, but behind the scenes, some of my systems stuff, feeling a little less organized than I would've liked. And it was this realization, “Vikki, if you're going to run a business, you need to spend more time in strategic leader role. You need to spend more time in operations role. These are things that you're going to have to prioritize even if they're not necessarily the bits you love.”
I love being strategic leader. When I'm doing it, I'm making all these decisions. I get really excited, but I still don't always prioritize it unless it's scheduled in. And so that was when I realized, okay, I need to actually schedule in time in these different roles.
And so it can really help, now it's color coded, obviously. I can just look at my calendar and be like, okay, well this week's quite a busy week cause I've got quite a few university workshops. So I'm in coach mode quite a lot. But there's a clear block there, so we're going to make that purple for content creation to make sure that I definitely get all that stuff done.
My marketing stuff is sort of sprinkled through so that I can make sure that I'm kind of mindfully spending time on social media, engaging with you all and those sorts of things. So I get to sort of, see exactly how much time I'm spending in the different places, and from there I can make decisions about what I want to do in the future.
Because with all of this, we're trying to be compassionate. We're not trying to come up with the perfect system that's going to work forever. We're trying to come up with a system that we think will work this week. Try and implement it this week, see what happens. And if it doesn't work, try it slightly differently next week.
See what proportion of it works, which elements of it work. Because again, it's not a, it does work or it doesn't work. These things come with gradations, so being able to see what percent of time I'm spending at the moment, and whether that aligns with my priorities or not. Super useful.
It also doesn't rely so heavily on predicting how long something takes to do. Now I spend a lot of time coaching people that they can decide how long to spend on something. A form to fill in. Doesn't take a set amount of time. It takes the amount of time that you choose to give it. Obviously there's some boundaries around that, but you could fill it in in 15 minutes. You could spend three hours on it, depending on the level of detail you go into, whether you correct all the fonts, all of those things.
You do get to pick how long things take. But I'm also aware that people still get really hit up about this. They still get really, “oh, I don’t know how long it's going to take me to make this presentation.” Hey, you need to plan in some time as presenter in your presenter role, conference preparation role, for example.
And you can work through and then you can prioritize within the time you've allocated to conference preparation, how much of it do you want to spend on preparing the presentation? How much of it do you want to spend on figuring out who else is going and maybe reaching out to set up some meetings, for example. Within the time you can give for preparing for your conference, how do you wanna split that out?
And suddenly that's a lot easier job than, how much of my time this week will it take me to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. So it makes that time prediction A, less important, and B, just much easier to do.
It is also a way to make sure that you schedule the less urgent tasks. Like I said, for me, some of this came about because there were just some basic processes that I needed to tidy up, make sure things were stored in the right places on my computer and all that kind of stuff.
And those are the to-dos that never come to the top of a normal to-do list. If I've got a to-do list that says record podcast, which is urgent cause it has to go out on a Monday and that says, write something for your newsletter, and that says, prepare for that client and design that workshop and tidy up your client contract file, that is never, never going to come to the top of my to-do list. Not in a million years.
But if I plot in an hour for operations jobs, and I just have my little list of operations jobs in front of me, then those jobs get done. Because I'm just operation dude. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm not coach, I'm not going to start reading my books and going off into my CPD world. I'm not going to start answering client emails. I'm operations and these are the tasks that I need to do.
So now I'm not choosing between fun recording podcast and boring sorting files. I'm choosing between boring sorting files and boring something else, so I might as well just get them done. Makes staying within those roles so much easier.
It also enables you to keep your mind in the same vibe. So one of the things that I know people struggle with transitions, like I said before, I'm going to talk about this next week, but one way you can manage that is by reducing your transitions. So if you know that you are going to plot amount of time to do operations stuff, you can get into operations mode.
Like I say, you could slot it between meetings. Perhaps you've got a bunch of faffy committee type meetings, let's slot operations mode in between those so you can bang out some of the to-dos from those meetings immediately.
You can keep going in that sort of, “I'm all organized and administrative” kind of mode without going, oh, and I'm going to plan for my presentation in that gap where suddenly you've got to get yourself out of quality assurance mode into, I'm undoing a research presentation mode and then back into school committee mode or whatever. Okay, so you can plan to keep yourself in particular vibes.
It also helps with this idea of people wanting meetings with you. So if you are allocating time and maybe being available to students is something that's really important to you. We often have structured office hours for our undergraduate students to come and visit us.
Maybe you want to have specific times when you are open to PhD students contacting you, for example. If they don't contact you during that time, then you might be reading their drafts, doing comments for them, checking their ethics applications, whatever it might be. So it's like PhD time, but if they need meetings, then you can slot them into those slots.
So you can sort of have areas in your diary where it zoned off for PhD students stuff, but if no one needs the meetings, you'll do other PhD student stuff during that time. And you can translate this out depending on which stage of the academic journey you are at.
What all sorts of time blocking help with is knowing what you are saying no to when you say yes to something. So what I see a lot of people do with their diaries is put in the stuff where you are with somebody else. So you put in meetings, you put in one-to-ones, you put in committees, you put in teaching, you put in those sorts of things, classes, if you're still doing classes, you put in those kind of fixed things that involve somebody else, and then you have blank time.
The blank time is when you'll do other things. And so when somebody asks you for a meeting, it's really hard to say, “no, I'm not available”, because you can see blank spaces in your diary and you know you've got a bunch of stuff to do, but you kind of go, “oh well I'll fit that around. Yes, you can have this slot. That's fine.”
And that's really, really common. And that's true whether you're a PhD student thinking you're saying yes because everybody else is more important than you, or whether you are a senior professor and you are saying yes, because you don't want everyone to think that you are kind of out of touch and unhelpful.
So whatever stage in your academic career you are, this happens. And the challenge is when you are saying yes to them, you don't actually know what you would've done in that slot, because you haven't planned it. And so it's then just, yeah, I can squeeze that in. But the fact is every single one of us is occupied 24 hours a day.
I’m going to repeat that. We are all occupied 24 hours a day. Now, sometimes that occupied is sleeping, sometimes that occupied is messing around on our phones. Sometimes it's watching Netflix, sometimes it's just staring into space, wondering what life choices we made.
But we are occupied 24 hours a day. So anytime you say yes to something, there is something else that you would have been doing. And maybe that's something else is something you are very willing to give up. Maybe it's tidying your study because there's you who follow me on Twitter. My study is still struggling in a tidy sense. Maybe it's something you don't mind giving up at all. Maybe it's something that you really, really, really want to be doing and now it's devastating to lose it.
But if you haven't planned it into your diary, you don't really know what you're saying No to. Whereas if you've zoned out your diary, then when somebody says, are you available Wednesday afternoon? You look at your diary and you're like, okay, well that was Finance Time. And then you can look at your finance to-do list and go, “how many finance to do your jobs have I got this week?”
Can I actually give up a chunk of my finance time in order to have this meeting? Yeah, I probably can actually. Cuz that invoice is done. That's sorted. That's under control. Yeah, actually that's fine. I've had a look, I can fit that in. Or you look at it and you go, no, I've got 13 invoices to send out. I need to do this, I need to do that. There's no way I, I need that slot for these jobs.
And so you can make decisions about when you accept meetings in a much more informed way, if you know what you would've used that time for if they hadn't asked.
That's true regardless of whether you do standard time blocking or role based time blocking. The thing I like most with with role based time blocking is that instead of going, can I do that one thing another time? You're kind of looking at it in the round. You're kind of going, within this role, do I need this time this week, or can I make it work somewhere else? And I think that just helps sort of see the bigger picture slightly and keep it all focused.
So I think there's a whole bunch of benefits to this. Before I go though, one thing I want to remind you, and this is true of role-based time blocking, it's true of ordinary time blocking. It's true of any productivity suggestion you ever hear.
This isn't a solution. This isn't that you've got some huge problem and this is the thing that might work. You know, the miraculous bullet journal or notion worksheet or whatever it is that some gurus told you is now going to fix your life.
Your life doesn't need fixing. You're just a busy person who's trying to do a lot of things and that's okay. So this isn't a solution to some terrible problem you've got. This is a tool that might help make some of the things you're trying to do a bit easier.
You can do it a different way. You could do this for a while, then try something else. There's nothing wrong with what you're doing at the moment, but this is an approach that I'm finding helpful and that you might want to experiment with how you could fit it in to your life and make it work for you.
If you do decide to do this though, please make some promises with me here today. That you will do it with compassion. This is not something that you're just going to slot in and do perfectly forever. I'm not even sure what perfectly looks like. I'm certainly not doing it perfectly.
You will look at this with compassion. You'll see it as a skill that you can build something you'll tinker with, you'll play with, experiment with over time and see what feels good and see what makes your life easier. If it doesn't make your life easier, sack it off. Try something different.
My final tip, as usual with these things, don't spend too much time messing about with it. I've spent a little bit of time working out my colour coordinated calendar, but try not to get too caught up in the process. This is a means to get the important things that you want to do done.
The aim of this is not to have a perfect role-based, time blocking system. The aim here is for you to do the things that are important to you and to enjoy your life. So keep that aim top.
My other promise to you is that I am going to restrain the desire to have different costumes for my different roles because my creative brain went to, “ah, I should wear a suit when I'm in strategy mode, and I should have different outfits that I wear for different ones.”
I am not doing that because that is not the purpose of this new system. So that is my commitment to you. I am not going to get carried away with new costumes or even, as my partner suggested, different hats. I mean, I might get carried away with different hats. If you make different hats, please do let me know and let me know how you get on with time blocking.
I would love to hear how it goes for you. I hope that has been useful and I will see you next week.