Practicing the Time Blocking Method

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying a productivity method called Time Blocking.

Practiced by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Peter Drucker, Elon Musk, Cal Newport, and Bill Gates, time blocking is a systematic approach where you give every minute a job.

It requires you to figure out in advance how you want to spend your time and make time for things that matter by scheduling them in your calendar.

It is an alternative to having a casual approach of doing things where you try to fill your time between meeting, calls, & email, often reacting to other’s task for you, and occasionally, when you feel like it, try to make progress on things that are important.

Time blocking helps you maintain an intentional structure of your time and ensure that the ‘Big Rocks’ or High-value tasks get done.

It also shows you exactly how much time you have in a day + how long things take. This realization can be scary at first, but it is crucial. It leads you to rethink about your life, be ruthless about cutting out things that don’t matter so that you have more time for things that do.

Here are a couple of things I’ve noticed about this practice:

1. It has shifted my mindset from managing my task to managing my time & energy
2. It has reduced my anxiety by providing me with a sense of control over my schedule.
3. Instead of trying to fit my important tasks between meetings & other urgent tasks, I now fill my jar with big rocks first before others fill it with pebbles & sand.
4. I know what I should be doing at any given moment. This makes me less prone to give-in to distraction and ad-hoc internet breaks.
5. It is extremely demanding & an intense practice of focus and concentration. That’s why I’ve stopped extending this practice to time outside of work.

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