Being BetterAtWork isn’t just about attitude or effort. It’s about having the right tools. We know what’s important now, we ranked our six things, we timed our focus in tomato-sized chunks. This week’s tool answers the question none of those actually solve: when does the work happen?
Benjamin Franklin kept a daily schedule in his autobiography that still gets passed around productivity circles nearly 250 years later. Every hour of his day had a job to do. 5 to 7 a.m. was for washing, dressing, and asking himself, “What good shall I do this day?” Work was blocked from 8 to 11 and 2 to 5. Evenings were for reviewing the day and asking, “What good have I done today?” Franklin wasn’t managing a to-do list. He was managing a calendar, and everything on his list had a home.
That’s the entire idea behind time blocking. Instead of keeping a list of things you intend to get to, you assign each task a specific block of time on your calendar. Not “write the proposal today.” Instead, “write the proposal, 9 to 10:30 a.m., Tuesday.” The task doesn’t exist as a vague intention anymore. It exists as an appointment with yourself.
The mechanics are straightforward:
- Look at everything you need to get done, ideally the list you already prioritized, whether that’s from GTD, the Eisenhower Matrix, or your six items for the day.
- Estimate how long each task will actually take. Be honest. This step is where most people get it wrong the first few tries.
- Block that time directly on your calendar, treating it with the same weight as a meeting with your boss.
- When the block arrives, work on that task and only that task. If something else demands attention, it gets its own block later, not a detour now.
- Leave buffer time between blocks. Back-to-back blocking with zero margin is a plan for feeling like a failure by 10 a.m.
A task on a list is a suggestion. A task on your calendar is an appointment, and most of us don’t casually skip appointments.
Your calendar already runs your day whether you use it deliberately or not. Meetings get scheduled, and everything else gets squeezed into whatever’s left. If your important work only exists on a list, it’s competing for leftover time against a calendar that’s already spoken for. Time blocking puts your priorities into the same system that’s already claiming your hours, instead of hoping they’ll find room on their own.
There’s also a cost to task-switching that time blocking protects you from. Research on what’s called attention residue shows that when you jump from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind on the thing you just left. You don’t fully arrive at the new task until that residue clears, which takes longer than most people assume. A day built from a reactive list tends to bounce between unrelated tasks constantly. A day built from blocks groups similar work together and reduces how often you’re paying that switching cost.
The estimating step can often be a stumbling block (pun intended). Most of us are wildly optimistic about how long things take. You’ll block 30 minutes for something that eats 90, the block ends, the next one is already starting, and the whole thing goes off the rails and you decide to just throw in the towel. The fix isn’t a better estimate on the first try. It’s tracking your actual time against your blocks for a week or two and adjusting. You get better at this the same way you get better at anything, by being wrong and paying attention.
The other trap is blocking every single minute. A calendar with zero white space isn’t a productivity system, it’s a pressure cooker. Meetings run long, tasks take longer than planned, and life happens during business hours whether you scheduled it or not. Leave gaps. The gaps are what keep the whole thing from collapsing the first time something goes sideways, which is to say, every day.
My experience with time blocking is mixed. Wonder and Invention are my Working Geniuses, and Tenacity, the genius of grinding a task out to completion, is one of my frustrations. Left alone, my brain would rather chase the next idea than finish the one in front of it. What I’ve found is that time blocking does the Tenacity work for me. Once the doing has a container, it stops rattling around in my head, which gives Wonder and Invention the room they need.
If you want to try it, give it a full week before you decide whether it works. Look at the handful of things you actually need to get done this week, not just one task, since one item isn’t enough to get a real feel for it. Give each one its own block with a specific start and end time, and protect those blocks the way you’d protect a meeting with someone important. See what it feels like to actually show up for your own priorities.
This is part of an ongoing series on productivity tools, systems, and philosophies. If there’s one you’ve heard about but haven’t tried, send it my way at garth@experiencebetterllc.com. I’ll research it and put it to the test so you don’t have to wonder.
Leave a Reply