The Building Blocks to Focused Work and Joyful Living
October 30, 2025
Learn how to use strategic time blocking to do the things that matter most, to give you back your peace of mind.
It's your weekly dose of clarity and insight on all things tech & business from Dream in Digital! Each week, I'm here to share my thoughts to help you make the most of today's technology and build a business that genuinely supports the life you want to live.
This Week’s Core Focus:
“Blocking” Out Time for What Truly Matters
Whenever I find myself having to do many different things throughout the course of a week, and things start to feel a bit overwhelming, my mind immediately goes to building out or editing my work blocks. Without these foundational puzzle pieces in place, it’s easy to get pulled in way too many directions. This leads to stress, more distractions, and lower quality work — or simply just less output. Either way you spin it, it’s a recipe for disaster!
That’s why it's crucial to make it a point to establish pre-planned work blocks. These help you balance all of your different tasks & responsibilities, while also allowing the proper time needed for your brain to switch gears, so you can stay productive throughout each day of the week.
Here are 3 things you can do to build your work blocks effectively:
Map Your Essential Tasks: List all of your core business functions (e.g., Client Work, Sales, Operations), or break your week up into groups of your different clients/services (Client A, Client B, Client C, or Email, Paid Ads, Social Media, Etc.). Now, instead of listing individual tasks, group them by type and estimate the time you would spend for each of the core tasks in that particular group.
Section Off Your Day Strategically: Divide your day into chunks of 1 to 3 hours. I find a 3-hour block is perfect for high-focus, core tasks that demand my deepest concentration. Save 1-hour blocks for more routine, lower-brainpower work.
Match Tasks to Priority & Energy Type: I told you this activity was a bit like a puzzle, right? Well, now it’s time to start putting the pieces together! Start mapping your core business functions/tasks to your time blocks throughout the week. I often find that my most productive time is in the morning and earlier in the week. Therefore, I use that peak energy time for top priority, focused work. I intentionally save my afternoons for meetings, some strategy work, and miscellaneous admin tasks. This allows me to leverage my peak brain hours for getting important things done, and my not so peak hours for doing things I tend to enjoy more, or that are lighter on my brain, which also helps prevent burnout.
Pro Tip: For all of your work blocks, but especially for your larger ones (the 2-3 hour blocks), use task reminders (like in Google Tasks) to section off the specific tasks you need to accomplish for that day during that dedicated time period. This helps you stay ultra-focused on the most important tasks at hand, and saves you from getting overwhelmed by the entire week's to-do list.
Let’s look at an example of how to put this all together in this week’s tech tip of the week…
Tech Tip of the Week:
Building Your Work Block Puzzle!
The Problem: The constant juggling act of different clients and business functions makes it easy for crucial items to slip through the cracks, leaving you feeling unprepared, behind, or simply that you’re just not making much progress.
The Solution: Use Google Calendar to define your Work Blocks, and then integrate Google Tasks & their Reminders to assign the specific, time-sensitive to-dos directly within those calendar blocks.
Here’s an example of what that could look like:
Again, this is just a general example, but it’s up to you to really strategize your working hours, and find a system that works best for you… start building your Work Block puzzle!
Bonus Tip: Color coordinate! I love using different colors across my Google Workspace setup to denote different departments, business functions, etc. Having different colors that relate to each of the tasks (Ex. Orange is Client Work, Light Green is Sales, Light Blue is Marketing, Gray is Ops/Admin work, and so on…) helps me keep things organized and easily align my mind to the task I need to complete.
How This Helps: This simple system ensures that every block of your time is tethered to a clear, actionable outcome, moving you from "to-do" to "done" with minimal wasted effort, and it provides you the peace of mind that you've accomplished what matters.