The *Huge* Problem With Timeblocking: What I Do Instead

picture this you plan your day by filling all these different time blocks in your calendar and you're ready to crush it tomorrow but then reality hits those quick tasks not so quick and that big project after lunch yeah turns out your brain isn't really on board with that one and just when you're finally pushing through some emergency comes up and you have to leave you then start to feel like a failure not because you didn't work hard but because time blocking doesn't account for our energy variations throughout the day maybe it's not about cramming every hour but realizing every hour is not the same we go through highs and lows every day so why not use this to our advantage and work with our brain and not against it there's this thing called the biological Prime Time and this is the time of the day when we're most alert focused and full of energy because our cognitive abilities don't just stay static throughout the day we're more alert and creative as well as slower and foggier at different times so certain tasks are best performed at certain times everyone always says do the hard things first but that assumes we're all the same and our Peak is in the morning but depending on who you are it could also be late at night or somewhere in between and you probably already know what part of the day you feel the most sharp and clear as well as when you feel the most fatigued and prone to distractions and while you can get stuff done outside your prime time it'll be like taking the stairs when you could be taking the elevator so why not stack the deck in our favor for free by using that time to do lower effort tasks like maintenance and email and save your prime time for the more demanding tasks for instance I'm not a morning person I wake up at around 9:30 and I have two peaks between 11: and 1 and then from 3: to 5: and it's during these hours that I focus on high energy tasks like creative work important meetings video editing and so on and as for the other hours that's when I go over the lower effort tasks like emails accounting going to the gym Etc and it's also during these hours that I schedule all the tasks that don't benefit from me being the most alert that I can be like my French Classes non-important meetings as well as you know doctor's appointments so instead of assigning a time for each task I assigned them priorities one two or three with one being the most important and demanding and during my biological prime time when I'm most alert I'll only do Priority One tasks and outside of those peak hours that's when I do priorities two and three and this aligns my work with my Natural Energy Cycles because nowadays everyone wants to have a full calendar with all these different things to do and while time blocking looks good in theory it has a lot of disadvantages picture this you're working hard you then get this wave of inspiration you in flow everything's doing great and then bam time's up you got to move on to another task are you really going to stop that great momentum you have over some arbitrary time block that you gave yourself sometimes weeks before and of course this doesn't apply to meetings and other non-negotiable tasks but you know you probably don't just get to sit down and flick a switch and immediately get in flow and start doing great work because our energy fluctuates not only on an hour by hour basis but on a day-by-day basis as well some days we sleep bad or we're just not feeling our best or maybe something came up and that's okay but time blocking doesn't account for this you set your blocks day sometimes weeks ahead of time and you're just supposed to stick to them and when you inevitably don't do what you set out to do it's easy to feel like a failure and spend even more time deciding when you're going to take on that extra work and rearranging sometimes entire weeks because of it and not to mention there's a huge temptation to fill every slot with productive work often at the expense of rest and Leisure and this is even worse for creatives which I'll get to in the later parts of the video and there's a lot of things I do to build on this for instance you know when you're in flow and you're hyperfocused on what you're doing and you then receive a slack or a WhatsApp notification and it pulls you out of it this isn't a minor Interruption because plenty of studies show that every time we switch tasks we lose a significant amount of our focus and it takes a long time to then get back into it now to get around this in the past we would have to either use airplane mode do not disturb or a third party app blocker but these were very limited you had to set them up in each of your devices and they were very much an All or Nothing approach you couldn't just select which notifications you still wanted to receive but nowadays if you're in the Apple ecosystem you can use Focus modes which is a massively underrated feature in one that I see very few people talking about I use these all the time and they're fully automated when I'm in my peak hours my devic is automatically switch to my work mode and in this mode only notifications from certain people come through my personal email gets silenced and apps like Twitter get Switched Off and this all happens automatically on weekdays since my peak hours are always the same and I also have Focus modes for activities if I open up heavy which is my workout app it triggers my workout mode and when I open inside timer to meditate it triggers my meditating mode and this also goes for downtime when I'm done for the day I don't want to get notifications from work so I have my downtime mode which silences all work rated notifications like my work email and slack and I always try to protect my prime time because you know when you're making a lot of progress on something but then you have to leave because you have something else scheduled is frustrating right and that's why I always schedule things that are flexible like non-important meetings doctor's appointments gym sessions all of that outside this time period and of course this is assuming that there's no availability issues and there's one more thing that's massively overlooked and tell me if this sounds like you you're working hard and when it's time to take a break you instinctively grab your phone and go on social media and I get it this was me as well but here's the thing this is the opposite of a break we think we're resting but pumping our brain with dopamine just leaves us more tired and less focused it makes us want to keep scrolling instead of returning to our tasks the ideal break is low in cognitive stimulation and is more boring than our actual work it should still be something that we enjoy but not enough that it takes away the appeal of getting back to work instead I try to take less stimulating breaks meditation walking listening to music working out reading these are all real breaks that let our brain recharge so that we can get back to what we were doing there's also an added benefit that when we're in complete relaxation our brain is still subconsciously working on a task at hand and in fact my best ideas usually come to me when I'm not doing anything at all and this is especially true for creatives I do my best to take longer than I need to finish a creative task and this sounds counterintuitive because everyone always talks about Parkinson's law which says that work will expand to fill the time you give it but here's the thing if you're all about doing more and more then sure giving yourself a title deadline will probably push you to produce more but if you want to do highquality creative work then racing against the clock at least for me does more harm than good I benefit a lot from from taking my time and letting my ideas evolve I'm going to give my creative tasks as an example which is writing these videos take multiple days to write but that's because I work on them bit by bit for multiple days so instead of spending a full eight hours in a single day writing them I'll break it down to say two hours each day for 4 days and in this example I'm still spending a total of eight hours on it but the end result is one of a much higher quality and this is all going back to energy management sure I could finish a video in the day but not only would it be a struggle as I'd have to force myself to work work outside of my peak hours but it simply wouldn't be as good because every day that I go back to it I find myself making changes and adding new things that I couldn't see the day before this is because we often come up with some of our best ideas and developments while doing just about anything other than actively sitting down and brainstorming and not to mention I really enjoy writing these videos and part of the reason why is because I take my time with them and I'm not rushing just to get more content out and I do my best to enjoy myself I know I'll never get as much done as I'd like and that's fine but it feels like nowadays productivity has become the way we measure our self worth people go through all kinds of honestly ridiculous lengths just to get a little bit more done they push through 14-hour work days they eat meal replacement drinks like soilin every day and they even cut down on sleep and every time I'm in a conversation the person who says I don't have time for that always seems to have some smug sense of superiority because in the world we live in busy people are seen as hardworking and valuable while those with time are seen as lazy and worthless it's why there's a sea of videos articles and paid courses on how to get more done the emphasis is always on more doing more achieving more but this obsession with quantity over quality is so crushing and ironically leads to decrease productivity in the long run it's the opposite of working with our natural levels they force us into a mold that doesn't fit often at the expense of our health and well-being and those types of videos always provide Universal advice for individual audien not all of us are morning people that would benefit from waking up at 4:00 a.m. not all of us can afford to have four side hustles while maintaining our full-time job and sustaining our families and that's not to mention the infinite other problems that the audience may have but all of these videos on how to get more done don't account for any of this and it puts us at competition with ourselves which is really harmful for our mental health and while I'm on this little rant here every other day I get a comment that says are you still using todoist or obsidian or Arc and I'm always so surprised at the amount of times this gets asked because I don't really change apps frequently that's a massive waste of time once something works for me I'll only even consider changing it if there's something significantly better and yeah sure there'll always be new flashy apps claiming to be game changers but I honestly feel no need to change what I already use anyway I guess that turned into quite a rant but it's a topic I'm really passionate about because at the end of the day I think a balanced life is so much more fulfilling than one constantly chasing an impossible standard of productivity this video was very kindly sponsored by brilliant.org brilliant is an online Interactive Learning platform geared towards maths and Sciences that is really good in turning difficult Concepts into easy to understand bite-sized lessons brilliant approach is super engaging so important and difficult concepts are broken down into understandable parts that's what makes stem topics actually stick it doesn't matter whether you're starting out or if you're Advanced whatever your skill level brilliant customizes content to fit your needs and lets you to learn through it at your own pace if you want to get started in data analysis I highly recommend you check out billian new course exploring data visually where you get to analyze real data and draw interesting conclusions from it and this is just one of the many courses that brilliant adds every single month there's always something new to learn to try everything brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org Sergio and the first 200 people that sign up will get 20% off brilliant's annual premium subscription and a big thank you to brilliant for sponsoring today's video and like I said before I make a lot of progress in my work through meditating and I went through all of that in this video right here so I'll see you there

Channel: FromSergio

Views: 27,144

Keywords: time blocking, productivity, manage time, how to manage time, day planning, best way to plan day, energy management, time management techniques, how to manage your time, how i manage my time, how to manage time effectively, how i manage time better, manage time better, manage time effectively, modern time management techniques, adhd time management techniques, effective time management techniques

Id: PPITG-6fR5s

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023