![]() ![]() ![]() 3 nb: I don’t just mean getting stuck in back-to-back-to-back meetings all day, although that is a special kind of hell. This leads to late nights or early mornings catching up on “actual work,” because your time and attention was sapped away from you throughout the standard workday in the form of 30-minute meetings, hourlong calls, and other interruptions. But, they also only use it as a tool for other people take time from them. Most people let their calendar completely dictate their time - if it’s on the calendar, it’s sacrosanct. The reasons are many: It makes you the master of your daily schedule. There are a lot of nuances to actually implementing a time blocking strategy - the pros and cons of blocking off your entire day, what things get blocked and what don’t, how far in advance to block, modifying your blocks on the fly and after the fact, etc - but time is the basic currency, and the action of “to-do list item => block of time on the calendar” is how you trade in it.įor such a simple concept, it’s a massively useful productivity tool, especially for consultants, technical leads, salespeople, product/project managers, analysts, and anyone else whose life falls somewhere in between the maker’s and manager’s schedule. You block off either a couple of hours on your calendar each afternoon between now and then, or - less recommended - an all-day marathon on Wednesday. Say it’s Monday and you have a pitch or presentation that you need to draft by Thursday. You block off the time you’ll be working on a specific thing ahead of time, and then during that time, you work on the thing. The value of time blockingĪt its core, time blocking is just scheduling your to-do list against your calendar. So, how do we make the best of this fact? Does being indentured to my calendar mean we can’t be in charge of our own time? If we can’t get rid of it, how do we make the best of it? Can we use the calendar to make life better instead of worse? The calendar is a necessary tool for us to be able to work with others. I work with too many other humans, who all have different demands on their time. I tried for a very long time to become less attached to my calendar, but it never took. I sent out a calendar invite for my birthday party. I create separate calendar events for every flight I take AND for the hourlong “pack, leave the house, and get there” window beforehand. My wrist, pocket, and laptop all remind me where I should be and what I should be doing at all points throughout the day, including after work and on the weekends. ![]() Yes, I acknowledge the irony of saying this at the top of a 5,000 word article about productivity tools and strategies. It’s just highly advanced procrastination. Tools should be chosen after strategies are defined, not before, and finding “the perfect calendar app” is both a distraction from and proof that you suck at protecting your time and attention from yourself, because researching and choosing productivity tools and strategies is not the same as being productive. 2 I’m intentionally not telling you which one I use because it doesn’t matter - time blocking will work with pretty much any calendar app.Īlso, conversations about tools are way less interesting than conversations about about principles and strategies. ![]() My entire professional and social life is managed by the blips and bings of my calendar app. “Send me an invite,” we say, “so I don’t forget.” The reason time blocking works so well starts with a simple, tragic fact: we are all slaves to our calendars. Without (much) hyperbole, I think time blocking can be an effective tool for doing more of the things that we want to do, and ultimately for living a better, happier, fitter, more fun life. Just google the phrase “time blocking” and you’ll find plenty (of varying quality)., but I want to cover it for two main reasons: I think it’s an extremely useful productivity tool, and I think it’s so much more than just a productivity tool. I’m by far not the first to write about the concept 1 As far as I can tell, Cal Newport coined the phrase and wrote the first article about the idea, but there are dozens of pieces about it. ![]()
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