Understanding how much time you actually have available to get things done is a critical piece of planning out your day to be meaningful and impactful. We first talked about making sure your set your "open for business hours" and that's all about helping other understand when you're available.
Right now we're going to focus on how we can make sure you have a better understanding of how much time you have for yourself. To do this, we're going to bookend our days.
Adding a bookend to our days, is no more complicated than setting a recurring appointment that puts a visual block at the start and end of each day. You can think of this a scheduling your travel time to and from work as that often makes it easier to visualize.
Let's consider a regular 9 to 5 work day, that repeats daily and has an hour commute to the office. All you need to do is create an appointment on Monday that goes from 8AM to 9AM and a second appointment that goes from 5PM to 6PM. This will account for your commuting time, but more importantly it will add a visual indicator in your schedule.
If your workday is consistent each day of the week you can set the appointment to recur daily (Monday to Friday). If you have different schedule each day of the week you can set a recurring appointment weekly for each day of the week.
In the image below you can clearly see that on the Monday there is still 3 and a half hours available within your work day. When you glance at Tuesday quickly it is harder to quantify how much time you have left. Is it 4.5 hours that are left on Tuesday or are you already working outside your day?
PRO TIP
We typically recommend you also mark your "Bookend" time as Out of Office. This provides more context to those booking time with you. It also let's you better refine some conditional formatting we used to make the appointments turn purple.
HOW TO DO IT
