Time blocking is the act of arranging your schedule so every activity you need to do in a day is accounted for visually. Ideally, you’ll do this using a digital calendar tool like Google Calendar or iCal, but it's possible with a planner and some highlighters. Even if you’re writing it all down by hand on a piece of paper, consider the way a Google Calendar looks before you start. Each day is represented by a column split up into 15-minute increments, from midnight until 11:59 p.m. When you add a meeting or appointment into the calendar, a box appears and fills up the space representing how much time the event will take out of your day.
How to create a time blocking schedule
Start by making a list of everything you’re going to do tomorrow. For instance, you might wake up, check the news, shower, make coffee, commute to work, grab breakfast, answer emails, attend a meeting, get lunch with an old friend, work on a project, commute home, take the kids to a baseball game, pick up dinner, eat that dinner, watch your favorite show, get ready for bed, lie awake thinking about climate change, and actually sleep. Get granular here. At first blush, you might think your to-do list on a given day is just something like "hit deadlines at work" and "make a doctor's appointment," but think of everything else in there, like packing your lunch, driving to the locations, stopping for gas, etc.
Then, grab the paper (or open the software) you’re using to time block and enter every single event and responsibility in, according to the time you’ve allotted for it. If you want to see how you are splitting up your day, choose different colors to classify tasks, like blue for grooming/bathing, yellow for work, and green for meals. Be strategic about which tasks make the cut on a given day, though. Use a prioritization technique like the Eisenhower Matrix to determine which of your tasks are actually pressing and which can be bumped to another day. Then, use a to-do list organizing method like 1-2-3 to divvy up your daily time correctly. Remember, your time in a day is finite, so you can't do everything all at once. With 1-2-3, you select one major task, two medium-sized ones, and three smaller ones to do in a day. The smaller ones can be building blocks for the big one or can be simple maintenance activities like answering emails or picking up the dry cleaning.
It's smart here to also implement some kind of time tracking, whether that involves writing down how long your tasks actually take you or using a software to monitor your work, so you can make adjustments to your time blocks as you get better at following the system. During the first week or two, you'll likely be guessing at how long each task will take you when you're building the schedule, but after a while, you should be able to identify if something takes a longer or shorter amount of time than you've been allotting, then adjust the schedule to match those needs going forward.
It also helps you meet deadlines and stay within your guidelines. If you know a certain project or task will take a combined 50 hours, time blocking helps you space those out and make room for them in your schedule, enabling you to get things done on a set timetable without having to guess whether you really have time for it. If you finish something ahead of schedule, great! Go ahead and add in a little block of time off.
A final note on time blocking
Time blocking is often confused with time boxing and a lot of productivity blogs and hacks will say "time boxing" when they mean time blocking. That Harvard Business Review article above does it, for instance. It's an easy mistake to make and, in fact, in a previous version of this post, I called time blocking time boxing. As long as you're sticking to the plan and making a detailed calendar, it doesn't matter what you're calling it, but this could cause some confusion while you read up on other guides, so just be warned. A complete rundown of the differences between the two can be found here.
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