The Key to Achieving Your Quarterly Goals

If you dedicate time to set goals and identify tactics, but you don’t also block out time to work on those tactics, you will struggle.

In the last newsletter about my annual planning week, there was something about my process that I left out. Planning is only the first component of getting things done.

The second component is just as important, and it’s time blocking.

I had included the example task list for getting this newsletter launched¹, but what I did not mention was that I already have set time blocks dedicated to business development or personal projects.

So yes, that task list was important, but what was more important was the time I had already dedicated to work on it.

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Time blocking is a method of scheduling that involves dividing your day into blocks of time dedicated to a specific task or set of tasks. Imagine smashing your to-list and your calendar together: each task landing in a specific block. Instead of appointments with people, it’s appointments with your to-do’s.

In The 12 Week Year, the author recommends scheduling a “Strategic Block” each week, which is a 3 hour block of time devoted only to working on business strategy. He also recommends “Buffer Blocks” (for dealing with email/communication) and a personal “Breakout Block” that’s only for hobbies or personal interests (he should have called this one the “Chopping Block”).

If you schedule a Strategic Block every week, here’s what starts to happen:

1. Your brain finds a groove (OK, I see where this is going…)
2. You start to look forward to this time slot (I have an idea for next time! Ooh here’s another one!)
3. Eventually, when that block begins, you’re able to instantly jump into creative, brainstorming work (This is just what we do at 7 AM on Mondays now.)
   

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There comes a point when you realize: the client work will never be done. You cannot wait for a window of free time; you have to make one.

I started blocking time to work on business development in the evening 5-6 years ago, after being frustrated that my clients got more of my brainpower than I did. I had been working to systematize and document processes for how we build websites, onboard clients, all the things. But it’s hard to write documentation on your website-building process when you’re too busy actually building websites.

So once the kid was in bed, I’d head to my studio and work without interruption on business development, continuing education, my own website, etc. Those nights start to add up, and I got a massive amount done over the years. At this point most of the process-related things I work on are revising or updating existing documentation.

Evenings have also been my routine for painting and writing. I’d love early mornings if I didn’t have to wake up for them. But for you morning people… getting up an hour or two earlier could make a big difference in working toward those quarterly goals.

As I’m mapping things out for 2025 I’ve been looking at even more focused time blocking for when I will do what type of writing, what block podcast editing is going to land in, and how realistic am I even being about all the stuff I’m doing right now.

One benefit of time blocking is that it forces you to be realistic about how much time actually exists in a day.

A to-do list can be endless. But if you work an 8-hour day, you only have sixteen 30-minute blocks. You have eighty of those per week. You have to face the facts.

I’m currently re-reading Four Thousand Weeks, because the beginning of the year is an excellent time to reset our relationship with time management. I recommended it last time, and I’m recommending it again now. My friend Eric told me–emphatically–to read it, and a year later when I finally did I regretted that it took so long. Just get a copy and thank me later.

Here’s one of the many enlightened things Oliver Burkeman has to say:

“Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”

The key is learning to:

“…stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence…”

The point of the planning week is to make intentional choices about what really matters. Time blocking is about choosing when and where to work on those things before you get pulled into the inevitable distractions.

What impact could you have on that pet project if you dedicated specific blocks of time to it every week?

Now that you’ve (hopefully) had a chance to think through your goals for this quarter, it’s time for the next step. Pick a time slot, schedule a repeating appointment with yourself, mark it busy, then stick to it every week and see what happens.

Footnotes

¹ This is how I learned that tables will be truncated in the email and only work if you open the newsletter in your browser… oops, sorry about that.