10 Time Blocks to Include on Your Weekly Schedule

Time blocking is one of the best ways to organize yourself in time; it can help you stay focused and get more done in a sustainable way.

Its structure is especially helpful for people with ADHD (and if you’re not yet sold, wait until we get to the physical implementation!)

Among its many benefits, time blocking helps you get realistic about how much time you actually have to work with in a day.

The Limits of a Day

When you sit down with your calendar and consider the 5 essential elements of time blocking and the 7 types of time blocks to include in your day, you might feel overwhelmed with how to fit in everything you want or need to do.

It’s important to remember that any given time block can be of varying duration. Some time blocks will be shorter than others; some will overlap. Much depends on your lifestyle and what you do during your day.

That said, it’s inevitable — and very common — that you won’t get to everything during your day, even if you’ve planned conservatively.

Even if you do get to everything you planned for the day, it’s common that certain essential components won’t get as much attention as they deserve.

When implementing time blocking, it helps to look at a full week in addition to the individual days.

We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in a week.

10 Time Block to Include on Your Weekly Schedule

Here are 10 types of time blocks to fit into your weekly schedule.

(1) Thinking Time

Thinking time is just what it sounds like: time to think about bigger picture issues in your life or business: coming up with ideas, developing strategies, planning longer-range projects, seeing patterns and trends. The crucial element of thinking time is that you are not implementing. Imagine you are a painter; this is the time to step away from the canvas to get perspective on what you’ve been creating and look at what you want to change or implement next.

(2) Play Time

Play time is crucial for our mental and emotional health, our brain function, and our productivity.

Even if your work feels like play, work is still tied to outcomes and results. Play time is time for hobbies and interests that are not tied to any particular outcome.

In an ideal world, you would have some play time every day. At the very least, we give yourself permission to play at least weekly.

(3) Deeper Connection Time

In addition to daily connection time, it’s important to make time weekly for nurturing deeper connections with ourselves, with others, and with nature.

Sometimes the urgency of a day can cause us to shortchange connection time. You may go through the motions without truly connecting.

For example, if you’re a parent, you might spend a few minutes with your kid in the morning before school — but are you really connecting?

We create a meaningful life not just by the volume of our connections but by their quality.

(4) Learning and Development

Learning new things and developing new skills is like exercise for the brain. It helps us keep our brains healthy and developing new neural pathways.

Whether it’s learning a new skill for work or just learning something for fun, having a time each week dedicated to learning new things or practicing new skills will help your mind stay sharp and agile.

In addition, learning new skills can boost self-esteem, foster resilience, and help you find deeper meaning and purpose in life.

(5) Self-Care and Personal Maintenance

Self-care and personal maintenance includes all the things that help you function in the world and feel good about yourself.

It could be superficial things like having your hair done or getting a manicure or a massage, but it can also be a nice bath, doing meal prep, or some other time where you intentionally care for yourself.

To be clear, self-care is something that you can build into your daily routine. And, it’s helpful to build a longer self-care activity into your weekly schedule.

(6) Unplugged Time

Unplugged time is just what you might imagine: time to be off email, social media, or other screens. It’s a time to unplug from the world, and restrict your information intake. A “Sabbath.” Even if you do this daily, it is helpful to take an extended amount of time to disconnect from the world at least once a week.

(7) Errands

When you start factoring in travel time and transition time, you will realize that errands can take up a lot of time. This is time during which it’s difficult and inefficient to do other things. Instead of putting errands into the small pockets of your days, group errands together by location and schedule them in a time block once a week. This works especially well for things like grocery shopping.

(8) Unstructured Time

Time blocking is helpful in providing a structure that keeps us organized and knowing exactly what to do. That said, there’s also value in having time to just be — without an agenda.

Unstructured time is the time to just be: to wander or putter around, to get lost in a book or a creative hobby for as long as you want, to take a nap, zone out, or do nothing.

Unstructured time can be used for work if you want — as a time to engage with something and see where it takes you without the pressure of having an outcome or place to be. The point of unstructured time is that it is completely free of any agenda.

Yes, there’s an irony to “time blocking” unstructured time. That said, for those of us with ADHD, it helps to have some limits, even if those limits are broad.

Also, keep in mind that the length of any “time block” is up to you. Your unstructured time can be an hour, a day, a weekend, or a full week.

(9) Weekly Review

A weekly review is like a daily review, but on the scale of a week. This is your time to review the previous week, take inventory of what you did and note what you didn’t get to. You can assess what worked — and what didn’t work, and come up with new strategies.

If you do this daily, it becomes easier and faster to do the weekly. But some days you might skip your daily review or overlook some things. The weekly review is a stop-gap for when you slip on the daily review.

(10) Weekly Planning

Weekly planning is about looking ahead at the coming week to see what’s already on your agenda, set your priorities, and implement your time blocks for the coming week.

You may combine this with your weekly review in terms of your work, but weekly planning is about more than work.

Weekly planning might also include meal planning and meal prep, workout planning, and other activities that set you up for success for the coming week.

Where Are You Skimping?

It’s common to abandon some of these time blocks when we are in the false belief of “not enough time.” Which of these are you skipping in your week?