Episode 128: Why Time Blocking Doesn't Work for Working Moms (and What to Do Instead)

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If you've ever tried time blocking and thought "this doesn't work for me", this episode is for you.

Time blocking is hard for working moms. Kids get sick, deadlines move, and the hour you set aside for email disappears into whatever caught fire that morning. Once you start dismissing those calendar reminders, your brain stops seeing them at all (just like that pile of clothes in the corner!).

In this solo episode, I'm sharing a flexible approach to time blocking that I use in my own calendar and recommend to my clients. Instead of recurring blocks, you set limits: how many hours of meetings you can handle in a day, how much time you need for email, and how much focused work you need to get done. Then you look two weeks ahead on a rolling basis and protect that time before anyone else takes it. You stay proactive with your calendar and still have room for real life.

If you've tried time blocking and quit, this might be the version that works. Listen in for how to get started.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Submit your coaching application today to learn more at www.themothernurture.com/application

• + Click here to read the full episode transcript

  You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.   Hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am coming to you with a solo episode this week. I have the windows open today as I'm recording. I just can't not. It is such a beautiful picture perfect fall day here. I know for any of you that have, been experiencing some of the weather from the Northeast in the US, , it's probably not a very kind thing of me to say right now. Thinking about you, but hopefully this weather is coming your way soon I'm really excited to jump in today and talk about time blocking or an alternative approach to time blocking. Because time blocking, I think, can be one of those love it or hate it strategies, and for those who don't like it, they have pretty strong reasons for why they don't. And if you have ever tried time blocking, if you have felt like maybe it was a little bit too rigid for your real everyday life, especially after becoming a parent, or if you've tried time blocking and felt like you couldn't keep up with the pace, that maybe you weren't great at estimating how much time you would need for different tasks, I want to introduce today a more flexible approach. This approach is something that I've been recommending to a few clients. I've seen a number of them have success with it, and so I wanna offer it here as well In case it's something that you might want to experiment with. So I hope you didn't see time blocking anywhere in this description and immediately dismiss this episode. I would definitely encourage you to listen through, consider this as a strategy. I think there are gonna be some tips in here that you might be able to take, to tweak, to borrow bits and pieces of to see if it makes a difference in how you get things done, how you feel about your time, and how you feel about how proactive versus reactive you can be in your days. If you're not familiar with time blocking, or even if you are, I wanna make sure that we are starting from the same definition, that we are talking about the same thing before we get into how to tweak and update and make that strategy more relevant for the constraints and honestly, just the realities of working parenthood. So time blocking by definition, or at least the way that I describe it, is a strategy in which you divide your day into specific blocks of time for set tasks or activities. So in the same way that you would decide with a colleague that you're going to meet to discuss this topic at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, you would also put a block of time set aside in your calendar to check your email, to draft a report, to work on that presentation that is coming up. So it is treating your tasks in the same way that you would treat an appointment or a meeting And I think that is a beautiful thing, because I think too many of us make lists without taking the time to see, does the list actually fit into the hours that I have available in between my set commitments? But here's the mistake that I see and why I think so many people give up on time blocking. And that is because they take these tasks, and then they create a rigid or set schedule with them. So for example, I talk to a lot of women who will, will set up a, a time blocking schedule kind of like this. They'll say, "All right, from 9:00 to 10:00 AM every day, I check my email for an hour. It's the first thing I do. I wanna triage it. I wanna get in and respond to anything that's come in overnight or while I was getting ready and dropping the kids off. Then maybe from 1:00 to 2:00, that's generally an open time block for me. I don't have a lot of meetings in that timeframe, so I'm gonna set that aside for my client work or my deep work. And then I am going to set a time recurring on my calendar for 4:00 to 4:30 or 4:00 to 5:00 every day to check my email again, and so on." So they will take tasks and make them recurring time blocks, or they'll decide in advance, right? Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'm gonna work on this presentation. Every Tuesday and Thursday, that's for my client work The problem is our days and our weeks fluctuate. Things change day to day, unless of course your day is stacked with patients or clients, you're in a, a role like that, where there is not a lot of autonomy or control that you have over how you spend your day, in which case time blocking in general, any version of it is probably not the best strategy for you, and we should talk about something else there. And then even if your schedule doesn't vary, like maybe you are always in meetings from 10 to 12 every day or from one to three, your deadlines, I'm guessing, change. What is the priority changes, your energy changes, and absolutely your focus changes from day to day or week to week. Not to mention a very crucial thing that we all have to learn as we are managing childcare and home and life and work, is that there are so many unexpected things that come up So when you have a set schedule for your time blocking, what happens is you end up ignoring or blowing past that 9:00 to 10:00 AM hour that you have set aside for email in favor of the fire that just got dropped in your lap, or the last minute request from someone on your team, or for the doctor's appointment that you are now rushing your sick kid to Or your schedule, your time blocked schedule was never really based in reality to begin with, And so you have over-committed or over-planned your day with very little room for things to take longer than you expect them to or for the unexpected to come in. And so by partway through the day, you are dismissing all of those calendar reminders because you're still stuck on the time blocked task from 9:00 to 10:00 AM, right? That thing hasn't wrapped up And so I get it. I get why so many working moms say time blocking doesn't work for me. I just need to work off of a list. So I wanna introduce some ideas that still take the core concept of time blocking, which is to the extent that you can, deciding in advance what you're going to work on, how you're going to spend your time, but most importantly, it's making sure that you have the time for the things that you say you want or need to do But I want you to do this in a flexible way. Now, you might be thinking, well, if it's flexible, can you really call it time blocking? Isn't time blocking meant to be a more set or rigid schedule? To which I say, says who? We get to make the rules. We can call it whatever we want. We can decide what it looks like, how we're going to implement it, and what we call it. So yes, I'm still gonna refer to it as time blocking because that's the, the foundation that it exists on top of but it's a more flexible approach So as I described a couple of minutes ago, setting a standard schedule with your time blocking may not be working for you. That might be the thing that is causing you to say time blocking doesn't work Because as soon as you start ignoring those calendar pop-ups that tell you it's time to check your email, or it's time to check in with your team, or it's time to take your lunch break even, and you ignore them, or you hit snooze, or you just delete them, you're done for Because you set the precedent that that's not actually important, and your brain starts to gloss over those time blocks on your calendar just like it glosses over and starts to no longer see the clutter that's been on the kitchen island for the last month because suddenly it's just part of the decor, right? It's no longer this thing that stands out as not belonging there. It actually belongs there because we've walked by it hundreds of times, in the same way that we've snoozed or dismissed our lunch break at noon every day. Instead, we stay at our desk and we answer one more email, or we end up taking that phone call, or we don't step away So what I want you to do instead is actually do away with any of those recurring set schedule blocks of time. I think they are great in theory, and as I just described, I think in reality, in the practice of following our calendars, our lives are just too variable to predict and to know that every day I do this thing at this time. Now, maybe it's working for you, and if so, by all means, keep it. You know your schedule. You know yourself best. I'm just sharing what I see more times than not is that those exist and we don't adhere to them So if you remove those recurring blocks on your calendar, what do you do instead? Well, instead, I want you to set up some guidelines or some parameters for yourself and for your calendar. So one of the first questions that I always ask a client who we're working through their schedule and, and their calendar and their tasks and their time management is about email, because that's the big one that I hear. I, I have yet to find someone in a line of work where email reading, responding, taking action off of email is not a part of the job. So I'm guessing it's a part of the work that you need to do. And so the question is, how many times a day or how long would you like to spend processing email each day? So think about that first. What would you love to see happen? Do you need to check it multiple times a day? Do you need to check it for just 30 minutes to get in and get out? Do you like longer processing blocks of time, like an hour if you had it? What would you want that to look like? Then if you are someone who is in meetings, again, most of us are, unless you are, a doctor or a teacher or a clinician in some way where your day is really just full of meetings or client sessions or appointments, then again, time blocking may not be the strategy for you. But for anyone else who has a smattering of meetings, I love that word smattering, how many meetings can you have in a day before you're completely drained or unable to get any of your other, quote-unquote, real work done? For some people, they might be maxed at three hours of meetings. Other people are like, "No, I can do six. That's actually a huge part of my job, and if I did less than that, I, I wouldn't be doing my job." So think about your work. Think about yourself. How many meetings in a day? How many appointments? How long can you be on Zoom or on Teams or in a conference room or, at a coffee shop meeting? So maybe you come up with, I'm just gonna use some example parameters here, taking averages across what I see. Maybe your parameter might be four hours of meetings a day, so about half of our day is meetings, and maybe you need about three 30-minute blocks of email processing time. You like to do it three times a day. And then in addition to that, maybe some of your work is actually producing a deliverable, a work product, some output. Maybe you need an hour of deadline work or client work or deep work a day, and that would be the ideal setting. Okay? So then what you want to do with that information is you want to work on a cadence where you are looking forward, you're looking ahead at the calendar maybe one to two or more weeks in advance. So if you were starting from scratch today, what you might do is today is you're listening to this on a Tuesday, so you would look at the calendar for the rest of the week. You'd look at today through Friday, and you would take those parameters that you'd set, and you would look at your calendar to see where are you within those parameters and where have you already exceeded them? Right? So if you notice any days where you are already at or above your meeting threshold, so you've already got four hours of meetings blocked or so you've already got six hours, whoops, we went over. That's okay, 'cause, you know, we don't have much advance notice here. We're just looking at tomorrow or the next day. Not much you could do at this point. It's probably already booked, blocked, and locked in. Go in and block any extra time. We just wanna prevent anyone from scheduling time with you that puts you even further over your threshold Maybe you look at your calendar for the end of the week, and you're like, "You know what? Actually, I could probably move one of those to give myself that hour that puts me closer to my max threshold of four hours." Great. Go ahead and do that. If not, it's okay, but just prevent any new meetings from coming in and pushing you way over. Then you might go back through the rest of this week and, and figure out, okay, where can I put those 30-minute blocks of email processing time? Oh, might need to do two of them back to back in the morning for a longer session, because there's really no other gaps, and then I can fit in another one at the end of the day. And if you want an hour for deadline work or teamwork or client work, look at those upcoming days and see where you can put it and, and where you can't. You may not be able to add it in every day. And maybe part of your parameters are like, "I wanna do that three times a week. That'd be amazing." Okay, great. Start and see how far or how close to that you can get. Then you're gonna look out to the next week, right? Now we're getting a little bit further in advance, so maybe the calendar is a little bit more spacious, maybe not. I see so many calendars that are filling weeks and weeks in advance. I mean, I know I just said a, a, a physician or a doctor may not be a good candidate for time blocking, but I'm starting with a new physician who can't get me in until April 1st. Wow, like, talk about planning in advance. So you're gonna look out a week, and you're gonna go through the same process. You're gonna look for where you're close or already at your meeting threshold, and you're gonna block that extra time. And then within those blocks, you're gonna add in time for emails or time for projects. You get to decide, like, what are the things that I wanna see reflected in my calendar each week? I'm gonna put those blocks in where I can. So it's no longer about, oh, I have to do my deep work every day from 9:00 to 10:00. It's well, I have a meeting here from 9:00 to 10:00 on Tuesday, so this day I'm gonna try it in the afternoon, or actually Wednesday's shot, so I'm gonna put it on Thursday instead, or I know I'm gonna need to probably do a little bit in the evening, and I just wanna do that consciously. I wanna know it going into the day And then maybe you look a second week out in advance. Go through the same process again. Where have I hit my thresholds? How can I add in these recurring things that I know I want space for? And then anything else, right? If there's extra time, you've hit that meeting threshold, you've blocked the time, you've got your emails, you've got your main projects or your teamwork or your client work in there, then that extra time is blocked from being hijacked by anyone else. And as you get to the day, you can decide what tasks you wanna use that time for. Maybe it's just buffer time because there's a lot of unexpected things happening right now in life or at work, and you just want the space to be available for that, to respond in the moment to all the fires or what questions come up. Maybe there is a longer term project that you wanna start putting some tasks into the calendar. Maybe it's just working through that huge long task list that you've got That choice is up to you. I would say probably the day of, maybe the week of, depending on how you think about your work and about your time But , what this turns into then is instead of setting a recurring time block for every day or every Monday at 10:00 AM, you are looking on a rolling cadence. Again, you choose how far out, one, two, three weeks. I, I would say most of my clients are doing like a two-week rolling cadence. And so what you would do is you'd set a time on your calendar each week where you're looking, let's say, two weeks ahead, if that's your cadence, and you're going through your parameters. You're looking at your thresholds, you're putting those things on, and you're blocking the rest of the time. Or you're leaving some of it open so that people can continue to schedule meetings with you until you hit your threshold, at which point you block the rest of the day. Does that make sense? So what this does is it holds the things that are most important, the things that you know you are responsible for in your work. Being responsive to emails, managing your team, doing deep work, producing a deliverable, maybe managing up, while still giving you the flexibility to respond to changing deadlines, to the fires that are gonna come in, the unexpected things in life And then with that time that's above your threshold, you get to choose. As I said, you might schedule it in for a specific task or project. You might leave it open. Maybe you choose to add a fifth or a sixth meeting in that day and go above your threshold. That is okay as long as it's your choice. And what having those thresholds does for you is it forces you to choose where you go above and beyond, where you go beyond your capacity. You know that four is your sweet spot, so if you are going to choose to add a fifth or a sixth meeting that day, that's okay. Know that you might feel a little more tired than you usually do at the end of the day, or you shouldn't expect yourself to get through a huge chunk of your to-do list because you're gonna have less time for your to-do list. It moves you toward a more proactive position with your calendar and with your priorities instead of being reactive, spending all of your time on calls or over-scheduling your day with blocks of time that aren't really relevant when you're up against a deadline. You can respond to what's happening in real time, what the priorities of life are right now, not the priorities when you set those recurring time blocks six months ago. Life looks very different today. And you can respond, hopefully, with some space, while also keeping the mainstays of what you need to be doing to be doing your job To me, this flexible approach is the middle ground between setting a rigid and recurring time blocking schedule that can't react to present day priorities and challenges, but it's also not just going in each day hoping that you'll get things done or filling your days with meetings or being reactive to what everyone else needs from you. It is looking a little bit ahead, a couple of weeks in advance. It is knowing what your thresholds are, and then it is allowing some flexibility to do what needs to be done in this week, in this season, on this day So if you've been feeling stumped with time blocking, it might be that you need a more flexible approach, and I would encourage you to give this a shot. Think about your thresholds. Think about the things that do need to be on the calendar, and decide how far in advance you feel comfortable scheduling them in. And then leave yourself the space to go in each day and each week to fill in the blanks with what is truly a priority right now If you give it a try, please let me know what you think. Like I said, I've seen a lot of clients have success with this. I practice this, , myself. I leave my calendar open, for example, to my clients to book their own appointments, but once I hit a threshold, I lock it down so nobody else can schedule more because I know I'm not the best coach when I've been coaching for six hours in a day. Some people can do that, I cannot. Takes a lot of effort and a lot of energy to be present and truly actively listen to my clients, and so I have thresholds myself, and then I fill in the rest of that time with the projects of the moment, with the tasks of the day, and I find it to work incredibly well for me. So I hope it does for you, too. If you want some one-on-one support with putting this into place in your own schedule, thinking through the unique constraints and situation of your work life or your life life, I would be honored to help you think through all of that and put a practice into place in a very clean and clear and doable way. So please reach out. I am accepting new one-on-one clients at the moment. It's a great time to start. I love fall kickoffs because we get to set you up for a really successful holiday season, end of year wrap-up, and be working together into the new year as we think about 2027, which is wild. I got some emails last week with those 100 days left in 2026 subject lines, and wow, I, I can't believe that, but also it's the perfect time to start. So reach out to learn more about coaching, and I would direct you to my website, themothernurture.com/application to answer just a few quick questions, and I will reach out to let you know whether I think you'd be a great fit for coaching or what I would recommend for you All right. With that, I hope you have some fun in your calendar, and I will talk with you in the next episode. Until then, take care. Talk to you soon Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.

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