How to Stick with Time Blocking the Right Way
There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive.
It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.”
While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive.
It’s this that we will be looking at this week.
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Script | 417
Hello, and welcome to episode 417 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it.
We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan.
And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend.
Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens.
Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected.
The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now.
Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening?
Hi Tim, thank you for your question.
You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings.
A maker’s role is to produce the work.
The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing.
In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal.
The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions.
You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them.
I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said:
“My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.”
Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager.
Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required.
AI doesn’t magically produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work.
The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking.
Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something.
This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse.
Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails.
It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive.
Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work done, and communicating to your colleagues and bosses that you cannot be disturbed right now.
I’ve found it’s that communication step people struggle with. There seems to be a fear that people will think less of you because you are not available to their every whim when they need you.
Complete fallacy. The people in your organisation who get the most respect are the ones who are strict about when they are available and when they are not. They have clear barriers, and no one crosses those barriers.
The people who get the least respect and are often the ones left behind on the promotion ladder have no barriers. They are always willing to stop and chat about this, that, and the other.
These are the people who end up taking their work home and are always the last to submit on a project.
As Jim Rohn said, "When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.”
The problem here is that when you don’t set boundaries and are always available, your bosses feel they have to supervise you more. You get caught in a vicious circle.
And because you are always submitting your work at the last minute, you’re being interrupted by colleagues and bosses asking how you’re getting on.
When it comes to protecting time on your calendar for focused work, timing is everything.
According to several studies, around 80% of people are at their most focused and creative in the morning. This means, if you want to produce your best work, do it when you are at your most focused and creative.
If that is the morning, protect time in the morning and leave your afternoons open for discussions, meetings and other responsive tasks.
To give you one example, I have a client who is a software engineer.
She’s the manager of a team of engineers, and each morning at 8:30 am, they have a 15-minute ‘stand-up meeting’ to inform everyone of their plan for the day. (They all follow the Daily Planning Sequence).
This informs the team when each of them will be doing their focused work time (usually a three-hour block), what meetings they have, and when they will be available to discuss projects.
My client blocks her calendar from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for doing her focused work, but does allow 9:00 am to 9:30 am to discuss any issues with individual team members or her bosses.
Then 9:30 hits, and she shuts down Slack and email, opens up her coding software, and for the next three hours, it’s complete and total focus time.
Since she and her team adopted this practice, they’ve never missed a deadline, and no one ever has to take work home. And more importantly, their productivity, as individuals and as a team, has shot through the roof.
This has the added benefit of their bosses now knowing not to disturb them during focus time. There’s plenty of time to update projects or gather information before and after a focus block.
It works. It’s balancing the need to be productive with the need to be responsive. And during an eight-hour workday, her team is only unavailable for three hours, not all at once. So there is always someone available to field questions from higher-ups and clients, if necessary.
Now, there is another block I would highly recommend, and this one will help to reduce and even eliminate backlogs. This is the communications and admin hour.
Let’s be honest, Slack and Teams didn’t do what they promised. Make communicating between teams and colleagues easier and faster. All these tools have done is take away the immediacy of email, move it to another tool, and made it noisier than email ever was.
We still get far too many communications, and far too many low-value and time-wasting messages.
The problem today is the one we’ve faced since the dawn of email: the feeling that we must respond immediately. Now, I’ll take you back to the two opposing forces at play in your workday: the need to be productive and the need to be responsive.
If you were 100% productive, you wouldn’t be communicating with anyone and would be focused solely on your work. If you were 100% responsive, you’d never get any work done, as you’d be responding to interruptions and answering questions and messages all day.
So, there’s a need to find some balance.
In my real-life tests, I’ve found that if you set aside an hour later in the day to respond to your messages, backlogs rarely occur, and if they do, they remain under control.
This only works, though, if you are consistent with this method.
You’ll never be on top of your messages if you sporadically deal with them throughout the week.
But if you consistently spend an hour or so responding to these messages and catching up on relevant threads, you’ll never feel overwhelmed, and if things do build up, adding an extra 30 minutes is often all you need to get things under control.
Now, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. You’re open calendar.
Time blocking will never work if you do not get control of your calendar and get in first. In other words, your focus block and your communications and admin time should be pre-blocked on your calendar.
I’ve seen people wait until Monday morning to find time to get their productive work done, only to discover their calendar is full of meetings.
No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that.
You have to go into your calendar and begin protecting time today. Perhaps your calendar is now full for the next two weeks. If so, go out three weeks in the future and set up some recurring blocks of time for doing your productive work now.
You can change these later if the time you’ve protected is needed for something important, but if you don’t do it now, you will never do it, and the pattern you’re stuck in today will be the same pattern you’re stuck in in three weeks.
I would also recommend setting these up as recurring blocks. That makes your life easier, and you soon come to respect these time blocks.
This also makes planning the week simpler. Knowing that you’ve got a couple of hours each day protected for your productive work, you can assign dates to your work more confidently.
I know when I begin the week, that I will have time on Thursday to write this script. I have time protected for doing so.
So there you go, Tim. I hope that has helped.
Look at the work you do, calculate where your balance between being productive and responsive lies, and then reflect that in your calendar.
I mentioned two hours a day for focused work, but if you are in a role that requires you to be particularly responsive, you may only allow one hour a day. But that is far better than nothing.
Good luck, and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.