Organizing Your Time Isn’t Enough, You Need to Protect it. How Bill Gates and Elon Musk Do It.
Cal Newport, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. What do they all have in common?
They all tried to buy Twitter. Just kidding.
They all use a method called time blocking to help them remain productive throughout the day.
In this article, I’m going to talk about:
1.What is time-blocking?
2. How to time block in your calendar?
3. How to deal with distractions?
Let’s dive right in.
What is time-blocking?
Time blocking is the art of scheduling your day in blocks or in chunks. Maybe you typically spend an hour on a project, or you need some time to get into it — blocking off a chunk of time where you’ll commit to working on that project and that project alone, without distractions can be a life-saver.
Tracking Your Time
Tracking how you spend your time alone is a game-changer. It can help you figure out what time of the day you’re the most productive and what time of the day you like to do different kinds of work. Maybe you enjoy writing in the morning, or business meetings in the afternoon and creative work in the evening. If you don’t know how long it typically takes you to do an activity, start here. You can use an online tracker.
What Online Trackers Can I Use To Track My Time?
- Clockify — simple and easy to use web app
- TrackingTime for making time more visual
- Toggl Track — a free time tracking app
- Harvest — use this for tracking hours for teams
- RescueTime — if you need to cut down on distractions
Time blocking helps you to stay focused from one task to the next. You also get an added sense of accomplishment as you move on to the next task, or if you finish a task faster than you anticipated.
It also removes decision fatigue — decision fatigue is when they’re too many decisions to be made and you don’t know where to begin. Like when you’re watching Netflix and you can’t settle on a show? Making those kind of decisions takes mental bandwidth, so it’s best to automate decisions as much as you can.
HOW TO TIME BLOCK
I like to use Google Calendar for this. There are more intuitive apps like Cron, as well as Motion.
Of course you can also write out your schedule by hand, but Google calendar works because I can set the tasks to repeat daily, colour coordinate and then just move them around, or delete them when the task is complete.
I also like Google Calendar because even though I predict something will take 10 minutes, if I underestimate, then I can expand the block and move other tasks around.
Using a calendar helps you to expand the allocated time, so that if you do the same task again tomorrow, you can adjust the time block. I find this really helps with future-planning.
Open up your calendar and then create an event for 1 hour, 30 minutes or 5 minutes.
You can approach this two ways:
- If you struggle with beginning a task:
then try the 5 minute sprint. Set a timer for 5 minutes and then ‘race to finish’ the task in 5 minutes.
Once 5 minutes is up you can either keep doing the task or move onto the next.
The logic behind a 5 minute sprint is Parkinson’s Law which states that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion”. Basically, the more time you give yourself to do a task, the more time it will take. Ever left an assignment to the last minute and managed to complete it in the end? That’s Parkinson’s Law at work.
2. Over-estimate the time needed:
Sometimes, I find it helpful to over-estimate how long things will take — if you got an emergency call in the middle, if there was loadshedding (!), if your laptop died, if the house were on fire…
Ask yourself, if everything went wrong, how long would it take you to complete the task?
The problem with underestimating is that you can end up feeling demotivated, because what was supposed to take 10 minutes took you an hour.
ALSO QUICK TIP: try tracking your time on your most lazy day and your most productive day to figure out how long tasks take.
BUT WHAT ABOUT DISTRACTIONS?
The Pomodoro Method
You can also use the Pomodoro method to 10x this strategy. Using the Pomodoro method helps to make time for unplanned events.
How does the Pomodorro Method work?
- Set a timer for 25 minutes and then set another timer for 5 minutes and 15 minutes.
2. Work for 25 minutes, take a break for 5 minutes.
3. Work for another 25 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes.
You can use an app like the pomoemthod.com or your timer desktop app. This helps to maintain focus because you know if something comes up, you can deal with it during your break, rather than instantly. Attention is a muscle that be built, and this is a good way to do it.
