Time Blocking

How I schedule my days.

What I worked on in my first time block of the day.

My priorities are:

1. Baby/Family

2. Sleep

3. Work

4. M.U.S.C.L.E (my acronym for little daily rituals sprinkled around the day)

Baby/Family

4pm - 7pm is family time. This block of time, or Timeblock, is non negotiable. I build my day around it, I try to show up with good energy and focus for my family during this time. A few times a week I might add additional time blocks for family related errands and activities.

Sleep

When I’m sleepy I sleep. Because I’m trying to establish myself as a career illustrator I’m always pumped and full of energy, and the only way to get to sleep is to spend every last ounce of that Excited/Nervous energy. So when I’m spent I sleep, this might be a nap midday or mid morning, or it may be retiring for the day at 8pm. I normally don’t set an alarm.

When I wake up fresh what ever time it is, I get ready to start my day and block in 3 Timeblocks of studio time.

Work

These days work is any number of big and small illustation gigs, some due this week and some due next year. Work is also a part time UX consultancy gig on a quaterly rolling contract.

All the work is broken down into little chunks that take between 2-4 hours to complete. At the start of each week I would have allocated 10-14 chunks of work for the week.

Every day I take the 1-3 Chunks that make the most sense to work on and put them into my studio timeblocks. And during each session of studio time, I aim to kill that chunk, well and properly kill the thing! Then I emerge from the studio do a small celebration dance, and I’m on to the next thing.

M.U.S.C.L.E

I have an acronym for categories of things I try to get done daily.

M - Maintainance

U - Understand (Read or Learn Something)

S - Seek (Spiritual guidence)

C - Create

L - Love

E - Engage

2 examples of a day (my Monday and Wednesday respectively)

All of this seems very simple to me now. But it’s actually systems upon systems that I’ve been trying to incorporate over the past 5 years ( and maybe dabbled with for the 15 years before that)

No out of the box solution or book or app ever worked for me. And I doubt it will work for you, but I just share this because people do ask, and because you might incorporate some part of it into your own practice.

I hope you have questions. So I can answer them in the next note.

See you then!