Timeblocking · @Jason’s Microblog!

Left side of a weekend page:

I typically advise people not to time block their weekends: these two days should provide some respite from the rigors of allocating work to every minute of your day.
the planner provides only a single page for organizing your entire weekend. The page is divided into two columns, one for Saturday and one for Sunday. The empty boxes included for each day can be used for jotting down a loose schedule, including reminders of any important appointments (“Dinner at the restaurant at 7:00”) or major things you hope to get done (“Read that novel”).
The lined space below these boxes that’s labeled “Weekend Capture” should be used for capturing ideas or tasks that come up on Saturday or Sunday. I suggest you always process these notes when you create your time-block plan on Monday morning. This will ensure that they’re never forgotten.

Original: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/111023408230677940

This is another two page spread that you’d have at the end of a week.

The page on the left is dedicated to organizing Saturday and Sunday, while the page on the right is for capturing your weekly plan, a high-level road map for the week ahead.

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THE SHUTDOWN RITUAL Contd:

Once you’ve finished going through your collection columns, you should then briefly review any other potential sources of unresolved work obligations.

For most people, this means taking one last look at your email inbox, to ensure you didn’t miss something urgent, as well as reviewing your calendar and obligation-tracking system.

When done with these checks, look over your weekly plan (below), updating it as needed. The goal here is to convince yourself that there’s nothing being forgotten or missed or being kept track of only in your brain, and that you have a reasonable plan for the days ahead. All of these reassurances are the precondition for enabling your brain to fully shift its attention from work to life outside work.

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THE SHUTDOWN RITUAL

One of the most important pieces of my system’s daily scheduling discipline is executing a shutdown ritual that helps your mind shift more completely from work mode to non-work mode. The details of this ritual are straightforward. At the end of each day’s time-block schedule, your final step, if at all possible, is to shut down work. To do so, first make sure your personal metrics have been re-corded. Next, go through the tasks and ideas in your collection columns, deciding for each what you want to do with it. In some cases, you may need to add new tasks into your task system, while in others, you may need to update your calendar or even shoot off a quick message.

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ADVANCED TIME-BLOCKING TIPS Contd:

Tip #4: Use “conditional blocks” to add flexibility to your schedule.

If you’re unsure how long a given activity might take, break it into two blocks.

The first block is dedicated to working on the activity.

The activity for the second block is conditioned on what happens during the first block: If you need more time for the original activity, then the second block is used to finish it. On the other hand, if you’ve finished the original activity, the second block can be used to tackle a backup task. In this way, you can avoid unnecessary schedule fixes when confronting work of ambiguous duration.

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ADVANCED TIME-BLOCKING TIPS Contd:

Tip #3: Capture email and instant messenger communication in
their own blocks.
Many knowledge workers don’t consider checking email or instant messenger channels a standalone activity. They instead think of it as something that’s always done in parallel with primary work.

I highly discourage this mindset: all of these quick checks of communication channels significantly reduce your cognitive capacity due to neural network switching costs. Batch your email or instant messenger time into their own blocks. When you get to one of these communication blocks, do nothing but communicate, and when you’re not in one of these blocks, don’t communicate at all. If your work requires you to check these tools often, then schedule lots of blocks to do so, but refuse to let this behavior be something that occurs informally in the background.

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ADVANCED TIME-BLOCKING TIPS

Tip #1: Embrace schedule fixes.
If circumstances upend your schedule, this isn’t a failure, it’s an expected part of applying this strategy. When you next get a chance, simply fix the schedule for the time that remains in the day so that you remain intentional about where you direct your focus.

Tip #2: At first, schedule more time than you think you need.
Novice time blockers chronically underestimate how long common work activities actually take. If you’re new to time blocking, you can save yourself unnecessary schedule fixes by inflating the time-block sizes you think are reasonable by 20 to 30 percent. After you’ve been time blocking for several months, you’ll begin to develop a more realistic understanding of these durations and can begin building more-accurate blocks without needing this extra padding.

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Energy Matters!

Finally, keep in mind factors such as time of day-perhaps earlier in the day is better for hard thinking and later in the day is better for small tasks-and how you’re feeling.

If you’re exhausted, you might want a schedule designed to help you catch up on administrative obligations, whereas if you’re feeling energized, you might want to put aside large blocks of uninterrupted time for intense projects.

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When building your time-block schedule, you should first reference whatever calendar or planner or organisation system you use to make sure that you’re adding time blocks for any meetings or appointments you already have scheduled.

The real decision then becomes what to do with the free time that remains.

To help make these choices, next consult whatever external system you use to track and organize all of the tasks, projects, long-term goals, or other obligations for which you’re currently responsible. You want your schedule to help you make progress on the right activities.

(In my case it’s my calendar and #OrgMode)

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all of the above were Cal Newport ideas that I jotted down from his video on Time Blocking here: https://youtu.be/eff9h1WYxSo

More ideas below from the instructions in the physical planner itself

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