Time Management for Your Livelihood

This article was written by Denise Landers of Entrepreneur.com

What smart lessons you can learn from small children! One day I was watching two youngsters, aged 3 and 5, playing with "bricks" made of heavy cardboard. The brick blocks came in three sizes: a 10-by-16-inch rectangle, a 10-inch square and the standard 3-by-10-inch size. They spent hours creating structures.

When they first started, they didn't understand that larger pieces provided a stronger foundation for the smaller pieces, so their constructions would come tumbling down before they'd used all their bricks. With lots of trial and error, the children discovered that if they started with the biggest size, they were more likely to be able to use all their bricks.

An effective daily schedule can also be constructed with blocks of three sizes. How much you can pile on -- or how productive you are each day -- depends on how well you organize your "blocks" of time.

Large Blocks: Your Day's Foundation

Make your day's foundation an uninterrupted block of time in which you can focus on difficult, involved projects. The ideal length is an hour and a half, or approximately 20 percent of an eight-hour day. If you can't possibly find that much time, try for at least an hour. But even with 45 minutes of uninterrupted time, you can get a significant amount of work completed, because you won't waste additional minutes after each interruption to get back into your flow.

During this uninterrupted block of time, don't answer every phone call and turn off your general e-mail alerts. If you want to be sure that a certain person or message gets through immediately, set up your software rules to notify you of that specific message. When you can block 20 percent of your time to focus on what's really important, I guarantee you'll accomplish about 80 percent of your work for the day.

Having uninterrupted time is easy when you arrive at work an hour early or stay for a few extra hours at the end of a day, knowing you'll have some quiet time. But why not become more productive by scheduling that quiet time within your day instead of adding extra hours to get the same amount of work done?