I tried a new strategy with my time blocking in 2024: roving 6-week sprints focused on one or two clients at a time. This is the “Basecamp Model” and it has benefits. But for me and my clients I’m not sure it worked spectacularly.
Challenges of this sprint approach:
- Sometimes people run into new events, programs, or offers “off schedule” from my 6-week schedule.
- Clients who got scheduled early in the year had to go a whole year with “less”. This starts to feel a little long in the tooth.
- Clients had to sync up a little with me asking for more input and other questions.
There were some benefits:
- I got a lot done for people.
- I did more dev-focused work, increasing site performance and clearing out a big backlog of ideas and to-dos that were always “someday”
For 2025, I’m switching this up a bit with a hybrid of my 2023 and 2024 strategy:
- No 6-week sprints
- A rotation of time blocks spread throughout the year
- Slightly longer 3-hour blocks
In 2023 I’d schedule people for 1-2 hours at a time. In 2024 I’d schedule 3-4 hours. In 2025 I’m shooting for 3 hours, but instead of hyper-focusing on a single project for 6 weeks I’m spreading those blocks out over the whole year for everyone.
This way it evens things out. The risk here is I’m less likely to remember precisely what I was doing for something since a client may get two 6-hour blocks every 3-4 weeks instead of 3-4 hours every week for six weeks.
