These three scheduling tips have been life-savers for me recently. It took me five years to learn that blocking time is one of the fundamentals of success in life and business.

Without blocking time regularly, my business was doing ok.

It paid all the bills.
It got me into a job as the lead developer for a great agency.
It got me to work with businesses all around the world.

Though, I wasn’t truly effective.

I was working on weekends.
I was working more than 40hrs per week to avoid having a 40hrs/week job.
My days had no routine.

Something had to change. My take on running my WP development business had to change.

1. Tip: Make scheduling a habit.

I love using the Coach.me app for tracking habits. Two habits are most important to me: „Daily Review“ and „Weekly Review“

Following the Getting Things Done method, I use those habits to plan days and weeks ahead.

2. Tip: Block time in your calendar.

Once you’re clear about the goals for a particular day and week, head over to your calendar and block time. This ensures you have enough time to actually DO what you planned.

Example: Last week, I switched the focus of WP Mastery towards optimizing WordPress sites for loading speed. I relaunched the website with that focus and a lead-generation chatbot. (Click here to see it in action)

In my calendar, this change reflects as 2h every workday for cold email outreach to prospects.

In the past weeks, I set up a productized service around loading speed optimizations – now it’s time to get the clients to work with. This is mandatory (obviously), so I blocked time in my calendar to ensure I’m doing the prospecting and outreach.

3. Tip: Add a content calendar to your WordPress.

Planning ahead what content goes onto your blog is mandatory for a strong online brand.

Becoming strategic about my content creation has massively improved the workflow I use. It’s basically just two steps:

First, I brainstorm topic ideas for the content I have to create. For this purpose, I’m blocking out 1 hour every week in my calendar.

The second step already is to create the content. For that, I’m also setting aside time daily and tracking the content creation with Coach.me in a „Write 100 words per day“ habit.

No need to over-complicate recurring tasks 🙂

Obviously, there is much more to running your online business effectively than just planning ahead and carving out time for the most important tasks.

But without a structured day, you’ll find yourself reacting to customer requests and random thoughts that appear to be important.

Only when you introduce habits and rituals into your daily routine, you’ll see how much freedom you can experience.

The moment you stop thinking about what to do next because you already know it, you’ll understand how disciplined planning will make your life simpler and more joyful.