Making time blocking work for you
Overcome common time blocking challenges, and make time for what matters most.
[If you missed Part One of this guide — in which I introduce time blocking as a practice, not a tool, and share a visualisation exercise — you can catch up with it here: How can I find time for what matters?. And Part Two - in which I take you step-by-step through time blocking your next week, is here: Start time blocking in six simple steps.]
How did you get on with your first week of time blocking?
My guess is…not too well 🤣
Don’t worry, that’s completely normal and it’s actually incredibly helpful.
Truly.
As I shared in Part Two, time blocking helps you discover, in real time, what’s not working about how you spend (and think about) your time. Which helps you to change things so that you can get closer to your dream life.
Time blocking helps you discover, in real time, what’s not working about how you spend (and think about) your time.
Most of us are carefully conditioned over many years to see failure as a problem — something to be avoided. So when we try something like time blocking and it doesn’t work very well, we feel uncomfortable and we give up.
Not this time. Because if you want things to change… you need to change.
This time you’re going to embrace the ‘failure’ and use it to make your life completely awesome :)
Pause and reflect
Take a moment now to look over the notes you took in your five-minute, end-of-day reviews.
(Didn’t review some or all of the days? How interesting! What can you learn from that? How could you take that learning into next week?
For now, cast your eye back over last week’s schedule in your diary or calendar, and make some quick notes about what worked and what didn’t. Did one task overflow and knock all the others out? Did something unplanned crop up? What was it? Did you forget to time block for something? Did something take less long that you thought?)
What patterns do you see emerging?
How do those patterns play out in the rest of your life?
What do you want to change in the week to come?
Struggling with time blocking challenges? You're really not alone! In my Time Block Party! Workshop Series, we dive into real-life hurdles and how to overcome them. You'll hear me work through common struggles with participants, offering tips that make time blocking truly work for you.
Ok, here are some common issues, and what to do about them…
A task took longer than you anticipated
Of course it did. This is so ubiquitous it actually has a name — the ‘planning fallacy’, a term first coined in 1977 by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It describes our tendency to underestimate the amount of time it takes to do a task. There are a number of reasons for this — but in a nutshell, we generally disregard how long similar tasks have taken in the past, and optimistically assume we won’t run into any complications.
We disregard how long similar tasks have taken in the past, and optimistically assume we won’t run into any complications.
From my experience, the two best ways to meet this challenge are:
1. Don’t worry about it — learn from it.
Your monthly report took 6 hours instead of 3? Great! You know for next month. Thought you were going to take a quick 15-minute lunch break, but were so depleted by your morning that it was an hour before you could muster up the energy to get back to work? Great! This week, invite yourself to live in reality, not in the land of ‘what-I-wish-was-true’.
Repeat after me: this week, I will live in reality, not in the land of ‘what-I-wish-was-true’.
2. Stop at the end of your time block, whether or not you’ve finished the task.
A couple of common scenarios: You’ve blocked an hour to complete a specific task. When the hour is up, you haven’t finished the task, so you keep going until you do. Or, you’ve blocked an hour to work on an ongoing project. At the end of the hour, you’re feeling good so you keep going.
Either way, your carefully blocked day is now in ruins, which has a knock-on effect for the whole week (and possibly beyond).
Research has shown that we actually get more done when we make a habit of sticking to our time blocks.
When we’re in the habit of sticking to our time blocks, we become more focussed, more efficient, and less obsessed with perfection. We’re also more inclined to work on tasks we don’t like, because we know exactly when we can stop. And of course, as we practice time blocking, we get better at estimating the real time it will take us to do something so our time blocks are more accurate in the first place.
Now, I know we don’t always have the luxury of stopping. If the monthly report is due tomorrow, and you haven’t finished it by the end of your time block…well, you have to keep going. But as you become more skilled at time blocking, this kind of scenario will become less and less common.
Just imagine for a moment what it would feel like to complete important tasks in plenty of time…
Something came up that you could have planned for, but didn’t
This is totally normal, particularly in the early days of your practice. It can be frustrating to realise you’ve forgotten something that you now have to shoehorn into your schedule — but hey! This is reality. You’re still 265% more organised than you were last week!
Perhaps you forgot something entirely, or perhaps you forgot to plan for all aspects of a task. For example, prep time, travel time, recovery time. Be kind to yourself if it takes a while to absorb the lessons time-blocking has for you. Sometimes they need to knock you round the head a bit before you heed their call. I’ve been breathing case studies for my most recent breathwork facilitator training, and it wasn’t until I had a backlog of 13 (13!!!) case study reports that I realised I needed to timenblock for the write-up, as well as for the session itself!
Perhaps lots of small unplanned tasks knocked you off-course. Running any kind of project — from a business, to a specific work project, to a household — generates admin, and we rarely plan in time for it. I like to set aside regular time for business admin, and (separately) family admin. I schedule it multiple times a week, so that if something comes up, I can usually leave it til the next allocated admin block, and it doesn’t derail my day.
Something came up that you had no way of planning for
Well, of course. That’s life. Stuff will happen, and you’ll need to shuffle things round. That doesn’t mean time blocking isn’t working — it actually gives you a more realistic view of what needs to ‘give’ when something unplanned comes along. If you’ve stuffed so much into your schedule that there’s no room for the unexpected, you may want to block in some ‘white space’.
But wait just a minute. Before we simply accept life’s chaos, let’s check that those things were completely unavoidable.
Perhaps someone else’s priorities got in the way? Your boss gave you an extra task; someone insisted you came to their meeting; your partner rang to say they’d be late at work and could you pick up the kids? Did you say ‘yes’ without seeing how it fit into your plan? Could you have set a boundary?
Of course, you can’t always say ‘no’ to things. But I guarantee you could do it more often than you do…
I guarantee you could say ‘no’ to things more often than you do.
You didn’t have the energy/motivation to do what you planned
We often do our scheduling in the morning, when we’re well-slept and fresh to the day. And that bright, bushy-tailed person is the person we have in mind when we’re planning.
By 7pm we’ve been beaten into a haggard mess by the day’s tasks, the hundreds of decisions we’ve had to make and the emotional energy we’ve expended in our interactions with other people…and this person is not up for cooking a three-course meal and then studying Spanish for two hours.
And if you’re anything like me, you’ve tried to fit too much into your schedule (oh, I do like to do everything, all at once!) — and you don’t have the energy to back it up.
As you practice time blocking, use your daily reflections to get real about your energetic ebbs and flows. Accept them. Plan for them. Remember to schedule in time to recharge. Our culture may have decided we should be 24/7, all-season automatons — you don’t have to play that game.
Our culture may have decided we should be 24/7, all-season automatons — you don’t have to play that game.
A cautionary note on bedtime:
Ever find yourself going to bed late, either because a) you need to finish things up, or because b) you didn’t get any time to yourself today, and what you really need is two hours watching dog-rescue videos on Facebook?
When we have lots to do, we often cut into our rest or sleep time. But — quite apart from the impact this has on our physical and mental health — this is directly borrowing from tomorrow. If you don’t get enough sleep tonight, you’re sure-as-shit not going to do what you planned tomorrow.
Cutting into your rest or sleep time is borrowing from tomorrow.
Resistance to being ‘scheduled’
Did you find yourself rebelling at the thought of making or carrying out your schedule? Did you feel confined by the idea of planning out all your tasks? Is ‘routine’ a dirty word for you? Does it feel like this is all impinging on your freedom, your spontaneity?
I can totally relate. I used to be the queen of doing things on the fly. Making shit up as I went along. Being open to opportunities and saying yes to anything and everything interesting. Reacting to whatever life threw at me (in fact, I made a career out of it).
And then I became a Mum 🤣
Children are pure, joyful chaos, and boy, do they love a routine. Slowly, resisting, kicking and fighting the whole way, I started to bring routine into my life. And I began to realise…that routine and planning actually give you freedom. Because they bring with them intention. You start to see what you want to keep in your life; what you need to let go of; what you want to create. Regular tasks become automatic and no longer take up as much time or energy, because you have less decisions to make.
Routine and planning actually give you freedom. Because they bring with them intention.
And your plans are just that — your plans. You want to change them? Do it! You’re in control. Now you’re grabbing your freedom with intention — no longer being swept along by other people’s plans, by the defaults of your life.
Plan, and be free.
This week’s practice
Have another go at time blocking your week, taking into account what you’ve learned this week.
Take a few minutes at the end of each day to reflect on what did and didn’t work.
Let me know in the comments what happens — there’s power in writing and sharing.
Next week: in the final part of this four-part series, I’ll share how three years of practising time blocking has changed my life — and how it could change yours…
