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Once you take note of your weekly goals, you need to start blocking out time on your calendar to work on these tasks. I generally have a recurring weekly schedule, and just modify events as necessary at the end of the week. Here’s the calendar I have:
It’s quite a lot to take in, and I’m not asking you to plan every hour of your life. I’m going to break down different milestones you’ll reach as you begin to start blocking out times for goals and obligations. Take your time to reach each milestone. It took me two whole years to go from the easy milestone to overkill mode.
Put only obligations on your calendar. These are appointments you have, friends you promised not to flake out on, classes you need to attend. This prevents double booking your time with your obligations.
Put on time blocks to work on goals with hard deadlines. These are homeworks you need to turn in, work projects you need to complete, tasks you just have to do.
Put on time block to work on goals in general.
Not for the faint of heart — put on everything else: sleep, shower, mealtimes, transportation. This will give you insight into how you want to spend your time across all verticals of life.
Let’s talk through the calendar methodology. Putting time on your calendar is a great way to visualize how you’re going to spend your time. It’s also a great litmus test to check whether or not you’re being overly demanding on yourself or trying to do too much in a week. Because you’re laying it all out on a calendar, you’re not double counting any time period and overcommitting your time.
Here’s what the different colors mean:
Ultimate Productivity Hacking Guide (Part II): Time Management

Time management is process of aligning your time with your priorities. The strategies discussed in this guide are to address the following questions: How do you spend your time? Does the time you spend every align with your goals? The people who benefit the most from this section are people who have diverse set of goals and workloads and consistently need to allocate their time. Conversely, people whose goals are singular (e.g. I’m going to focus on taking care of my child) and have a strong conception of direction will benefit the least from this section.
Every day you should set aside 15 minutes at the start of your day to plan your day. Take out a post-it. First, figure out what obligations you have for the day. Do you have classes to attend? Friends to meet? Appointments to go to? It’s worth writing the ones that aren’t part of your regular schedule down. Then, figure out what you’re going to do for the day and assign an upper bound estimate on the amount of time you think it’ll take. You can comb through through your gathering points in the “Priority Management” section to figure out what you need to and want to do. Examples could be “Read chapter 5 of Intro to Probability (1.5 hrs)” or “Respond to recruiter emails (30 mins)”. Add up all the hours of your tasks and double check to make sure it doesn’t fill up more than 70% of your daytime outside of strict obligations. Now stick this post-it somewhere visible like your laptop, your planner, or your desk. At the beginning of every week you should give yourself an overview of what larger tasks or goals you have. If you have a diverse workload or a diverse set of goals you generally should write these goals in a spreadsheet. If you have math homework due every week, you should make a note on how many hours you expect it to take. I also take tasks off my project management software and throw them onto this spreadsheet. I found it useful to write down what I expect to complete by the end of the week and make sure I’m not overloading myself.


Example of my master calendar


Example Google Calendar
Potpourri of tips I’ve had working with a schedule for 7 years: