Time Blocking and Productivity (Cal Newport)

Productivity
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The article below was mentioned in another post. I think the technique is interesting enough for its own thread:

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

I call this planning method time blocking . I take time blocking seriously, dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building my schedule for the next day. During this planning process I consult my task lists and calendars, as well as my weekly and quarterly planning notes. My goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right pace for the relevant deadlines.

This type of planning, to me, is like a chess game, with blocks of work getting spread and sorted in such a way that projects big and small all seem to click into completion with (just enough) time to spare.

Three Concerns

Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity . A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Does anyone here plan their time like that?

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I’m meaning to do this some time very soon.

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I tried it but I couldn’t keep up, so much that I don’t even make it to the first hour. Though I’ll admit it’s really productive.

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I have plans to do this. The article is really interesting, thanks for these cool thoughts!

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So you can now do in 10 minutes what you used to do in 1 hours? Or put differently, fit what used to be an entire workday into the average length of a movie?

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.
:grin: :+1:

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That appears to be some very interesting math… just be careful not to create a black hole as you’re approaching speed of light with your efficiency.

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Been trying to do this for months now. Using 30min blocks.

Though lately I’ve also been trying to merge the idea of time management and/with energy management.

There’s more to it than just planning the day I think, if you’re not able to comply due to energy level issues.

We as humans operate in oscillation. We need to figure out our individual rythms. Couple it with the time blocking system and you have a winner…

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I came across the Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo a few years ago. His idea is like yours, to work in 30 minute blocks with breaks. At that time he had some literature available (it may be on his site now, but I didn’t bother to look around), which I tried to attach but it seems to no allow me to attach pdf files. If anyone has advice how to upload pdfs, please let me know. This hasn’t worked as well for me as I would have hoped for, but others find it very useful.

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You might be able to find them by searching Google for a sentence of the text in the PDFs along with “ext:pdf” in the search query (to limit the results to PDF files).

(PDFs can’t be uploaded in the forum because they tend to be used mainly for filesharing of copyrighted material.)

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I looked through Cirillo’s site and am guessing he incorporated what used to be free into his books. I used the technique Josh suggested but Cirillo is no longer offering his pamphlet.

About a decade ago I read Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and found it to be an effective system for helping to increase my productivity. The authors of the article, Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity have posted a preprint on ResearchGate. While the article is about the science behind GTD, figure 1 on page 5 is an excellent overview of the process.

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