The Rolling Time Block Method

I’ve never been a big fan of time blocking—defining ahead of time what I’ll do for every hour of the workday.

The technique has always felt robotic to me. But my biggest issue with it (which likely holds only for me) is that I always feel an odd urge to rebel against my previous self and work on almost anything other than my time block. Screw this guy, I always think, what does he know about what I have to do in this moment? Each time, I only compromise my productivity by getting fewer important things done.

Then, I tried making a dead-simple change. Instead of blocking every hour of my day in advance, I started writing how long I’d like to block for various tasks on the bottom of a dot-grid notepad I keep on my desk. Then, as the day goes on, I slot those areas of activity into the hours of the day. This lets me spend my time in an intentional and productive way—yet not so rigidly structured that I feel I have no autonomy in the moment. For each block of time, I only work on what I pre-specified.

For example, here are my target hours for today. Today was a more straightforward day (only one meeting):

And here are the time blocks I defined as the day went on. (I re-wrote these out—my handwriting is never this neat.)

Since starting this little ritual, it has stuck. If you want to try it out, here are the steps to take.

1) First, define your areas of activity. These are the high-level activities that comprise your work. Mine are, in alphabetical order:

• Book writing (or strategy);
• Communications and admin (I aim to keep this to one hour a day);
• Content creation (or strategy);
• Meditation;
• Mini course creation (more on this in the coming months!);
• Reading;
• Research;
• Speaking (planning, creating, and performing talks).

I have these hours stuck to the front of my notepad. It looks like this:

2) Second, each day, write down the hours you will be working. (In my Calm book, I call these our “productivity hours”—page 34.) This step also helps you set boundaries around your work and creates an endpoint for when you’ll stop working. I find it helpful to write out these hours of the day using every second line, to divide your day into half-hour blocks.

3) Third, at the start of the day, look through your areas of activity and estimate how long you’ll need to spend in each of them that day. Look especially to the important and not urgent areas of focus—this is where your most significant opportunities for productivity reside. Remember that you likely only have around four highly productive hours each day—schedule things accordingly. And, if you set them, reference your daily and weekly intentions.

Then, keep your time blocking page by your side as you work. Continually look ahead to slot in what you’ll be working on—I like to look ahead two or three hours. Try to get your most aversive tasks done first.

———

Things won’t always go according to plan. Today, I spent more time on content creation than intended. I also crossed out the time for my mini course, and upped my meditation time by half an hour, to help with the helpfulness and clarity of a talk I was creating. (I find meditation also helps me switch between my areas of focus more seamlessly and helps me focus deeper and longer each day.)

If time blocking hasn’t worked for you, play around with it a bit to find ways to make it looser. If you value self-direction as I do, you probably won’t want to have every day fleshed out for you by some previous version of yourself. But at the same time, you likely want to stay deliberate throughout the day.

This method of planning your day as it goes on is far looser than time blocking—while leaving room for some serendipity. Through it, I can stay nimble and adjust as my energy and focus wax and wane over the day.

If time blocking hasn’t worked for you in the past, try this rolling time blocking method.