Time Blocking Draft 2

Time blocking is the practice of putting aside blocks of time for specific projects.  It is a good idea in principle.  If you have some time allocated on your calendar then you can be sure that the time will be used for that priority task.  

So why doesn’t everybody do it?  I can only talk about what goes wrong when I have tried it.

1. The time block appears but for either good or bad reasons you find yourself doing something else instead.  You are now in a worse state than before.  You have devoted energy to creating the time block.  You now need to reschedule the time.  And you have demonstrated at least to yourself and possibly to others that you have no willpower or self discipline.
2. You duly start the job, but find you have to do something else instead in order to achieve it.  So your block of time gets spent, but the result you wanted isn’t delivered.
3. You are in such a state of flow on something else when the alarm for the time block goes off that you either decide it was a net disbenefit, or you simply don’t do it.
4. It turns out that this job I was going to get finished in 2 hours actually needs 6.  I get to the end of the 2 hour period feeling like I have been going backwards even when I haven’t.
5. You have to reschedule for some reason, so you have to move your time block adding to the complexity of your life.

The reality is that time blocking is actually a very advanced skill that only people with superb time management skills can use.  If you have the iron self discipline and the self awareness to use it, then it is a very useful thing to do.

 The interesting thing, is why it is so useful and why it is so hard. The basic resource we are dealing with here is not time, it is attention. You can't get to work on the time you have blocked out because in reality your attention is on something else. So if you break off what you are thinking about to do something else you are sacrificing one recipient of your attention for another.

Switching attention is itself work, and you never get that back again. And if it turns out that the thing you are thinking about before the time block is important, possibly even more important than what you are switching to, then you have lost out.