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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

Fixed days and hours?

If both of your roles are suit­able for strict time divi­sion, I would sug­gest doing so. At least for me, it gives me peace of mind to work with full focus on role A all day on Mon­day, know­ing that I will be entire­ly devot­ed to role B on Tuesday.

More flex­i­bil­i­ty?

How­ev­er, if urgent tasks arise in both of your roles from time to time that can­not wait until the next ​“A‑shift,” you may risk feel­ing scat­tered. You could feel stressed because the urgent mat­ter is still pend­ing or because you are work­ing on the urgent mat­ter instead of the oth­er role. I want to feel free to work on the right task at the moment — regard­less of which role it belongs to — and still ded­i­cate the appro­pri­ate amount of work to each role.

How can this be achieved? Here’s a suggestion.

Do this

1. Cre­ate a hypoth­e­sis, a first draft, of when you will work on what dur­ing a typ­i­cal week so you have some­thing to base it on.
   
2. Visu­al­ize what you have come up with so that you remem­ber it. Write it down or book it in a tem­plate cal­en­dar, as you may have heard me dis­cuss.
   
3. In your every­day life, work with the role that is sched­uled accord­ing to your deci­sion.
   
4. But, in the moment, if some­thing urgent comes up in the ​“wrong role,” allow your­self to work on the task that cur­rent­ly has the high­est pri­or­i­ty — regard­less of which role it belongs to.
   
5. To ensure you do not work ⁷⁰⁄₃₀ (or 70/70!) or any oth­er incor­rect dis­tri­b­u­tion between the two roles, log how much time you spend on each role. Make it easy with a ser­vice like Tog​gl​.com, for exam­ple, and then peri­od­i­cal­ly check the dis­tri­b­u­tion to see if you should spend more time on a role you have neglected. 

The best of both worlds

By divid­ing your time in a planned man­ner, allow­ing for flex­i­bil­i­ty, and log­ging your time, you ensure that you ded­i­cate the right amount of time to each role with­out being rigid­ly bound to a plan you made once. In my opin­ion, you get the best of both worlds. 

How do you do it?

Have you solved the prob­lem of role dis­tri­b­u­tion dif­fer­ent­ly? Please tell me about it. Per­haps you have found a clever trick that I can also ben­e­fit from!

(Look­ing for more on the sub­ject? Have a look also at my tips on how to divide your time between your dif­fer­ent areas of respon­si­bil­i­ty.)