Time blocking, without a minister's diary

Time blocking means reserving chunks of the day for one specific thing, rather than listing tasks and hoping to find the time. The idea is old; it keeps coming back, carried in recent years by Cal Newport and his work on concentration.

Its best-known version is also its least sustainable: the full schedule, from 8am to 7pm, every half-hour accounted for. It works for a day, sometimes two, then a call overruns, a train is late, and the plan turns into a list of time-stamped reproaches.

Two blocks already give you the whole benefit

What time blocking actually delivers isn't control over the day, it's the protection of two or three moments. A ninety-minute block in the morning for the thing that matters. A thirty-minute block at the end of the day for emails, phone calls, small things. That's it.

The rest of the day doesn't need to be planned. It's full of meetings, surprises and dead time, and trying to control it mostly produces disappointment. What matters is that the two blocks exist — and that they're only used for what they were set up for.

Three rules to make it stick

One block, one thing. "Work on the file" is a block. "Get on with a load of stuff" isn't one: it's free time in disguise, and it will fill up with messages.

A block is shorter than you think. Ninety minutes of real concentration is worth more than three hours of broken attention. Setting three-hour blocks guarantees they'll get nibbled away.

A missed block doesn't get made up. It comes back the next day, in its usual place. It's the only way to avoid building up a time debt that, after two weeks, makes the whole thing absurd.

Duration: the piece of information most lists are missing

A task list with no duration is a blind promise. Six lines might represent forty minutes or six hours, and you only find out at 4pm. Writing an approximate duration next to each line — ten minutes, an hour — changes the way you choose your day: you see straightaway that it doesn't fit, before you even start.

The estimate will be wrong, often by a factor of two. That doesn't matter: even wrong, it stops you writing an eleven-hour day into a six-hour one.

A week's trial

Set a single block each day for five days, always at the same time, for the same kind of work. Note what happens: does it hold? What's it actually used for? What interrupts it?

After a week, you'll know two useful things: what time of day you're capable of concentrating, and what systematically comes along to eat that moment. That's worth more than a perfect schedule — and it's what lets you set a second block.

Common questions