Focus time, time blocking and planning the day

What is time blocking?

Time blocking is assigning specific work to specific hours instead of keeping a list and hoping. It converts intentions into commitments that other people's scheduling has to work around.

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How do I start time blocking?

Block the two or three things that must happen this week first, before the week fills, and leave a third of the day unblocked for what you cannot predict. Blocking every hour produces a plan that fails by 11am.

What is deep work?

Deep work is cognitively demanding work done without interruption, in blocks long enough to get properly into the problem — typically 90 minutes or more. The distinguishing feature is that fragmenting it does not just slow it down, it changes what is possible.

How long should a focus block be?

Ninety minutes is a common sweet spot: long enough to get past the start-up cost, short enough to hold attention. Blocks under 45 minutes rarely survive the time it takes to get going.

How much focus time does a normal week actually contain?

Far less than the hours suggest. Once meetings, their buffers and the fragments between them are removed, many people have under ten genuinely uninterrupted hours in a 40-hour week.

Focus time calculator →

What is context switching and what does it cost?

Context switching is moving between unrelated tasks, and the cost is the time to rebuild the mental state each one needs. It is why five one-hour slots across a day produce less than one five-hour block.

What is the difference between a task and a calendar event?

A task is work to do; an event is time set aside. A task becomes real when it is given a time, and a task list that never touches the calendar is a list of things you feel guilty about.

Should I put tasks on my calendar?

Put the ones that need real time there, with honest durations. Scheduling a two-hour task into a 30-minute gap is a way of lying to yourself with software's help.

How do I estimate how long a task will take?

Estimate, record what it actually took, and compare. Estimates improve quickly with feedback and not at all without it; most people are consistently wrong by a stable factor, which is useful once you know yours.

What is the planning fallacy?

The planning fallacy is the reliable tendency to underestimate how long work takes, even when you know you have underestimated before. The practical defence is to use your own past timings rather than your current optimism.

What time of day should I do my hardest work?

When you are reliably sharpest, which for most people is the first few hours after properly waking. The important part is that it is a fixed decision rather than a daily negotiation.

What is a maker's schedule?

A maker's schedule is built around long uninterrupted blocks, as opposed to a manager's schedule divided into hourly slots. A single meeting placed in the middle of a maker's afternoon can cost the whole afternoon.

How do I stop meetings eating my focus time?

Block the focus time first and make it visible as busy, so meetings are scheduled around it rather than through it. Protection applied after the calendar fills is negotiation, not protection.

What is protected time?

Protected time is time your calendar refuses to give away — not merely marked busy but genuinely unavailable to booking tools and colleagues. The difference matters once other people can book you directly.

Protected time →

Should focus time be at the same hours every day?

Yes where possible. A fixed block removes a daily decision, and colleagues learn it without being told, which is worth more than any individual hour.

How do I plan a week?

Decide the three outcomes the week is for, block time for them before anything else, and let the rest fill in around them. A week planned as a list of tasks becomes a list of tasks moved to next week.

How much of the day should be left unplanned?

Around a third. Interruptions, overruns and things you did not know about on Monday are not exceptions, they are the normal content of a week.

What is timeboxing?

Timeboxing is deciding in advance how long to spend on something and stopping when the time is up, regardless of completion. It suits work that could absorb infinite time, such as research or polish.

What is the Pomodoro technique?

The Pomodoro technique is 25 minutes of work followed by a five-minute break, with a longer break every four rounds. It suits starting when you do not want to; it suits deep work less well, because 25 minutes ends about when it gets going.

Should I schedule breaks?

Schedule them if your calendar would otherwise fill without them — which, if other people can book you, it will. A lunch that exists only as an intention is an hour that reads as free.

What is the two-minute rule?

The two-minute rule says do it now if it takes under two minutes, rather than tracking it. It is a good rule for email and a bad one for a focus block, where the interruption costs more than the task.

How do I handle a day that goes wrong by 10am?

Re-plan the remaining hours once, deliberately, rather than trying to catch up all day. Most lost days are lost to running late on the original plan long after it stopped being possible.

What is the best way to plan tomorrow?

Do it at the end of today, while you still know what happened. Planning tomorrow in the morning spends your sharpest hour deciding rather than doing.

How do I know where my time actually went?

Compare what was planned with what the calendar recorded. The gap is the useful part — it is the difference between how you intend to work and how you do.

What is a theme day?

A theme day dedicates a whole day to one kind of work — meetings on Tuesdays, writing on Thursdays. It reduces context switching more than any individual scheduling trick, and it needs a team that respects it.

How do I protect focus time when I do not control my calendar?

Book it as a meeting, because that is the only thing most calendars respect. A block called 'focus' declines invitations as effectively as one with five attendees.

What should I do with the last hour of the day?

Close things down: finish notes, clear the small stuff, and plan tomorrow. The last hour is usually the worst hour for hard work and the best one for making the next morning easy.

Is multitasking effective?

For anything requiring thought, no — what feels like multitasking is rapid switching, and each switch costs. It works only for pairing one attention-demanding task with one automatic one.

How do I balance reactive work with planned work?

Give reactive work its own scheduled windows rather than letting it interrupt continuously. Two half-hour slots for messages protects the rest of the day better than a rule about responding quickly.

What is the relationship between goals and the calendar?

A goal without hours in the calendar is a wish. The useful form is hours per week rather than a deadline, because hours are what you can actually schedule and defend.

Goals →