Time-block planning is a productivity system designed to help prioritize focused work. I have come to the end of my first time-block planning workbook. 16 weeks are in the books. Here are the practices that I have found most helpful so far.
🗒️Keeping my daily calendar in a physical notebook.
I constantly need to look at my calendar throughout the day to remind myself of what’s coming next. When I managed my calendar only in Outlook, I found myself clicking around different windows and tabs to look at it. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was distracting for me. Multiply that by a few hundred checks a day and it adds up. Having my calendar at a glance in a dedicated screen, a notebook, helps me keep my focus while still being able to remind myself what’s next.
✅The nightly shutdown ritual.
A small little checkbox next to the words “shutdown complete” signals that the workday is done. Once I check that I am done, I do my best to be done. If you could use a boundary to mark the end of your work for the day, this is a simple solution. Prior to ticking the shutdown box, I review e-mail and write out my time-block schedule for the next day. This serves the dual purpose of taking my brain out of “work” mode and preparing for what’s coming next.
🪫Understanding my work capacity.
My first week or so time-block planning involved a lot of crossing out and writing in new blocks throughout the day. Some of this is inevitable as schedules move around, but it was mostly based on my assumption that I could do more than I actually could. Your true work capacity becomes much more obvious when you force yourself to write down what you are going to do. This is important because it helps you prioritize what is most important to you to get done. I also find it reduces stress when I am able to execute what I plan to for a day as opposed to watching undone tasks fall off the table.
📈Tracking a personal scorecard.
“People play differently when you are keeping score”. This is true even when you are the only one in the game. Tracking daily goals in my planner kept me accountable to do what I said I would do. There were days when I was too busy to make progress on a goal. But I would see it staring back at me from the page. More often than not, I would find a way to get it done. I doubt this would have happened without keeping score for myself. Making gradually daily progress towards long-term goals feeds the slow productivity mindset and is extremely motivating.
If you want to have a better understanding of how you actually spend your time, start time-block planning. Productivity systems are not about doing more work, they are about doing more of the right kind of work. Taking schedule and task management out of your head is an amazing stress reliever.