How To Optimize Your Calendar & Schedule with Time Containers

Looking for some calendar optimization ideas to help calm the chaos in your daily life? I hear you. Most of us with ADHD could seriously benefit from decluttering our calendars. We’re overwhelmed by our jam-packed schedules, we struggle to balance our endless tasks and commitments, and we often repeat some version of: there’s just not enough time to get it all done.

So, today I’m sharing the best calendar optimization solution to bring greater clarity to your days by diving into a transformative approach to managing your time: viewing your day as a series of time containers.

Are you ready to declutter your calendar and make your time work for you? Then tune into episode 259!

You can listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app here.

Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for a summary of the key takeaways.

In Episode 259: You Will Discover

• The power of thinking through your day as a series of containers
• How to efficiently divide your projects to fit within these containers
• Calendar optimization ideas to prioritize what matters most
• A step-by-step guide to implementing this approach in your life today

Episode #259: How To Optimize Your Calendar & Schedule with Time Containers (Transcript)

I’ve been on a bit of a decluttering over the last several months, and one of the approaches I’ve used throughout the process comes from Dana K White. Let me tell you, it’s been incredibly impactful!  

If you are new to Dana K White, she is a real-life, down-to-earth human who knows what it’s like to deal with real clutter. In fact, her blog is called A Slob Comes Clean.  If you’re looking to start decluttering and don’t know where to begin, I highly recommend checking out her methods.

That being said, today, we’re not talking about decluttering stuff – we’re talking about decluttering our schedules.

The other day, I was listening to one of Dana K White’s books, Organizing for the Rest of Us. It’s a fantastic, succinct, and actionable book. She gives an overview of her primary decluttering method and, more specifically, her container concept.

She teaches this concept in beautiful detail in one of my other favorite books of hers, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. Hearing her summary reminded me of how applicable her container concept also is for managing our time.

Introducing ‘Time Containers’

Now, many of you have likely heard me talk about thinking in containers of time before. But today, I want to explore this topic through the lens of Dana’s decluttering process because I think it adds an important layer that helps us face the (often frustrating) fact that while we can do anything, we can’t do everything.  

One of Dana’s main approaches to decluttering is all about viewing our spaces as containers with limited capacity. Instead of wondering “How many socks do I need?”, let the container be the decision maker.

If your socks don’t fit in the drawer, you have too many. The container is overflowing. 

The container concept revolves around the idea that every space in our home is a container with a limited capacity. This concept helps us understand that the size of the container determines how much we can keep.

We start by filling the container with the items we love and use the most.  Once there is no more room, we’ve reached the capacity of the container, and it’s time to let go of the rest.

Applying Containers to Time Management

Just like our physical spaces, our days have a limited capacity.

We can only fit so much into our schedule without it overflowing and spilling into our other containers and taking up more space that we wanted to set aside for other things—like sleeping, for instance.

Thinking of our days as containers helps us:

• Face the reality of a limited amount of time while
• Supports us in creating a more manageable and realistic approach to our schedules

This concept is especially powerful for those of us with ADHD.

Many of us struggle with time blindness – that tricky inability to sense how much time has passed or how long things will take.

This often leads to overbooking our schedules, feeling like we’re constantly behind, and carrying around a never-ending to-do list that grows faster than we can check things off. It’s frustrating and overwhelming, right? But by using the container concept, we can start to see our time differently.

We can break our day into smaller, more manageable chunks – morning, afternoon, evening – or separate containers for work and home. Or maybe you start thinking in fifths or quarters as we talked about in Episode 243: The Four Quarters Method.

Thinking in these containers helps us visualize our limits and make more intentional choices about what to include in our day. 

Remember, just because we write something on our schedule doesn’t mean we can magically get it all done. We need to respect the time each task takes and recognize that our time containers can only hold so much.

This shift in perspective can be a game-changer as it has the potential to help us manage our schedules with greater ease and efficiency.

Let’s Define Time Containers in More Detail

Time containers are an effective way to visualize the limited capacity of our days, similar to how we view physical containers for our belongings.

Just as a shoe rack can only contain so many shoes until it overflows, our days can only accommodate a finite amount of activities and tasks. By thinking of our time in terms of containers, we can better manage our schedules and set realistic expectations for what we can accomplish.

2 Ways To Think About Containers

1. Think about your time containers in three daily sections: morning, afternoon, and evening.
2. You could also think about containers in terms of context. These containers could represent different aspects of your life, which helps you intentionally divide how much time you want to allocate to different responsibilities and activities, such as work hours, personal time, family time, etc. 

I think some of the most powerful containers to consider are – as I mentioned briefly earlier – the approach we explored in episode 243 by thinking in either quarters or fifths. 

As an overview: You could divide your day into four quarters or four containers: morning, midday, afternoon, and evening. This method helps you reset your focus throughout the day, ensuring that if one part doesn’t go as planned, you have multiple opportunities to get back on track.

Or, for those who prefer even more structure, like myself, you might find the fifths approach more effective. This method divides the day into five 3-hour blocks.  

Whatever approach you use, thinking in containers of time can be incredibly effective because it allows us the opportunity to intentionally decide what we want to do within each of these containers. 

If we have 3 hours for our first container, what will fit?

These separate containers also provide us with multiple chances to reset throughout the day. They offer regular rhythms and clear benchmarks to help our time-blind ADHD brains stay aware of time passing.  

This is one of the most important points in this episode: Once our containers are full, that’s it. We can’t pack more into them. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to shove things in; once the container is full, it’s full. 

As Dana K. White reminds us, if you’re frustrated, upset, or irritated, blame the container.

This is simply what fits within the container. I’m telling you that as we begin to recognize and respect these container limits, we make incredible shifts in managing our time more effectively and reducing the overwhelm that comes with trying to do too much.

My Favorite Calendar Optimization: 5-Step Time Container Process

Let’s get into the details of how to start optimizing your calendar and schedule with time containers.

Step #1: How To Visualize Time Containers

Now, let’s talk about what this actually looks like.

Choose Your Visual Tools

Visualizing our time containers is key to effectively managing them, especially since so many of us struggle with poor working memory. Having visual reminders helps us remember what we’re focused on throughout the day and week, plus it helps us better visualize the passage of time.

Using tools like calendars, planners, or digital apps can help you see your time clearly and manage it better. 

Digital vs paper is a personal choice. Both can work great. It depends on your season of life and what feels best for your brain. 

I personally have a hybrid approach. I use a digital task management system so I can quickly jot down tasks and ideas and projects wherever I am.

But then every week and every day I do planning in my analog paper planner. Doing the physical planning helps me slow down and actually assess the time I need for the different tasks. It helps make the time real. That’s what works really well for me. 

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👉 Check out the planner I created and use for myself and with my clients, you can snag it at imbusybeingawesome.com/planningsystem. It also includes access to training where I walk you step by step through using this system to work for your ADHD.

I’m thinking about making a digital copy of this planner, too. That way, if you like to use your iPad or Kindle Scribe, or for those of you who want to print and do a spiral-bound version of the planner or just print specific pages that you like, you could have a digital version to do so. If you are interested in a digital copy, would you let me know? You can pop over to Instagram @imbusybeingawesome.

Prioritize Your Tasks

Once you have your visual tools in place, the next step is to prioritize tasks within your time containers.  As a quick overview, here’s how to do it:

Identify the most important and necessary tasks on your list. These are the tasks that will have the biggest impact on your goals and responsibilities. Place these tasks into your containers first.

To determine what’s most important consider:

• Urgency
• Importance
• Impact

We want to make sure we’re leaving plenty of room for the important, impactful tasks, which may not have the immediate urgency that other less impactful tasks may have. 

More resources to help you with prioritization:

• 5 Tips to Balance Short Vs. Long Term Goals
• How To Make a Decision with the 6 Thinking Hats Technique
• Pareto’s Principle: The 80/20 Rule for ADHD Adults

Step #2: Estimate Time Requirements

Be realistic about how long each task will take. 

Here are a few tips I use to determine how much time to allocate to tasks:

• If I start something I’ve never done before, I triple how much time I think I need because I am so incredibly timelines
• For something I’ve done several times but still don’t have the data, I double the time I think I need 
• Once I have gathered the data and timed my tasks repeatedly I use the actual time when scheduling my calendar

Give yourself space to figure it out. Overestimate the time, and then begin tracking the data for a little while—not forever, just long enough to give you the information you need. 

Knowing how long things take allows you to create an accurate schedule. It’s what allows you to know what actually fits in your time containers. Additionally, it helps you better estimate how much time to allocate for similar tasks in the future.

Step #3: Fill Your Containers

Start filling your time containers with your prioritized tasks, beginning with the most important and impactful ones.

Do your best to respect the limits of each container. Notice when your brain wants to fight with the reality that once a container is full, we’ve reached our capacity for that time block. Notice it, and practice honoring it.

Review and Adjust:

At the end of each day or week, review how well you managed your time containers.

• Did you overfill any containers?
• Were there tasks that took longer than expected?
• Did you underfill any?

Use this information to adjust your approach and make your time management more effective.

Again, visualizing your time containers and prioritizing tasks within these containers is a powerful strategy for managing your time effectively and decluttering your schedule of unnecessary tasks and projects.

Remember, the key is to be realistic about what you can fit into each container and to prioritize the tasks that matter most. By doing so, you can create a balanced and manageable schedule that aligns with your goals and reduces overwhelm.

Step #4: Make Time for Transitioning Between Tasks

One of the most overlooked parts of this process is accounting for the transition time we need between activities.

The truth is, if you’re anything like me, you probably don’t want to accept that your brain needs transition time. However, acknowledging and including transition time in your calendar is crucial for decluttering your schedule and creating one that is realistic and actually reflects what one can do each day.

The most annoying part of all—the Human Factor: Remember, we are humans, not robots. We need time to switch gears. Acknowledging the human factor in our time management is crucial. 

I’m telling you, it’s simply unrealistic to expect ourselves to move seamlessly from one task to another without a break. Maybe you can do it every once in a while, but it’s not reliable because it’s not realistic. The brain is not intended to work in this way.

By including transition time, we respect our natural rhythms and needs, making our schedules more sustainable and realistic.

Step #5: The One In, One Out Rule for Time

Just like transition time, this next component is one that your brain might want to fight against, but it’s also one of the most powerful guidelines for ensuring that you don’t overbook your schedule or overcommit to too much. 

In her decluttering process, Dana K White talks about the “one-in-one-out” rule.  And it’s just as it sounds.

Once you’ve gotten to your clutter threshold – the amount of stuff that actually fits within your home –  then it’s time to implement the one-in-one-out rule. If you bring in a new shirt, one goes out. If you buy a new set of plates, a set of plates needs to go out. 

Just like physical decluttering, we can use the One In, One Out rule to intentionally manage our time and maintain a decluttered schedule. When we’re thinking about commitments, projects, and tasks, the one-in-one-out principle is all about making trade-offs and prioritizing what’s most important.

When taking on this calendar optimization process remember: for every new task added to the schedule, another task gets removed.

This helps maintain the ideal balance that works for your current capacity and energy this season. It helps prevent overloading your time containers. It’s about recognizing that our time, like our space, is limited. If we want to add something new, we need to make room for it by letting go of something else.

You’re taking powerful steps forward by respecting the need for transition periods and making thoughtful with the one-in-one-out approach.

This helps organize and maintain a calendar to prioritize what matters most, stay flexible, and ensure your time containers remain manageable and aligned with your goals.

Don’t Forget To Practice Self Compassion

As always, it’s essential to practice self-compassion as you navigate this journey, too. Recognize and appreciate the effort you’re putting in, even if everything doesn’t go as planned. Celebrate YOU for showing up.

Instead of focusing on what you didn’t accomplish, reframe your thinking to emphasize what you did achieve. Focus on the gain of what you’ve done and how far you’ve come rather than the gap of what’s left. 

You’re showing up, trying, learning and you’re doing it! You’re busy being awesome.

Links From The Podcast

• Learn more about We’re Busy Being Awesome here
• Learn about 1:1 coaching here
• Get the top 10 tips to work with your ADHD brain (free ebook!)
• Discover my favorite ADHD resources here
• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System here
• Get the Podcast Roadmap here
• Get the ADHD Routine Revamp here
  
• Episode 243: The Four Quarters Method
• Organizing for the Rest of Us
• Decluttering at the Speed of Life

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