Time Block Planning - Is it a Good Idea?
Summary:
Sidney is a full time college student, and i also work remotely in marketing. He has two issues with time blocking: it’s difficult to estimate how long a task or project will take and how long he should dicate to it. The alternative to the list reactive method is what is called time block planning. You actually look at the time that is available outside of meetings and appointments, and you allicate specific work to specific times. This is more difficult than simply opening your m box or occasionally looking at a todo list. But if you time block plan you w’ll produce about two times more valuable output in the same amount of time as compared to someone who is using the list…
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Hika,
Speaker 2
my name is sidney. I’m a full time college student, and i also work remotely in marketing. I love your advice to time block. And since i have a pretty busy schedule, i time block just about every week. However, i’m not very good at it. I have two issues with time blocking. Firstly, i find it difficult to accurately estimate how long a task or project will take and how long i should dicate to it. And i end up with tasks that bleed into the next time block or don’t fill up the whole time block. The second issue i have is that i’m always tempted to shuffle around the time blocks or work on things in a different order than i originally planned. I’m i’m wondering if you have any strategies for using time blocking in a more efficient way and getting better at it an so that i can use it to maximise my time s. They think it can be great if it’s done right? Thank you so much. Well, thit’s
Speaker 1
a good question. Let’s start witha a quick reminder of what time block planning actually refers to. So the standard method a lot of knowledge workers use to deal with their time outside of already scheduled meetings and appointments is what i call the reactive list method. Now this method says, o k, i have some time before my next meeting or my next appointment. What should i do? The the reactive list method says you have two optionsyou can go into an emale or slack in box and start reacting to information, or you can turn to a long to do list and try to pull something off of it and make progress on it. Now the advantage of the list reactive method is that it solves the problem of making sure you have things to do. You will feel very busy if you use th list reactive method. You will churn through a lot of small things if you use the list reactive method, but it turns out to be a terrible way to deploy the limited amount of time you have available to produce the most possible, valuable output. So alternative to the list reactive method is what is called time block planning. Now the idea here is that you actually look at the time that is available outside of meetings and appointments, and you allicate specific work to specific times. So you might see you have ninety minutes in the morning before your first meeting. You actually decide, what do i want to do specifically during that ninety minutes? Whell maybe i want to spend the first hour, for example, working on this report, and then the half hour before my first meeting catching up on urgent emales ad. Then maybe you only have a thirty minute block between that meeting and the next, and you se ou not gong t take that time. And i have a real small thing i’m going to work on. I then, aybe there’s a larger block after that, you decide, oka, i’m going to go do deep work. I have two hours hearing a do a little ritual at the beginning. This is my time to make progress on something particularly cognitively demanding. This is what i call time block planning. It is more difficult, it is a more difficult discipline than simply opening your m box or occasionally looking at a todo list. But in my experience, if you time block plan you w’ll produce about two times more valuable output in the same amount of time, as compared to someone who is using the list re method. So it is a very powerful method. Is what i use, is what a lot of my readers use as well. So let’s go back to sydney’s question, which is, how do you get better at time block planning? And i was gone to offer a few pieces of advice for you, sydney to think this is advice that is relevant for any one who is using time block planning. First, if you are new to this method, take whatever block side you initially choose for an activity, inflate it by fifty per cent. People that are new to time block planning consistently underestimate how much time is actually required to get things done. So just bias towards that. Say, i’m assuming my instincts here are wrong. You have to treat it like that sin feld episode where george costanza did the opposite of all his instincts and suddenly was very successful in life. Will it’s the same thing with your time block planning. At at first you say, this is great. I will just slip this into a quick hour. Your instinct should be oka then i’d better give myself at least ninety minutes, or or, this’ll just take a half hour lent, we just slip this in between these two blocks, you should say, noi ned at least forty five minutes or an hour probably, to get this done, right? So at first, that’s what i’d recommend. Always should always be feeling like you’re giving yourself too much time. You’ll realize that almost always, that’s not going to be the s the second thing i would recommend is conditional blocks. So one of the big busters of time block schedules is where you have something really deep and long to work on. So maybe you give yourself, let’s say, two hours to work on your doing a riding project. Now the issue is, if you really get on a roll, you might have a hard time stopping right at that dead line. Or maybe it just takes a lot longer to make the type of progress you wanted to make, because it’s a difficult task. So long difficult blocks are hard to get right. Whetl one trick that a lot of time block planners do is what’s called a conditional (Time 0:01:40)