Time allocation: One half of achieving your goals

We all know someone who seems to have their life together. They’re successful, have a vibrant social life, and find time to do things they enjoy—they even find time to get a good night’s rest. You’ve likely wondered what their secret is to living such a balanced life. Well, it’s not much of a mystery—it’s simply time allocation. The real secret lies in how to allocate one’s time. 

In this blog post, we’ll share how to allocate your time, prioritize responsibilities, and progress on your goals to achieve a well-balanced life. 

Prioritization as a philosophy and practice

In an earlier blog post, we explained The Eisenhower Decision Matrix. The matrix applies a philosophy and practice that dictates that all responsibilities can be categorized—and in turn, prioritized—into four simple buckets:

• Urgent and important
• Important and not urgent
• Urgent and not important
• Not important and not urgent

The matrix is an easy way to sort out the effectiveness of your priorities and goals. To learn more about this process, check out our blog post. 

Prioritization of tasks is an essential step to improving the effectiveness of your time allocation, achieving your goals, and leading a more balanced life. Still, it is only the pre-work to time allocation. Once you’ve identified what’s a priority and what isn’t, it’s time to take action.

Plan the work, then work the plan 

Think of your goals—be it living a more balanced life or getting through a project—as a coin. Heads are the time allocation or the planning aspect of goal setting. It means taking your list of prioritized items and setting or scheduling time to complete those tasks. Tails are the action part of achieving your goal. It means that once you’ve allocated time to your most important items, duties, or responsibilities, it’s time to act on completing those tasks. It’s committing to working on those things that will bring you closer to your goals.  

Types of time allocation

So, what’s the best way to allocate or schedule one’s time? Let’s take a look at some common practices, their pros, and cons.

In-the-moment time allocation

Allocating time in the moment usually involves a mental to-do list. This practice skips the time allocation pre-work we mentioned before, which means there is likely a mental tally of all the things you need to get done. You allocate time to your tasks by merely picking something from your mental list and working on it immediately.

• Pros:
  • You’re taking advantage of the present moment and making progress on the things that need to get done.
• Cons
  • Your to-do list may or may not get shorter.
  • You may feel anxious about the things you need to remember to get done since your to-do list lives in your head
  • This method doesn’t help you become more effective as there is no distinction between what is important and what is urgent.
  • You’re unclear as to what to do next.

Daily time allocation

Another way to allocate time is by creating a daily to-do list. It means kicking-off the day by creating a list of things to accomplish by the end of the day. You’ll gradually work your way down the list crossing items off as you complete them throughout the day.

• Pros: 
  • This process applies some prioritization based on urgency or importance, especially when compared to in-the-moment time allocation
• Cons:
  • This method accounts for urgency and importance but is not optimal. The list only accounts for the day’s goals and lacks long-term vision.
  • This method leaves one vulnerable to various distractions or urgent matters that may arise throughout the day, taking attention away from one’s to-do list and resulting in little progress.

Weekly time allocation

Weekly time allocation involves creating a plan of action, outlining several items you aim to complete over a week. This method involves more consideration as it requires you to plan multiple days, propelling you to check in on your progress regularly.

• Pros: 
  • Weekly time allocation is an improvement over previously mentioned methods. It lets you dedicate a larger block of time to make real progress on your tasks and goals. 
  • It allows for a variety of activities to take place like meetings and interruptions without entirely derailing one’s intentions for the week.
  • Goals are more likely to be reached when one has planned to make progress on them during an entire week, rather than trying to make time as each day comes up.
  • This method creates a regular, thoughtful schedule that will help you plan and prioritize items that are not urgent but are important
• Cons:
  • If you’re commitment-phobic, you’ll have a hard time with this method.

Experts and time management aficionados say that somewhere between one and two weeks is the sweet spot for individuals and teams. This block of time is short enough for you to plan and visualize your schedule relatively quickly. It also provides you with enough time to progress against goals.

Finding balance through time allocation

We all play various roles in life—we are individuals, friends, children, maybe a spouse or a business owner. Whatever roles you play, giving attention to each of those roles is essential. We all know a person that may focus too heavily on only one aspect of their life, neglecting and negatively impacting the other parts of their life. Achieving balance in one’s life can have profound and lasting benefits on one’s mental and physical health. 

The bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, recommends taking a look at our roles and picking one to two goals—aligned with each role—to achieve in a specific week. In doing so, you can balance your attention across the various things that are important to you. Let’s look at an example:

I am an individual and a marketer—just to name a few of my roles. I have a personal goal to take better care of my physical health. So how do I take steps to become healthier? I’ll set smaller goals to exercise three times a week every week. As a marketer, my goal is to create a regular cadence of helpful and educational content for the Yomez blog. I’ve set smaller goals to help me get there such as creating a content strategy by the end of May (✓), a content calendar by the end of the first week of June (✓), and writing this very blog article by the end of the second week of June (✓). Et Voila! We have a plan and have started allocating time for our goals.

Remember, time allocation is just one side of your “goal coin”. It’s like our CEO, Doron Gan, always says, “You must allocate time and take action if you want to accomplish something.”

Time allocation tools

Once you’ve sorted out how you’d like to allocate your time, you may want to give some thought to what tools you’ll use to organize your time.

Time Blocking with calendars

Time blocking is a popular method for organizing and scheduling time. This method involves using an electronic or paper calendar to block off chunks of time assigned to a specific task or goal. I prefer electronic calendars since they are easy to create, update, and share. Mobile devices also enable you to take your schedule wherever you go.  

So, how does time blocking work? Let’s imagine you’re working on an important presentation for your boss. You can use this method to block off 10 AM to 12 PM on Monday and work on that one goal. This time block is usually scheduled around meetings or other obligations, allowing you to accomplish what you need to get done while also addressing different needs. 

Indeed, time blocking with calendars helps us allocate time to accomplish our goals. However, it can become tedious—and a task in itself—to create various blocks of time for the different things we want to do throughout the week. It becomes challenging to manage for more than a few days at a time. 

Time allocation apps

There are various time and task management tools available on the market that can help you get organized. Still, they often require a lot of manual rearranging of tasks, which creates tedious work. Task management apps often encourage a due date for each item. Although this can be helpful, it can be limiting or restrictive. Focusing too heavily on due dates rather than on task importance or goals may be less effective. Yomez automates time blocking, eliminating the need for manual scheduling. With Yomez, you can easily see what you can get done with the time you have available, and what tasks or responsibilities are at risk of not being completed. You can even get a task’s estimated time of completion based on your available time and priorities

Yomez makes it easy to visualize your time—available and already committed—helping you to think critically about how you spend your time and on what. 

With Yomez and its powerful product features, you can take small or giant steps toward accomplishing your goals. For access to our free beta program, sign up here. 

With your new-found understanding of time allocation, we hope you’re able to improve on your time management practice. Check out the productivity tab of our blog for more insights on becoming the most effective version of yourself.