Adventures in Time Blocked Planning

With time blocked planning the idea is to break down your day into blocks of time where you do things. The point is to structure your day so that you’re never faced with the question of “what do I do next?” Instead you sit down ahead of time and block out large sections of time where you do a specific large task, or bundle together a group of small tasks. You don’t block the day out into a minute by minute plan, but instead work in blocks of at least 30 minutes and usually 1-2 hours.

The idea isn’t new, and I haphazardly gave it a try when I was a student, and not surprisingly I failed spectacularly at it. It was only very recently when I decided to give it a serious try. The reason I decided to give time blocking a try was to solve a problem that I think is pretty common: I’d run out of steam about two-thirds into my day and end up just vegging out in the evenings, not accomplishing what I wanted, not even consuming the sort of media that really interested me. There’s only so many decisions my mind could make throughout the day, and late in the afternoon I would run on empty.

Since I was already “front-loading” my day (i.e. doing the really important work first thing in the morning or as early as possible) it was pretty easy to see the benefit of deciding what to do at a given point of time early on in the day, or even the night before. My issue with time blocking in the past had been that my work day is inherently unstructured. I may plan to work on something in the morning, but then a slack message or an email comes in, or someone bursts into the room with a problem and suddenly I’m working on something completely different.

Here, however, is where maturity kicks in. When I gave time blocking a chance years ago, I didn’t really take it seriously as an approach to work and life. Once something interrupted my day (and something always interrupted my day), the plan went out the window never to return. The plans rarely survived until lunchtime, and very quickly I decided that there was little point in time blocking for people like me. What I failed to realize at the time was that the majority of people are people like me: we live in a world where we are constantly being interrupted, and rarely does the day end in the way we envisioned it at the beginning.

Given this new found realization, and the realization that some very smart, very accomplished people whose work I follow use time blocking successfully and consistently, it was clear that the issue wasn’t with time blocking itself but with how I was approaching it. So I decided to make a more consistent, serious attempt to use time blocking for at least a month or two and see where it gets me.

I’m still very early into the process, but I decided to write about it as I go along, so I’ll have a record of how I tweaked things, and for those who like me, wanted to try time blocking but have failed in the past. Maybe my successes and failures will help them in their journey.

The First Mistakes

I started out with two mistakes, one easily fixed and another a mistake that I’m still working on correcting. The first mistake was trying to create separate time blocks for my work day and my “home day”. That failed spectacularly. Lesson learned: you need to follow one timeline, one plan, from waking up until going to sleep. If you use two different plans you are setting yourself up to fail because you’re creating two points in the day where you have to switch plans. While the morning switch may be relatively easy, by the time you’re off work you don’t feel like opening a different notebook or calendar and seeing what it is exactly that you’re supposed to be doing right now. I kept my home plan on a Rhodia dot pad and my work plan on a Moleskine squared notebook, and it just didn’t work for me. I had to carry two different plans with me, I had to reference and cross reference them, it was a mess. Now I have one plan per day, on a Rhodia dot pad.

The second mistake is one that I’m still working on correcting, which is what do I do when things don’t go as planned. What I should be doing is taking 5 minutes and replanning the rest of my day basically from that point onwards. What I currently do and doesn’t work well is either try to get back to the plan the moment I can (at which point things start to fall apart pretty quickly), or try to make only minor adjustments to the plan. The reality is that if there’s a significant break in my plan (i.e. something that takes more than 30 minutes to deal with), then I need to take a few minutes to stop and completely reassess my day. No, I will not be able to fit everything I planned into it now. Yes, my energy reserves are most likely more depleted at this point than I originally planned. Rather than trying to stick to the plan and crashing and burning, I need to be kinder to myself and look at what’s left of my day with fresh eyes. “That production outage took a lot from me, so let’s switch things up so I have a lighter workload until I’ve had a chance to recover, maybe even schedule a significant break here. Then rebuild my evening so I also have a bit more recovery time then – add a meditation session, or more reading time, etc.”. This is something I’m currently working on doing consistently.

The First Successes

While I’ve been time blocking only for a short time, I have already seen the value of this system. I’m getting much more done, and I am able to dedicate long stretches of time focused on meaningful work. I batch emails to the beginning and end of the day, and slack messages only to the times between large blocks of deep focus. I haven’t had an episode of mindless YouTube watching in the evenings since I’ve started. I’m reading more, journaling more, meditating more, spending more meaningful time with friends and family. I’m also being much more realistic about my goals. Once you start putting things in the context of the hours you have in the day, it becomes easier to assess how much you can get done in a given day.

It’s not just a result of the time blocking itself, of course. It’s also the way I’ve structured my year, a commitment to deep focus and digital minimalism which mean no social media, no mindless media consumption, more reading and more deliberate practice of the things that matter to me. I’m also far from reaching a point where the way in which I time block my day is stable, well-defined routine. Things are still shifting around as I’m recording in my journal what worked and what didn’t work. While I’m not looking for perfection, I do want to reach a point where I have a system that works for me (and not I for it), and that helps me better shape my days.

I’ll be writing more about time blocking in the future, whether my experiments with it succeed or fail. If you’re giving it a try or use time block planning regularly I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments.

Planning in 2024: The 12 Week Year

It’s 2024 and this time I’m doing neither yearly goals nor themes. I find themes to be too vague to be useful: they don’t provide enough structure or motivation for my needs. My old yearly goals worked perfectly before I got cancer, but now I can’t commit to a full year of goals (my brain just won’t let me). So I’m trying something new this time: the twelve week year. The idea is to treat each quarter as a new year, with all that entails.

I mapped out the first 13 weeks (from the 31st of December to the 30th of March) in my Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal, each week on two pages. On the left are the days of the week and on the right is my set of tasks for the week. The list of tasks is divided into two columns, and each column is divided into categories. The left column is for categories and tasks that vary widely from week to week: blogging, general tasks, various courses and challenges I’m taking. The right column is for my permanent categories that happen every week in the quarter: health, reading, connections, meditation and journaling.

The health category tracks fitness and health related tasks (on a given week it will have checkboxes for running, swimming and gym sessions for example, as well as reminders to go to the dentist or get my blood pressure checked). The reading category is for where I want to be with my reading in a given week (halfway through book x, 30 pages into book y). Connections is something I added after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and it’s been well worth doing: I call or meet up with 2-4 friends every week. Messaging doesn’t count, only phone calls, zoom calls, or physical meetups. If there’s one habit I’d recommend picking up in 2024 it’s this one. Meditate and Journal are just tracking locations for my meditation and journaling sessions.

I then set out goals in various categories for the entire “12 week year”, as if it was a full year. Each of these will be evaluated at the end of the 13 weeks, and a complete new set of goals will be set for next quarter. The goals are all SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Unlike themes there’s a possibility of not achieving all my goals, but that’s also something worth learning and carrying on to the next “year”.

So for instance under my health category for the next “year” is to get back to a 5k running base and an 8k long run (I’ve had a break in running for a few weeks due to illness and travel). If at the end of March I’m only at a 7k long run that’s not the end of the world, it just means that I need to take that into account when planning my next 12 weeks.

I then break down the goals into tasks that go into the weekly page. Each week I look at my goals, calculate where I am and where I want to be by the end of the week and fill out the weekly planning page accordingly. I use the calendar side of the page to block out time sensitive things or things that provide useful context (days of the week where I work from home and those where I work from the office, rainy days, holidays, etc).

To be clear: I don’t block the tasks for all the “year” in advance, but rather on a week by week basis. Only the goals for the entire 12 week period are planned in advance. The goals themselves are realistic, and many of them are broken into “base goals” and “stretch goals” much like in Kickstarter. At the last week of the quarter I set aside time to review and “shutdown” the quarter and plan and set up the new one coming up. If I end up not liking the weekly page setup, if there’s a goal that just didn’t work for me, if there’s something new in my life I can easily take it into account without feeling like I’ve “wasted” precious planning time or I’m bailing out on my plans.

So, if you’re unsure on how to plan your year, I suggest just planning the next 12 or 13 weeks. It may just work for you.

Ghosts of Planners Past: GTD and Friends

This is probably going to be the hardest post to write in this series, and so I’ve been postponing it.

I got into Getting Things Done around 2005, when it was really starting to gain momentum with tech workers online. I first heard about it via PvP Online’s creator, Scott Kurtz. Yes, I found a productivity and planning system via one of the first webcomic creators. The internet is funny that way.

If you have no idea what GTD is, then I suggest starting here. It’s a 15 minute guide to David Allen’s all-encompassing planning and productivity system. If it resonates with you, then the GTD book is pretty good for a book in the productivity genre. Books in this genre tend to be repetitive, padded with anecdotes, and oftentimes poorly written. The GTD book is readable, and while it contains the inevitable productivity guru anecdotes, there aren’t very many of them.

There are a few things to note about GTD that set it apart from other productivity systems, and make knowing about it worthwhile:

While it was developed for a paper office based world and appears on the face of it to be very rigid, it is in fact extremely customizable and flexible, and it converts very well to digital planning and to do list systems. Many of the most popular to list applications have their roots in GTD, for good reason.
While it was developed for an office setting and busy executives, it easily works well for students, designers and other creatives, developers, teachers, and just about anybody that doesn’t lead a leisure filled life. If you have “stuff to do”, if you feel overwhelmed, then GTD in some form or another could very likely help you.
This system spawned dozens and dozens of other systems. You can see the roots of GTD in BuJo (Bullet Journalling), there’s a monster list of GTD implementations, and 43folders (Merlin Mann’s old productivity site) is full of info on various GTD tweaks and variants. This, by the way, is my favourite one.
The basics of GTD are worth implementing no matter which system you use, because they just work, and because they will likely fit whichever system you use. They are:
- Make a list of all the things you have on your mind that you need to do. They need to be actions that you can perform in the real world, and you need to be able to clearly envision what “done” means.
- Curate that list – make sure that things on it are actually ACTIONS that you can take IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. Break big tasks into little ones, things that you are able to do it small chunks of time. Make sure there aren’t any hidden dependencies or prerequisites to these tasks. Make sure you know what DONE looks like. Make sure that they are REAL and actually need to be done, and need to be done by YOU. If things on that list take less than 2 minutes to do, just do them. T
- Go over that list and do the things. If you’re stuck, make sure the thing was properly defined and isn’t a hidden project (i.e. isn’t actually one task but rather 20), something that you can delegate or not do, or something that you can’t start working on now. If you’re balking at doing it open a timer (the famous pomodoro technique enters here).
- Once a week prune the list. Be ruthless.
- Don’t schedule anything on your calendar unless it absolutely has to be on your calendar – a doctor’s appointment, a child’s graduation, an exam date, etc.
You can get carried away by GTD and become more interested in the organizational part of it (“Productivity Pr0n”) than in actually getting the work done.

The last bullet is what earned GTD a place in this blog post series.

I love GTD. I’ve been using it in various form for almost two decades. I have the book and have read it twice, and I have a good grasp of the major players in the GTD cinematic universe. I know the system well enough to be comfortable to get rid of its mannerisms and streamline it to my own needs. I can see its influences in Jira, in BuJo, in Omnifocus and other to do apps. And it’s very powerful dark side is that it really invites you to tweak and tinker with it. You are tempted to make your system a little bit sleeker, better, more efficient, better suited for your needs, to the point where you suddenly find yourself spending more time and care on the system than the tasks that it is supposed to help you manage. So while GTD taught me how to define and manage my tasks, it also taught me to be constantly aware of how much time I’m spending on my task management systems.

So if you are worried about being carried away by GTD’s siren call to tweak, tweak, tweak, here are some basic ideas from the system that I think are worth taking with you or thinking about no matter what:

Our minds aren’t good at keeping track of things. Write them down.
Not everything is a real task. It if it isn’t an action that you need take in the world, then it needs to be trashed/delegated/better defined.
Tasks that languish in your planner/to do system are either ill defined (see bullet above) or require deliberate action to get out of the way (see pomodoro technique, dashes and timers).
Don’t clutter your calendar. It just adds needless stress to your life.
The best definition of a task is a physical action, that can be accomplished at a sitting, supports valuable progress towards a recognized and desirable goal, and something that YOU are the most appropriate person to perform.

Ghosts of Planners Past: Chronodex

As I’ve been struggling with planning ever since I received a cancer diagnosis in mid 2021, I’ve been reflecting on the many planner systems that I’ve used over the years. Most of these systems didn’t stand the test of time for me, but I think that there’s still something to learn from their failure. So while I’m working out how planning looks like for the new, post-cancer treatment me, I thought that I would write down my reflections on each system that I have used.

I love planning, I’ve always loved planning, and together with many analogue systems I have tried quite a few to do apps over the years. Analogue planning systems, while sometimes cumbersome, always worked better for me, which is why that’s what I’ll focus on in this short series of posts.

I first discovered Chronodex, Patrick Ng’s gorgeously visual planning system, when he first published it in late 2011. It immediately appealed to me because it was so visual, and I’m a visual thinker, and it was so very different from anything else that was going around in the planning world at the time. This was well before the days of various bullet journal tracking pages, in the heady days of GTD and the Fountain Pen Network. The Rhodia Webnotebook was new and exciting stuff, and the Traveler’s Notebook was all the rage.

Patrick’s Chronodex was meant to be printed at home, 6 months of planning pages at a time, and then folded and cut to size to fit a Traveler’s Notebook. I tried to do that at first, and failed miserably. Home printers are terrible, and the result was unusable and just a waste of a lot of paper and inkjet ink.

Since I still really wanted to give the system a try, I went to the office supply store next to my job and bought a circle template ruler. Using that, a Rhodia Webbie and a Pilot Hi Tec C Coleto I created hand drawn Chronodex pages for a few months. I was a team lead at the time, I was overwhelmed with work and meetings, and I thought that visual time blocking as offered by the Chronodex would be the solution.

I really insisted on getting the Chronodex system to work for me, because I was so aesthetically enamoured with it. I pushed it until it broke and then I kept dragging it on for weeks before I finally realised that it was time to move on. The Chronodex wasn’t for me.

The system works on time-blocking, as drawn on a circular 12 or 24 hour template that is supposed to mimic a watch face. If you are a visual thinker you will immediately see the appeal. If you like pretty planner pages, you will also love the Chronodex’s elegant beauty. But planning for me has first and foremost got to work on a practical level, and the system faired poorly there.

If you have relatively few things to do throughout the day, or if your day is already time blocked (i.e. you are a student or a teacher) then the Chronodex could work well for you.

If, on the other hand, you have a lot going on, or you tend to have to jump around between tasks, or if your days aren’t so easily well defined in time blocks, then the Chronodex is likely not for you. It becomes too cluttered to be readable if you try to splice your day into small time blocks, and if your day is fluid and not well defined in advance, you aren’t going to be able to to time block it until you start to actually do the thing. The Chronodex isn’t a Pomodoro substitute, it’s the equivalent of having an old-school day planner with the hours marked on it, and chunking out your work and meetings in advance in your planner. It’s a great system for students, and for people who have a high degree of control and certainty about their day.

What I did take from Chronodex is the option to stop and visually time block my day when things are getting out of hand in terms of my expectations versus what I can actually do in the time at hand.

If you are at all curious about the system, I encourage you to visit Patrick’s beautiful site and maybe print out a page or two to try it out. Another option is to draw out the Chronodex circles yourselves, just to see if there’s anything in the system for you (don’t do it long term, though, as it takes ages). A third option is to go Etsy and search for Chronodex. There are dozens of stamps for sale with the Chronodex template on them.

Some Thoughts on Productivity Systems

In the beginning of the month I started working in a new team, in a new career path, in a new technical job, under new circumstances. After working for two and a half months from home, I now work half a week at home and half a week at work, in a pretty empty office. I haven’t met all my team members, as we work in separate “capsules,” ensuring that if one of us got sick at least 50% of us would remain unaffected and capable of working. After 17 years of being a Mainframe system programmer, I’m now a DevOps engineer. I’ve been training for the past six months for it, and I love the work, but it’s still not the easiest switch to make. I have a new set of managers, with a new management style, and my old job keeps calling on me, which results in some wild context switching.

And meanwhile the world is burning, as incredible stupid leaders worldwide decide that their pockets are worth more than othe r people’s lives.

I’m not a huge fan of change, and so my productivity systems tend to stay around with me for years. During the early days of the pandemic, when I just started working from home, I thought that this was temporary. On the second week I realized that the mess of notes in whatever writing pad was around would need to change. And my mindset would need to change.

I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

I tried to replicate my old work setup at first (a large Moleskine squared hardcover with only the daily todo part of bullet journalling), keeping my home setup intact (a Field Notes with a running todo, lists, trackers etc). That held until I realized that I was starting a new job in a place that moved at a completely different pace than what I was used to. I was also no longer a manager, so the focus of my work was different. I needed to tear everything down and start over again.

I went back to digital task management. I’d tried OmniFocus for a while two years ago and didn’t like its complexity. I had used Things for a good long while before that but stopped and change back to a paper notebook once I decided that I had to have a physical barrier between work and home to have any balance in my life. Those were wild times, and I’m glad that I made that choice, but now it was time to bring Things back into my life. I’ve been using it since the 1st of June, and while it isn’t yet 100% set up to perfection, it’s working well so far.

I’m now managing both work and home from Things, because I can’t handle the added hassle of remembering to lug which notebook where every day, especially now, when I’m not yet set up in my new place. I also don’t realistically think that I could have kept track of my work in a paper notebook right now. I’ve “outgrown” it.

The issue is that I still love paper notebooks, and I still love writing with pen and pencil on a piece of paper. I still keep a pad next to me when I work and scribble ideas on it, but this switch has dwindled down my daily stationery use significantly.

As I was clearing my old desk I found physical evidence of all my years of work there: notebooks full of todos, meeting notes, project notes, ideas and problem solving pointers. I could see the work that I’ve put in. My new system is searchable, but it’s still an amorphous pile of bits somewhere in the Cloud.

I don’t recommend this eraser. It’s just one that makes me smile.

When I went into quarantine I had an inexplicable yearning to get back to the first ever real productivity system I used, the PigPogPDA. I loved my Moleskine pocket plain reporter notebooks, set up just right, full of all the important information that I might ever need. I had shopping lists, trackers, drawings, story ideas, directions, packing lists, cheat sheets in those notebooks: they were my everything at the time. I also remember how terribly expensive they were for me, and how difficult to obtain. Every page was precious, and I had to be careful not to waste any. I used the Hi-Tec-C and the Staedler Mars technico lead holder for that, and these little notebooks lasted for ages and travelled the world with me. Only in the past three years have I stopped using them, replacing them with a much simpler system in Field Notes pocket notebooks. Out of nostalgia I brought one back to life. It has done a lot to cheer me up and give me a sense of stability during these hectic times. Yes, I know it’s just a notebook. Sometimes “just a notebook” is all it takes.

If I have any advice to offer it’s this: be kind to yourself and pick whichever system works for you, and doesn’t make you work for it. Pick something that you’ll enjoy using. If it’s a sleek app, let it be a sleek app. You’ll find use for the notebooks in your cupboard eventually. If it’s notebooks, then make them entirely your own. That’s the joy of using paper planning anyway. And don’t be shy of saying: “This doesn’t work for me anymore”.

So I’m back to digital planning, and I’m going to find a way to have fun with my pens and paper somehow (I still journal and draw and write after all). This is something that’s likely to change as the times do, my work and my life circumstances do. So long as I don’t fall into the trap of Productivity Pr0n and forget what all this is in service of, I’m fine.

I’m fine.

General update

My to do list today is 45 items long. It’s 10AM and I still have 33 items to go.

I’ve been using the Forest app for the past week to cut down on my phone time, and especially my twitter time. It’s a fun take on the Pomodoro technique that basically lets you set a timer to plan trees in your forest. The tree grows when you finish your timer without touching your phone (you can have the phone play music or a podcast while your tree is growing, you just can’t fiddle with your phone). You can also accept calls while the tree is growing, but you can’t make calls/text/check apps etc. It’s a good gamification of the Pomodoro technique, and a beautiful app.
I’ve finished rewriting chapter 2 and am back to rewriting large swaths of chapter 7. Forcing myself to cut ruthlessly cut things down.
Reading John Scalzi’s “The Human Division” and thoroughly enjoying it. Also indulging in M.C. Beaton’s “Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House,” because I can.
Started working on my 2018 resolutions. It’s the fourth year that I’m doing
My (mechanical) keyboard is creaking. It’s time to swap out the keycaps and lubricate the switches a bit.
Cutting down on Apple technology podcasts. Getting a bit fed up with them and more interested in podcasts with more interesting content than “guess how much I love my iPhone X”.
That being said, I upgraded to an iPhone 8 (not a Plus or a X on purpose), and I’m OK with it. Still frustrated that it doesn’t have a headphone jack.
Ran a game of Parsley that I wrote for a group of friends using Discord, and it was a roaring success. Planning on running another game like that soon.

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