Reclaim Your Time: Use Calendar Blocking To Conquer Your Daily Schedule
Many of us have heard the popular adage, "You have as many hours in a day as Beyoncé." However, between chasing dreams, securing the bag, and living your best life, maintaining a productive and balanced schedule can be a downright challenge. In a world of meetings, deadlines, and endless emails, it can be difficult to utilize your working hours in the most efficient way. To make the most of your to-do list, try a technique called calendar blocking (also known as time blocking).
Calendar blocking is a simple, yet effective productivity method that helps to organize your daily schedule.
This time management tool includes taking each of your tasks and purposefully scheduling or "blocking" them on your calendar for a set period of time. Calendar blocking was not only designed to increase your focus, it also helps to hinder any nagging distractions and helps to take your daily organization to the next level.
The beauty of calendar blocking is that it can work for anyone, from a boss businesswoman to a stay-at-home mom. The value of blocking your time is that it helps to build your day around important priorities, and by scheduling your time in advance, you're able to avoid non-priorities, decreasing stress and anxiety. Are you ready to master the art of calendar blocking?
If so, here's an easy step-by-step process that will help you maximize each moment of your day:
1. Evaluate Your Energy Level
Focus on when your energy levels are the highest. Are you more of a morning person or more of a night owl? Do your creative juices flow most in the afternoon? Understand your physical and mental energy levels and then structure your day around your tasks and your time. Recognizing your performance capacity will help to build self-awareness and efficiency in your work.
2. Free Your Mind
Like many of us, there are probably a million and one things whirling around in your mind. According to studies, the average human tends to have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. That's a lot to think about!
Grab a pen and a sheet of paper–it's time to go old-school. Get your thoughts in order by writing them down. This includes routine items such as meetings and deadlines as well as future projects and plans. It's equally important to pencil in your daily rituals such as morning prayer or meditation, an afternoon workout, or your evening commute back home.
3. Identify What's Important
Once you've jotted all of your thoughts on paper, ask yourself, "What are the most critical items on my to-do list?" Think of everything you'd like to accomplish in a timely manner and then take note of any urgent and important deadlines. Knowing what you're going to work on ahead of time encourages you to make conscious work decisions. In addition, when you acknowledge your high-level priorities and goals, that will determine what your calendar will look like and how you will block out your time.
4. Time to Throw A Party... A Block Party, That Is
Now, it's finally time to build those blocks. Figure out the best day to do your blocking. Some prefer to do a weekly blocking schedule the Friday before or the Sunday of the upcoming week, while others recommend a daily practice that only blocks out the next day.
Once you've decided your best mode of action, place the items you've planned to do into specific blocks of time on your calendar.
Feel free to get as detailed as you like and make sure to allot yourself enough time to fully complete your tasks. Fill your day with designated times for meetings, creative work, or errands.
Here Are Some Additional Tips On Maximizing Your Calendar Blocking:
Reserve time for breaks, buffers, and the unexpected. While organizing your calendar is the ultimate goal of this activity, it's important to keep your schedule flexible to accommodate unexpected happenings and avoid overcommitting. Also, be sure to add buffers to certain items to give yourself extra time to work on an assignment in case you need it. Lastly, set aside time to rest and recharge.
Dump the distractions. Ditch anything that prevents you from fully focusing on your work. If it's your cellphone, try silencing your ringtone and/or your notifications whenever you need to concentrate on your projects.
Allow yourself to revise and reorganize. Take time to reflect on your productivity. Recognize what blocks worked in your schedule and what blocks didn't. In the upcoming weeks, try to maneuver some blocks around to learn which changes are advantageous and which aren't.
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Smile, Sis! These Five Improvements Can Upgrade Your Oral Hygiene Instantly
This article is in partnership with Sensodyne.
Our teeth are connected to so many things - our nutrition, our confidence, and our overall mood. We often take for granted how important healthy teeth are, until issues like tooth sensitivity or gum recession come to remind us. Like most things related to our bodies, prevention is the best medicine. Here are five things you can do immediately to improve your oral hygiene, prevent tooth sensitivity, and avoid dental issues down the road.
1) Go Easy On the Rough Brushing: Brushing your teeth is and always will be priority number one in the oral hygiene department. No surprises there! However, there is such a thing as applying too much pressure when brushing…and that can lead to problems over time. Use a toothbrush with soft bristles and brush in smooth, circular motions. It may seem counterintuitive, but a gentle approach to brushing is the most effective way to clean those pearly whites without wearing away enamel and exposing sensitive areas of the teeth.
2) Use A Desensitizing Toothpaste: As everyone knows, mouth pain can be highly uncomfortable; but tooth sensitivity is a whole different beast. Hot weather favorites like ice cream and popsicles have the ability to trigger tooth sensitivity, which might make you want to stay away from icy foods altogether. But as always, prevention is the best medicine here. Switching to a toothpaste like Sensodyne’s Sensitivity & Gum toothpaste specifically designed for sensitive teeth will help build a protective layer over sensitive areas of the tooth. Over time, those sharp sensations that occur with extremely cold foods will subside, and you’ll be back to treating yourself to your icy faves like this one!
3) Floss, Rinse, Brush. (And In That Order!): Have you ever heard the saying, “It’s not what you do, but how you do it”? Well, the same thing applies to taking care of your teeth. Even if you are flossing and brushing religiously, you could be missing out on some of the benefits simply because you aren’t doing so in the right order. Flossing is best to do before brushing because it removes food particles and plaque from places your toothbrush can’t reach. After a proper flossing sesh, it is important to rinse out your mouth with water after. Finally, you can whip out your toothbrush and get to brushing. Though many of us commonly rinse with water after brushing to remove excess toothpaste, it may not be the best thing for our teeth. That’s because fluoride, the active ingredient in toothpaste that protects your enamel, works best when it gets to sit on the teeth and continue working its magic. Rinsing with water after brushing doesn’t let the toothpaste go to work like it really can. Changing up your order may take some getting used to, but over time, you’ll see the difference.
4) Stay Hydrated: Upping your water supply is a no-fail way to level up your health overall, and your teeth are no exception to this rule. Drinking water not only helps maintain a healthy pH balance in your mouth, but it also washes away residue and acids that can cause enamel erosion. It also helps you steer clear of dry mouth, which is a gateway to bad breath. And who needs that?
5) Show Your Gums Some Love: When it comes to improving your smile, you may be laser-focused on getting your teeth whiter, straighter, and overall healthier. Rightfully so, as these are all attributes of a megawatt smile; but you certainly don’t want to leave gum health out of the equation. If you neglect your gums, you’ll start to notice the effects of plaque buildup, which can irritate the gums and cause gingivitis, the earliest stage of gum disease. Seeing blood while brushing and flossing is a tell-tale sign that your gums are suffering. You may also experience gum recession — a condition where the gum tissue surrounding your teeth pulls back, exposing more of your tooth. Brushing at least twice a day with a gum-protecting toothpaste like Sensodyne Sensitivity and Gum, coupled with regular dentist visits, will keep your gums shining as bright as those pearly whites.
Why Do Millennials & Gen-Zers Still Feel Like Teenagers? The Pandemic Might Be The Reason.
There’s nothing quite as humbling as navigating adulthood with no instruction manual. Since the turn of the decade, it seems like everything in our society that could go wrong has, inevitably, gone wrong. From the global pandemic, our crippling student debt problem, the loneliness crisis, layoffs, global warming, recession, and not to mention figuring out what to eat for dinner every night. This constant state of uncertainty has many of us wondering, when are the grown-ups coming to fix all of this?
But the catch is, we are the new grown-ups.
As if it happened without our permission, we became the new adults. We are the members of society who are paying taxes, having children, getting married, and keeping our communities afloat, one iced latte at a time. Still, there’s something about doing all these grown-up duties that feel unnaturally grown-up. Enter the #teenagegirlinher20s.
If there’s one hashtag to give you the state of the next cohort of adults, it’s this one. Of the videos that have garnered over 3.9M views, you’ll find a collection of users who are overwhelmed by life’s pressing existential responsibilities, clung to nostalgia, and reminiscent of the days when their mom and dad took care of their insurance plans.
@charlies444ngel no like i cant explain to her why i had to buy multiple tank air dupes from aritzia #teenagegirlinher20s #fyp
The concept of being a 20-something or 30-something teenager is linked to the sentiment of not feeling “grown up enough” to do grown-up things while feeling underprepared and even nihilistic about whether that preparation even matters.
It’s our generation’s version of when we ask our grandmothers how old they are and they simply reply with, “I still feel 45,” all while being every bit of 76 years old. In this, we share a warped concept of time while clinging to a desire for infantilization.
Granted, the pandemic did a number on our concept of time. Many of us who started the pandemic in our early or mid-20s missed out on three fundamental years of socialization, career development, and personal milestones that traditionally help to mark our growth.
Our time to figure out and plan our next steps through fumbling yet active participation was put on pause indefinitely and then resumed provisionally. This in turn has left many of us hanging in the balance of uncertainty as we try to make sense of the disconnect between our minds and bodies in this missing gap of time.
Because we’re all still figuring out what the ramifications of being locked away and frozen in time by a global pandemic will have on us as a society, there really is no “right” way of making up for lost time. Feeling unprepared for any new chapter of life is a natural rite of passage, pandemic or not. However, it’s important to not stay stuck in the last age or period of life that made sense to us because self-growth is the truest evidence of personal progress.
So whether you’re leaning on your inner child, teenager, or 20-something for guidance as you fill the gap between your real age and pandemic age, know that it’s okay to grieve the person you thought you would be and the milestones you thought you’d hit before you ever knew what a pandemic was. If there’s anything that the pandemic taught us, it’s that we have the power to reimagine a better world and life for ourselves. And if we tap into our inner teenager as a compass, we can piece together our next chapter with a fresh outlook.
Sure, we’ve lost a couple of years, but there are still some really amazing ones ahead.
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