The Art of Time Blocking: How to Plan Your Day for Maximum Efficiency

For whatever reason, we try to convince ourselves that multitasking isn’t a myth. You may be thinking ‘Oh, but I’m a great multitasker! I literally just read 20 e-mails while sitting in a meeting and simultaneously drafting my direct report’s bi-annual employee evaluation.” I hate to break it to you, but there’s no trophies for overloading the moment with multiple tasks all for the sake of “doing all the things”.

If anything, you’re exhausting your mental energy from all the consistent context switching.

Context switching refers to the act of shifting your attention from one task or project to another. Frequent context switching can lead to mistakes and lower-quality work, as your focus is divided and your cognitive load increases. 

We should truly give our brains time to adjust to a new task. Each time you switch tasks, your brain needs to adjust to the new context, which consumes cognitive resources and time. And here’s a fun-fact, it can take up to 23 minutes to regain full focus after an interruption. So, you gotta ask yourself: Are you truly focusing on each task when you’re multitasking?

What is time blocking?

Time blocking is a technique that may help with getting a better grip on how often your brain needs to shift its focus. Time blocking consists of allocating specific blocks of time for focused work on a single task or project, reducing the need to switch contexts frequently. You’re more likely to keep a consistent flow state, which is a highly productive state where you’re fully immersed in a task.

Time blocking allows a proper allocation of time for both deep work and shallow work. And if you’re anything like the average corporate worker, your day is likely sprinkled with both types of work.

Planning - the essence of time blocking

So, how does one time block their day? Well, it all boils down to planning. In their paper, Making the Best Laid Plans Better: How Plan-Making Increases Follow-Through, researchers Rogers, Milkman, John, and Norton insist that “…making a concrete plan helps people follow through on their intentions.” Asking whether someone intends to engage in an activity can increase their likelihood of follow-through, however, guiding people to concretely unpack the when, where, and how of a fulfilling a goal can increase their likelihood of following through even more.

Therefore, let’s get to planning! We’ll start small by looking at just 1 workday.

Take inventory of your tasks

First, start by taking inventory of all the tasks that you need to complete on a given day. I’m talking about everything such as checking emails, doing 1:1s with your manager and/or peers, planning for an upcoming meeting, writing documentation, coding and/or resolving bugs, mentoring others, completing required trainings, etc.

Group like-tasks

After you have an idea of the tasks that you need to complete, then it’s time to start grouping the tasks into like-tasks. A like-task are tasks that are like one another. These may be tasks that share a dependency, tasks related to the same subject matter, or tasks that share the same level of effort. Determine your own patterns and group your tasks accordingly. Also, consider that some tasks may be standalone tasks – these are tasks that should be executed in isolation and not batched/grouped with other tasks.

Determine time allocations

Once you’ve grouped your tasks and identified isolated tasks, the next step is to determine either how long it’ll take you to complete each task or how much time you want to allocate towards working on the task.

There are 3 approaches to time estimation:

1.     Make time estimates based on how much time it takes on average to complete the task.

2.     Limit the amount of time you want to spend on a task – this is known as timeboxing.

3.     Allocate a portion of time to work on tasks. The amount of time to allocate could be influenced by your energy levels, another time constraint or just be an arbitrary number.

Be sure to account for unexpected tasks. Maybe your team needs to schedule an impromptu brainstorming session, or a colleague reached out of the blue and needs some help working through a challenge. While it’s totally up to you to decline engaging in such moments, too many refusals could potentially diminish your work relationships in the long run. Therefore, consider avoiding the action of overloading your work calendar with tasks. Give yourself some wiggle-room and breaks. Maybe you’ll have 1-2 hours of time unaccounted for that aren’t allocated to anything. Follow up on those unexpected tasks during those periods or shift one of your planned tasks to that period. And if that time rolls around and there’s nothing else to work on, then go rest. Don’t assign yourself yet another task. The only award you’ll ever get for over-working is burnout.

Visualize your time blocks

The final step is to visualize your time blocks. There’s power in writing down and seeing your tasks. How come? Well, the answer is simple: external storage and encoding. Whichever medium you choose for writing down your time blocking schedule (i.e. Outlook, a calendar, your planner, a sticky note), that’s your external storage. It’s the artifact that’s external from your brain which holds the documented version of your tasks. Encoding is when your brain processes what you see and sends the info to the hippocampus for a closer look. This part of the brain then decides what’s worth keeping in your long-term memory and what can be forgotten. When making decisions, your brain sorts through tons of information. How does it figure out what’s important? If you’ve written something down, your brain gives it extra attention, making it more likely to stick. Neuropsychologists call this the generation effect, and it means you’re better at remembering information you’ve created yourself than stuff you’ve just read.

Therefore, as much fun as it may seem to keep everything upstairs, up the dose of fun by writing down your time blocks!

How I visualize with Outlook

Given my employer, I manage my calendar in Outlook. I’ll typically add blocks on my calendar specifically named for the tasks that I need to complete. And here’s the important part – I mark that I’m busy. It sounds so simple but if my calendar shows that I’m available, someone is more likely to schedule a meeting than to leave those calendar blocks alone. Since I use Outlook, I go even one step further and assign a label to the time block which provides some color coordination to my calendar. The addition of color is truly just a mental thing for me as it helps me keep tabs on what I’m spending most of my time on in a given day, week, or month.

For example, let’s say I assign the color green to working on projects and red to meetings. I have a project deadline approaching and I don’t have the luxury of being late. If I look at my week on that Monday and see that 85% of my week is red, 5% is blue, and the remaining 10% are other various colors, that could be an indication that I’m spending my day sitting in too many meetings and need to allocate more time towards working on my time-sensitive projects. It’s much easier for me to pick up on that pattern with the use of color rather than just seeing a bunch of calendar event titles.

Start small before scaling

You can take this approach to time blocking and scale it to your entire week. I personally wouldn’t recommend going beyond a week until you’re more comfortable with time blocking. You’ll want to provide yourself the space (and grace) to perform your own mini retrospective on how time blocking worked out for a given week and determine ways to improve how you’re allocating time to complete tasks. What may work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday may be a disaster of an approach for Thursday and Friday. And guess what, that’s OK! It’s seldom that our day-to-day work life looks the same every day.

Time blocking is by far one of my most favorite methods of task and workload management! If you’re going to give it a try, definitely focus on making this technique work for you and how you work.