Time Management Through Color Blocking

Colors… so many colors…

A recent Inc. article concluded that we only have 4 hours of productive time per any given day. As such, you want to preserve these four hours for your top priorities. (“Simplify Your Time Management With the 'Rule of 4'””).

Visual cues are quite helpful in enriching our understanding of how we spend our time. By using colors coupled with key words, priorities stand out visually. Color Time Blocking is a popular technique and includes concepts like:

• 1. Use “Green” to align with specific strategic goals and your top priorities – which you are trying to ensure are on track, delivering, and therefore “green”. You may use more than one shade of “green” to designate one project/priority from another.


• 2. Use “Yellow” for uplifting, positive, and sunshining activities like coaching, mentoring, and relationship building.


• 3. Use “Orange” for learning, continuous improvement, training, education, etc.


• 4. Use “Grey” for administrative / overhead meetings.


• 5. To actively manage your overhead and drive strategic change, ensure you have “White space” which is your time to think.


• 6. Use “Blue” for time with family and friends.


• 7. Use “Red” for exercise and getting your heart pumping, hence the “red”.


• 8. Use “Purple” for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and breaks as many of us forget to eat throughout a busy day or get up and stretch, rest our eyes, clear our minds.

If it is important, schedule it on your calendar. This helps you guard against distraction and multiply your focus. Family time, exercise, time to think, strategic planning, lunch, etc. get scheduled and are protected just as vehemently as a meeting with the boss.

At first, you will use this technique to gather data. Does the array of colors match the balance you expect to see within the portfolio of priorities you have identified for yourself? What does the trend look like over the course of a week? A month? This quarter? Based on how you are allocating your time, are you giving yourself space to focus on and achieve your personal, professional, spiritual, and family goals? What would an ideal calendar look like for you? What would it feel like to have control over your time?

As you aim for the ideal, you start to focus your energy and shift your schedule to preserve time for what is most important to you. As you align your energy with your effort, you will gain progress. With progress comes encouragement which is just the fuel you need to keep this schedule machine working for you.

[Hint: It is your time, so you do have control. You just may need to take it – or take it back!]

“It's gonna take time
A whole lot of precious time
It's gonna take patience and time, mmm
To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it
To do it right.”
- “Got My Mind Set on You.” George Harrison. (1987). Cloud Nine. Friar Park: Dark Horse Records (Recorded 1987).