Time Flex Tier Technique: A New Approach to Time Blocking

Danielle's Time Flex tier technique transforms scheduling by using color-coded calendars to balance flexibility and priorities.

### Mastering Time Blocking: The Time Flex Tier Technique (TX3)
* 🗓 Time blocking can be effective, but simply transferring tasks to a calendar doesn't guarantee completion; it requires a **thoughtful approach**.
* 🎨 Instead of creating multiple calendars for different life areas, use a few calendars that represent **tiers of time flexibility**, helping you **prioritize tasks based on your energy levels**.
* 🔴 The Time Flex tier technique, or TX3, categorizes tasks into five tiers: **A for appointments** (fixed commitments), **B for bottlenecks** (important tasks that precede others), **C for critical tasks** (daily priorities), daily routines, and a catch-all for **miscellaneous tasks**.
* 📅 Appointments are marked in **bright red**, indicating they are inflexible, while bottlenecks are slightly less urgent but still **significant to overall productivity**.
* 🚦 Critical tasks, like maintaining a workout routine, are **essential for achieving personal goals**, while daily routines encompass habitual tasks that may not hold the same weight.
* 📝 The technique allows for flexibility; tasks can be **moved or deleted based on daily circumstances**, promoting a sense of **accomplishment without overwhelming pressure**.
* 🌟 Utilizing a simple grading system helps **visualize the importance of tasks** and **manage expectations**, making it easier to **adapt when plans change**.
* 💡 Ultimately, this method aims to create a **balanced approach to productivity**, allowing for **spontaneity while maintaining structure** in your daily life.

time blocking. Let's talk about it. [Music] If you take tasks off your to-do list and put them onto your calendar, and then you task like they're now appointments. Who falls for this stuff? Not me. Um, then there's no way you're not gonna do them, right? Wrong. [Music] You probably know you need some kind of structure, right? I do. I also hate any kind of rigid structure that is like standing in the way of spontaneity, hampering my creative impulses, right? Okay. And when I tell you this one tiny little tweak to the way that I use Google Calendar, change my time blocking, and kind of like low-key change my life, okay? And I genuinely believe that somebody else out there will also feel the way that I feel. Hopefully, it's you. I'm Danielle, by the way. Okay, so here is the juice. We've got to stop creating all these multi-colored calendars for all these different areas of our life. You know what I mean? Work, personal, social, travel, right? The kids, workouts, okay? You get it. No more of that.

and what I want you to do instead is use the multi-calendar function and therefore the colors associated with each calendar to represent, sorry, I have to read this, tears of time flexibility relative to your priorities, yet sensitive to your moods and energy levels. Big no to millions of calendars for all the different million areas of your life, uh, Gone by. Big yes to a few calendars whose colors, like, signal to your brain a, like, how important something is, and don't worry, I'll get into it, but also B, how much, like, flexibility you have to move it around your calendar without your whole life catching on fire. I'm calling it The Time Flex tier technique or tx3 for short. All right, now we're gonna make this concrete. [Music] Hello, it's many months later. Also, you're in my kitchen. I'm in a bathrobe, sorry. Okay, so one of the last things I said was that you needed to create calendars to represent tiers of flexibility, and probably like, what the hell does that even mean? How many tears are there? How

do you decide what goes in each tier? Are they labeled by numbers? Like, right, okay, I hear you, I got you. But to teach you how to do it, we're gonna have to go back to grade school. I'll show you what I mean. So, this is a good time to open Google Calendar if you want to follow along. I've watched so many time-blocking videos, and when I look at other people's little area down on this thing, they'll have, I've seen five calendars, but I've also seen like 20. Something that I ran into when I used to calendar block that way was like, okay, I'm taking a trip to New York City to hang out with one of my girlfriends. Does that go on my social calendar? Does that go on the travel calendar? But I plan to Vlog it. Is that gonna be on my content? Like, it was just, it was too confusing for me personally. Now, Google Calendar automatically gives you one calendar. It's usually like named your name, and then there's like a tasks, a reminders.

Wayne is aside from all those calendars that Google Calendar already gives you. We are going to create five of our own, and this is what I mean by grade school. I want you to remember the grades you got on your report card: A, B, C, D, and F. A stands for appointments, only things that cannot be reasonably moved to another time on this calendar. That's obviously things like doctor's appointments, hairdresser appointments, meetings, flights, right? So, it doesn't have to be like health appointments; it just means things that are tied to a time, and if you change the time, you're either really inconveniencing someone else or really screwing over yourself. These are solid, and I would just say inflexible. Now, using myself as an example, let me unclick my appointments calendar or let me click on my appointments calendar. This particular week, we were in the thick of moving and settling in, so I really only had one thing this week that was tied to a time. It was an appointment to get this lasered, but like

let's say you know Saturday 7 P.M. is your friend's birthday dinner, right? It's from seven to eight, obviously. This is like not something that you can really move around, or like let's say you work at a coffee shop from seven to I don't know 11. Or let's say on Wednesday you have a flight, right? Okay, that's obviously not gonna be 15 minutes long, but you get the point, right? And this is why I make appointments bright red. That red signals to my brain they are the things with the least amount of flexibility. B stands for bottlenecks. This calendar I feel is slightly more intuitive than the appointments calendar, right? Because bottlenecks is less about something being tied to a specific time and more about how important that task or event is. Because it's something, it's a precursor to something else I've deemed important. Alright, so let's toggle on my bottlenecks calendar. For me personally, you might not feel this way, but like my weekly plan, it's obviously

not an appointment. I don't have to do it at 5 PM every Sunday, but for me, it's something that, like, if I don't do it, the whole rest of the week, I just won't know what I'm doing, so it kind of holds everything up. To be honest, I don't even think that's the best example, but I'm trying to be more consistent on YouTube. A bottleneck would be something like filming a video, right? Film this week's video, right? And you know that'll probably take me two hours, hypothetically speaking, right? Now I've made it another bright color. It's not quite as bright as the red, but I've made it another bright color because I want it to signal to my brain, like, Hey, if something comes up on Monday, let's say the hairdresser that I can never get an appointment with, is like, 'Hey, I've got an opening. Could I wait a few hours? Could I easily shift this down a little bit or even maybe move it to the next day?

I could, but just know you are holding other things up by not doing this. Grade C stands for critical. Let's say that my two priorities in life right now are being consistent on this YouTube channel and, um, you know, let me just toggle on the critical calendar, and then I can show you what I mean by this. At the time that I made this schedule for myself, my husband was deployed, and one of my biggest focuses in life was trying to be like hot by the time he got home from deployment, right? I put it on my critical calendar that every morning I do a hot girl walk and a little bit of Pilates, and then I also was doing these cavitation treatments. It's a machine that melts your fat, basically, and then also just like other little beauty things. So, all these things are not appointments, they're not bottlenecks, but they were critical to my success. Caveat to this calendar: it probably doesn't need to just be to whatever your two main priorities are. I have trash day written down here as critical.

where we were living at the time. Like, we needed to put the trash out on Monday night, so obviously, that's critical to just keeping my home in working order. It's not tied to a time, but it's like something like, I need to do that day. I want to like really get in-depth with these, but I also don't want to beat a dead horse. If you have any questions, just like leave them in the comments, and I will explain. Daily routine is, I think, pretty self-explanatory. It's the stuff that you need to do every day. Let's toggle on my calendar. You notice a lot more stuff pops up, pops in, especially around the morning and around the evening. So for me daily, I have my little morning routine here, which I've represented by these emojis, which is basically like wake up, brush your teeth, scrape your tongue, drink some water, drink your coffee, make your bed, right, showering, doing my hair, reviewing my calendar for the day. Sometimes I think it could be tempting to put something you do every day on

your daily routine. Even though it's critical, I made the distinction to put like Hawker walks and Pilates on my critical calendar because it wasn't really like habitual, like getting up and making coffee and making my bed. It takes up time, so I put it in the calendar, but making my bed isn't really critical in the grand scheme of things to my goals, whereas doing Pilates every day was. The thing that's different about the daily routine blogs, though, is because they happen every day, they can't really roll over. You could probably delay them in the day. For example, let's say I wake up on Monday morning and for some reason I just can't get out of bed, and then I realize, Oh crap, I've got Pilates class. I gotta get to. So I gotta get going, and I don't have time to make my bed. I could roll it down and move it, make it later, you know, when I get home, and I'm just like, Oh, let me make my bed so that it's not bothering.

me all day, but you're not gonna make your bed twice in one day, so these daily routine things don't really roll over. They just kind of get like deleted. Like, let's say the whole day goes and I didn't make my bed. Whatever, didn't happen. If I end up not freaking showering today, I'm not gonna shower twice tomorrow to make up for it. Alright, I'm just gonna be like, Whoops, Goblin girl moment. It was one of those days, you know. What I like to do is I have things on my schedule, and then when I would do them, I would turn them gray. So like, let's say I woke up at 6am, great. I would gray it out. I get up and I have a successful quick morning routine. Like, I have ADHD. I've learned to stop asking so much of myself. I used to have these like ridiculous morning routines, but I could never follow through with them or keep up with them for very long. If I wake up and I brush my teeth and scrape my tongue before I have coffee.

It's a good day, and I reward myself by this is my version of like ticking off the box. I turn it gray, right-click this event is now gray. And like, let's say I'm having just, I'm on a roll, I'm having a perfect day, and I did my hawk or walk in the morning. I'd come back to my walk, and I'm like, Did that? And I would turn it gray. And then after that, I did my Pilates, turn that into gray. And then, Oh, I uh showered. I deleted that earlier, but like, let's say I did that. I would turn it gray. And then let's say I'm like feeling a little bit lazy, and I get sucked into my phone, or I don't, something else comes up, blow-dry my hair, just let it air dry, whatever. Now I would just delete it. I would say, Oh, that didn't happen, and I'm not gonna style my hair twice tomorrow to make up for it, whatever. And I would just do this all day long, and let me

tell you it feels so good. There is nothing more satisfying than like Sunday night coming around, and it'd be time for my weekly planner review. And I'm looking back at this week and being like, Man, like I really did all that, or it doesn't. Then you just delete it, and you see blank space in your calendar, and you can kind of reflect on like what did or didn't happen. [Music] These are things that like my dream self would do with everything were to go according to plan, but it's also the kind of thing that like if I delete it or it doesn't get done, you know what I mean? For example, my ideal self is someone who like cuts herself together and does her makeup every day, but like if it didn't happen, nobody cares. Don't like follow my example. Like some of the stuff that's negotiable to me is not negotiable to other people. Like vacuuming my bedroom, ideally I would have done that once a week, but honestly sometimes I skipped it to some people. That's probably but now

you can kind of use this two ways. Like the way I use this is like, oh, it's either something that can like just be deleted if I can't do it. If me and my girlfriend like can't make sure we have our like weekly phone call, like whatever we just talked about it, delete it, whatever. But it's just nice to kind of see these things as little reminders of like how you want to live. And I wouldn't call my friend if I hadn't filmed the video this week, you know what I mean? I've reserved Sundays as like days to get groceries and meal prep for the week. But like if I decide I want to do that Saturday instead, you know, I'm not hurting anyone. If I see a big Blank Space wide open, let's talk about some extra credit calendars. I'll call it the a plus calendar alerts and awareness. It's just a vague catch-all for notes of like what you actually did or like what's other things I put on there, people's birthdays, right? That's like not

a task. If I were to hop to this week, you would see like, Oh, Gabe in class, like during these times, because it's just good for me to like know, like, Oh, that would be a good time to film because he's not here. Now, for the calendar, everybody got with their name on it when they first set up their Google account. This I use as like a quick capture function. Say I just go to create an event. It automatically defaults to this calendar, so you don't have to fiddle with like what calendar it goes on. But like, let's say I just remembered I need to mail my mother-in-law's birthday card tomorrow. I would just put, I wouldn't worry about how long it's gonna take, exactly when. I just put it on the thing, the black for some reason to my brain says, Oh, this hasn't been processed. Deal with this, deal with this, deal. I think it's important to remember that like you still have ADHD, even though to this day I still don't do like everything I said.

I was gonna do exactly what I said I was gonna do. This calendar has helped me pace myself more.

How to time-block when you have ADHD

Danielle Colada

Simplifying Time Blocking with Google Calendar

Danielle shares her struggle with rigid time blocking and multi-colored calendars for different life areas.

She introduces the "Time Flex Tier Technique" (TX3), using a few calendars with color coding to represent time flexibility and prioritize tasks.

The goal is to reduce confusion and create a more manageable scheduling system.

Wayne is developing five personalized calendars, using a grade school approach with A, B, C, D, and F.

The A calendar is for inflexible appointments that cannot be moved, while the B calendar focuses on bottlenecks, highlighting important tasks that precede other significant events.

Both calendars use bright colors to signal their importance and flexibility, helping Wayne manage his time effectively.

Prioritizing Life Goals with a Critical Calendar

The speaker emphasizes the importance of a critical calendar to prioritize life goals, such as consistency on a YouTube channel and personal wellness.

They share their own schedule, which includes non-appointment tasks like hot girl walks, Pilates, and trash day, all deemed critical for success.

The distinction between critical tasks and daily routines is highlighted, with critical tasks having a greater impact on achieving goals.

The speaker struggles with maintaining a consistent daily routine due to ADHD, often feeling that missed tasks are "deleted" and not carried over to the next day.

They use a method of graying out scheduled tasks as they complete them, providing a sense of accomplishment.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of being realistic with their expectations and not trying to make up for missed tasks the next day.

The Satisfaction of Weekly Planner Reviews

Weekly planner reviews bring a sense of satisfaction and reflection on accomplishments.

The author emphasizes the flexibility of tasks, noting that some are negotiable and can be deleted if not completed.

The planner also serves as a reminder of how to live and manage time, with the author using it to schedule important activities and keep track of events like birthdays.

The calendar is used to track class times and plan filming around them.

It serves as a quick capture function for tasks, with events automatically defaulting to the user's calendar.

The color coding helps prioritize unprocessed tasks, and the calendar has been beneficial in pacing and managing ADHD-related challenges.