#TimeBlocking Log Day 4

Taking it easy today.

made a plan. for doing nothing. or very little. what matters today is the plan and the intention and the mindfulness of the execution / delegation behind it. Not the actual content.

I know it’s weird but reading the @thephd’s post and it’s somehow heartening to see that I’m not the only one struggling like this

https://elk.zone/pony.social/@thephd/111049360559613330

#TimeBlocking Day 2!

#mjbBabbles

Ok done for the day. Shutdown complete ✅

Cognition takes a precipitous dive post 6p.
best served for light reading / iterating / noodling

Energy highest in the morn. Tackle hard tasks then.

Doing this makes me a lot more self aware and intentional.

the plan got borked thrice in the day.
At least this time I got to be intentional about what I would do / ditch / delegate / postpone

And everything got captured, so my mind’s empty

It’s not natural doing this. And a bit hard.

So I’ll probably keep doing these, until the process becomes second nature.

#mjbBabbles #TimeBlocking

so I need some sort of middle ground of … disciplinary flow, I guess?

also with the old life, all I had to do was show up, and do the work. and that was easy to plan and execute

my current life is very amorphous. I have a lot more responsibilities. I have to take care of family. My body broke in 2018 and it requires daily upkeep to function. And I am trying to pivot careers. All of these generate a lot of work. Not to mention the rest of life throwing things at me.

So I somehow need some approach to taming it. and focus on what I need to do.

I’m good at the long term stuff. I know what I want to do.What I need to try. The paths to get there.

What I currently lack is some way of handling daily life. And what to do when life happens all the time.

Current plan: long term stuff - do with #OrgMode. daily stuff - do with #TimeBlocking

What I *also* need to remember to do is ***review*** mesh what i do on a daily basis and see if it is leading me to where I want to be.

#mjbBabbles

@twelvety yay! another #TimeBlocking aficionado! thank you for sharing your experience. very heartening!
let’s see how my experiment goes 🤞

#TimeBlocking Log, Day 1 thread.

Will this stuff work? Logging for a few days, to see what I feel as I do this.

P.S. this is what I’m babbling on about: https://toots.dgplug.org/@jason/111023054494146952

#mjbBabbles

so i’m going to try doing #TimeBlocking tomorrow onwards and babble about it

#mjbBabbles

#TimeBlocking

FIN!

That about sums up the advice given in the planner proper
Also all the “I”’s above are Cal. I have just been copy pasting, in case that wasn’t clear.

The planner has a site here: https://www.timeblockplanner.com/

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#TimeBlocking

CONCLUDING a bit more:

1. Build smart weekly plans.
2. Use this plan to develop effective daily time-block schedules.
3. Execute those daily schedules with intensity.
4. When you're done for the day, shut down completely.
5. When you get to the weekend, take a break from rigorous scheduling.
6. Then start the cycle all over again. This is the rhythm of a professional life that's both extremely productive and sustainable. And it's exactly what this planner is designed to help you achieve.

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#TimeBlocking

CONCLUSION

1. It’s this combination of high-level weekly plans with detailed daily time block schedules that unlocks the full potential of this productivity system. 2. The weekly/daily approach is what allows you to begin moving obligations around like pieces on a chessboard, and to construct configurations of your schedule that enable you to accomplish head turning amounts of work, all while staying on top of the various small requests and tasks pulling at your time and attention. While your peers react frantically to inputs and deadlines as they arise, often putting in late nights to try to compensate for their haphazard schedules, you'll approach each day with a justified confidence.

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#TimeBlocking

PLAN YOUR WEEK! Contd:

8. Weekly plans are also important because they allow you to tackle objectives that require more than a day to complete. If you decide at the beginning of the week, for example, to write an article that’ll require around ten to fifteen hours of research and writing, your weekly plan can help you figure out how to spread this work out across the upcoming days. It’s much less likely you'd end up getting all of this required work done if you instead just planned each day as it arrived.

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#TimeBlocking

PLAN YOUR WEEK! Contd:

5. The planning may take time up front, but it will return much greater productivity for the entire week that follows.
6. It allows you to identify important patterns that can help you get much more accomplished. If you see, for e.g., that Wednesday through Friday are very busy due to a visiting client, then you can compensate by squeezing in more uninterrupted deep work on Monday or Tuesday. Or if you know you'll be off-site all day Friday, then you can adjust your Thursday schedule to make sure loose ends are tied up before the trip.
7. Sometimes your weekly planning habit can motivate you to change appointments already on your calendar. After trying and failing to fit in enough hours to finish an important project, for e.g., you might realize that you need to cancel or reschedule a few non-urgent appointments perhaps coffee with a colleague or a meeting for a speculative project to make room for the more urgent work.

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#mjbBabbles

#TimeBlocking

PLAN YOUR WEEK!

1. You should work out your weekly plan either first thing Monday morning or over the weekend before the week begins.
2. When crafting the plan, look over your calendar and whatever system you use to track your obligations, projects, and goals.
Some people like to empty their email inbox as part of this planning process so that they feel as though they restarting the week fresh. For other people, this might be infeasible.
3. Regardless, creating these plans takes time. For example, I usually spend between thirty and sixty minutes to get up to speed on what's happening in the upcoming week and decide how to tackle it.
4. You might feel at first that this time is wasted like you're throwing away an hour you could dedicate to actually completing concrete tasks. I urge you to resist this reaction.

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#TimeBlocking

Right side of a weekend page:

1. It includes space for you to plan the upcoming week. This area is purposefully left simple. When it comes to weekly planning, I've found it's crucial to embrace flexibility. The style or format of your plan should match the challenges of the specific week ahead.

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#TimeBlocking

Left side of a weekend page:

1. 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.
2. 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”).
3. 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.

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#mjbBabbles

#TimeBlocking
WEEKEND PAGES

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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#TimeBlocking
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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#mjbBabbles

#TimeBlocking
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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#TimeBlocking
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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#mjbBabbles

#TimeBlocking
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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#mjbBabbles