Make time blocking work for you

How to focus, even if you don't have complete control of your time

Let’s say you’re working on four different projects. What is the most effective way to make sure you’re making progress on all of them?

For many people, the answer is “time blocking” — that is, setting aside certain blocks of time of the day or week to work on each project. For instance, Project A might get Monday morning, Project B gets Monday afternoon. Project C gets Tuesday morning, and Project D gets Tuesday afternoon. Then you could repeat the cycle as needed.

It sounds good, and a lot of people with more flexible or entrepreneurial schedules use this blocking technique. For instance, many entrepreneurs underinvest in marketing. Make every Monday afternoon into “Marketing Monday” and you’re less likely to skimp on this. I tend to post all my Vanderhacks for the upcoming week on Mondays, and generally record all my short Before Breakfast podcast episodes then too. Tuesday is for book writing and editing, and so forth.

However, if your schedule isn’t flexible, or at least you aren’t completely running your own show, you can immediately see potential problems with this sort of time blocking. What if you are working with multiple people on Project A, and they can’t all meet on Monday morning? What if something major happens on Project D on Monday afternoon? What if you have some future projects brewing, and a potential client wants to talk on Tuesday morning? Next thing you know the whole schedule has been blown up.

That said, even if rigid time blocking won’t work in many jobs, there’s still much to be said for limiting how much task switching you do. Starting work on Project A, and then answering an email from Client B, and then redirecting someone from Team C who sends a Slack message is incredibly inefficient. Moving back and forth between multiple projects means you will spend the entire day doing a lot of stuff, but not feeling like you are getting much done.

So instead, a more workable solution is to create smaller, flexible time blocks — ones that allow for a lot of back and forth during the day, but will also still allow you to make progress.

Map out each day

One way to do this is to look at what David Allen calls ‘“the hard landscape” for each day (i.e. time specific appointments) and make yourself a schedule for the rest of the time, assigning each block of time to a project or to interaction.

So, for instance, if you have meetings on Monday from 10-11:30 a.m., and from 1-3 p.m., you might decide that 9-10 a.m. is a block that can be assigned to whatever project makes the most sense. For instance, if that 10 a.m. meeting is about Project A, and you need to get up to speed, then you assign that block to Project A.

Then 11:30-noon could be interactive time — when you check your messages and triage the rest of the day. 12:00-12:30 p.m. could be lunch, then 12:30-1 p.m. could be a block for another project. Probably this would be Project B as you cycle through everything on your plate, but if there was a good reason to choose another project, you could do that.

Then at 3 p.m. when you were done with your meetings you might do another interactive stint, checking emails and instant messages from 3-3:30 p.m. Then 3:30-4:30 p.m. would be another block devoted to whichever project came next, or that you had previously decided really needed it. You could spend the rest of the day catching up on messages and mapping out the next day.

Keep the cycle going

The hard landscape of the next day might be totally different, but there would probably be some blocks available then too. Your default would be to assign these time blocks to whatever projects didn’t get touched on Monday. Perhaps some projects won’t need it. If you have a meeting about Project D on Tuesday and you know that everything is smooth sailing with that, then the meeting itself could be your touch point on that project. The available blocks could be assigned to everything else. But this would help you think about devoting time to each project, while maximizing the use of non-meeting time, and letting you be responsive.

Of course, things still might not work perfectly. If you do get a request for a very important phone call or meeting that needed to happen ASAP, you might give away one of your blocks. But you might also use your plan for each day to direct these calls. You can catch up on emails whenever, so if a request came in Monday morning, you could try to put this call at 11:30 a.m. Monday (using our sample schedule) or 3:00 p.m., or possibly 4:30 p.m. You’d still get your focused blocks, and your important call done.

The truth is, you often don’t have to devote much time to a project to keep it moving forward. A focused block of 30-60 minutes can be enough to edit a document, or to think about ideas for a meeting, or to send emails requesting information to the 5 different people who have it. The problem is when you try to do 6 other things during that 30 minute block. That’s when, inevitably, people start time blocking…from 5-8 p.m. Best not to buy yourself a late night if it’s not inevitable.