Tag: time blocking

Weekly planning

If you have a job that requires you to complete work that can’t be completed in a single day, you need to write weekly plans. Spending time to plan how you will spend your week will allow you to get more done by identifying what you need to do and then moving your commitments around to make space. Daily planning for 5 minutes each morning using time-blocking is the best way to be productive. Still, most of us have projects that can last weeks or months; starting with a high-level weekly overview will help you make room for these daily plans, first dividing the work into smaller chunks and then moving around your commitments to fit these into your schedule. Weekly planning will also allow you to find time for your two hours of deliberate practice each day.

Build smart weekly plans. Use these plans to develop effective daily time-block schedules. Execute those daily schedules with intensity, and then when done for the day, shut down completely.

Cal Newport

Start with a blank A4 page and do a mind dump of everything you can think of that you need to get done. Not using a specific format provides flexibility for the challenges and specifics of the coming week. You might choose a chronological approach where you write the days of the week with some bullet points for each day to support time blocking, or you may take a thematic approach for weeks that are taken up by meetings and appointments. Planning using themes will allow you to fit tasks around when you have free time.

Do a weekly plan on the weekend or first thing Monday morning. I prefer Sunday afternoons after lunch at a coffee shop to keep focused on the task and get out of the house. It can take 30-60 minutes to do a brain dump, look through your calendar, review current projects in your planning system and possibly empty your email inbox. I like to write a short, three minute read, review of the week for my team as part of the process but this can take extra time.

It’s this combination of high-level weekly plans with detailed daily time-block schedules that unlocks the full potential of this productivity system. The Weekly/Daily approach is what allows you to move around obligations like pieces on a chessboard and construct configurations of your schedule that enable you to accomplish head-turning amounts of work, all while staying on top of the various small requests and tasks pulling at your attention.

Cal Newport

My one o’clock Sunday afternoon calendar prompt 

The following text is in a recurring calendar event on Sundays at 1 PM. I go to my favourite local coffee shop, get a strong coffee, put my headphones on, and work through the steps. 

Calendar event text:

Aim: Have all your time accounted for (including rest/relaxation/recovery time) 

  • Step 1: Mind dump – tasks, ideas, and commitments.
  • Step 2: Review the previous week – write a three-minute summary and send it to the team.
  • Step 3: Unstructured plan for the week – write a plan.txt.
  • Step 4: review plan daily.

Ideas for weekly planning

  1. Set weekly goals – one per role (husband, student etc.) and sharpening the saw goals (physical, mental, social, and spiritual).
  2. Reoccuring time blocks – 1. sharpening the saw 2. daily planning.
  3. Plan your big rocks – most important tasks – block them on the calendar.
  4. Fill in the gaps from using the mind dump.

A 30 day time block scheduling challenge

Working from home has been good for my productivity. I am fitter and healthier than ever before, my work output has increased significantly, and I have been able to publish a daily blog. Work has moved on from the project-based approach used to manage to move a whole university online, and so the way I work needs to evolve too.

Removing the commute has given me an hour and a half of extra time each day, and working from home has given me more freedom around my working hours to focus on output rather than time in the office. I have used this time to train twice per day for the last year consistently; some cardio at 7 am each morning, some strength training or recovery work in the afternoon for 45 minutes to an hour between 16:00 and 18:00, and four-minute movement breaks where they fit throughout the day. The output so far has been a 1:35 half marathon, a 308w FTP on the bike, a 120kg Squat, a 100kg bench press, and a 142.5kg Deadlift, while weighing around 82kg and at 6ft tall.

I have written over 100 daily blog posts so far by finding around an hour each evening after dinner, between 19:00 and 20:00, to do some research, write, and publish it. I loosely aim to write somewhere in the region of 500 words to keep within the time and force myself to be concise. We consume so much content these days between articles on our phones, youtube videos, and reading for work, that I write about whatever I think about or consuming that day. I have found many of the posts useful for work; I have reused some of the content for work when the topic has been raised, sometimes weeks later.

My morning and evening routines outside of work are highly structured, but my working hours have to be more reactive. Universities have moved all, or most, of their teaching online, and so those of us in online learning has never been busier. This week I stopped my teams daily stand-ups. Our work is moving from project-based to a new normal, the daily meetings had become more social events than supporting productivity, so it is time to reassess how I use my working hours to have more of an impact. I want to be more deliberate with my time during work in a similar way to my strength and conditioning training and writing practice.

Time blocking

The first step of any productivity system is to spend five minutes writing a task list at the start of the day. Most people stop at this stage and then start with the first item or might prioritise the list and start with the most important. This approach presents two issues; the first is that tasks tend to expand to fill the time available, known as Parkinson’s law. The second is that we are not good at estimating the time something will take to block out space in our calendar. To solve these issues, we need to track how long tasks take consistently, and then we need to use this knowledge to block out that a suitable amount of time to complete the task efficiently.

Schedule every minute of your working day

For the next thirty days, I will follow a time blocking routine to be more deliberate in the use of my time and focus on the work that is going to impact students’ experience in the new academic year.

The practice:

  1. Write down what you want to do at the start of the day.
  2. Estimate how long each of these items will take.
  3. Schedule these blocks of time in 30-minute chunks around your existing commitments.
  4. Follow your schedule; at any point you deviate from it, update the plan for the rest of the day by moving the unfinished blocks as required.
  5. Make a note of how long each task took next to your estimate and assess why you were wrong – use this knowledge to help you schedule similar tasks in the future.

Let me know on Twitter if you want to try time blocking your workday too. A remember, the aim is to take control of your day and learn to plan your time better, not to be fixed to a schedule.