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💡 The Big Idea: Tell your time where to go or wonder where it went.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar:

You wake up, and you’re ready to get after it. Armed with fresh motivation and a clear list of things you need to get done, you hit the ground running.

But then, life happens.

You get a Slack message from your boss about needing the deck for the upcoming client presentation. A client emails you asking about the status of their overdue order. And your coworker pops in to ask for help finding that one file you worked on together last Thursday.

And once work ends, the family responsibilities begin. You pick up kids from school, take them to soccer practice, make dinner, help with homework, and tell people to go to bed about 100 times.

By 10pm, you collapse into your bed exhausted. You were extremely busy, but when you look back on everything that happened, that thing that you really want to do but keep putting off didn’t happen. Again.

It’s not a laziness problem, and it isn’t really a time problem either.

It’s an intention problem.

It’s a lack of a plan for the time you have. It’s a lack of focus that comes from knowing what’s most important. And your task list can’t fix this, because a list just tells you what to do. But it can’t tell you what to do when. So the loudest thing wins. Every time.

The solution? Time blocking. Cal Newport (author of Deep Work) says:

When you time block, you don’t actually get more time. But because you’re being intentional about how you spend it, it feels like you do.

But first, let’s talk about how much time you actually have to work with.

You have more time than you think

We all feel like we have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. But the real problem usually isn’t how much we have to do. It’s the lack of intention in how we spend the hours we have.

Let’s do some quick math.

There are 168 hours in a week. If you sleep 8 hours a night, that’s 56 hours. A standard work week is 40 hours. Let’s set aside 6 hours for commuting, 15 hours for hobbies, and 6 hours for exercise. Then there’s the cooking, cleaning, laundry, errands, and all the stuff that keeps life running, so let’s group that into maintenance and set aside 15 hours for that. And let’s also set aside 5 hours for service, like going to church, volunteering, or simply helping out a neighbor.

That’s a pretty full week. But if you add all that up, you’ve still got 25 hours left over!

So where does that extra time go? For most of us, nowhere in particular. It just kinda leaks out. We veg out watching Netflix instead of reading the book that’s been on our nightstand for 6 months. We pull out our phone and scroll instead of writing our blog or newsletter.

It’s not that you don’t have time. It’s that you weren’t clear about what job you hired those hours to do.

How do you currently spend your time?

Before you can be more intentional with how you spend your time, you need to understand where those hours are currently going.

The uncomfortable truth here is that most of us have no idea where our time actually goes. We have our own story we tell ourselves about how busy we are, but that story and the data often don’t match up.

How we think we spend our time is not how we actually spend our time.

You’re probably carrying the incriminating data around in your pocket right now. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings → Screen Time, and tap See All Activity. (If you’re on Android, you should find the same thing under Digital Wellbeing.) It’ll show you, down to the minute, how you used your smartphone this week — which apps you used, how many times you picked up your phone, even how many notifications you received.

If you’re like most people, there’s at least one number there that will make you more than a little uncomfortable.

I’m not sharing all this to shame you. But I want you to understand: if you didn’t decide to spend that time, it got decided for you.

That's the problem time blocking fixes.

So let’s look at how to live with a little more intention.

Live by intention, not by default

There’s a famous quote by President Dwight Eisenhower:

This is the foundation of a famous productivity framework titled the Eisenhower Matrix.

This matrix breaks everything down into four quadrants and asks two simple questions:

1. Is it urgent?
2. Is it important?

In the upper-left are things that are both important and urgent. These are things that will naturally get done.

In the upper-right are things that are important but not urgent. These are things that we know we should do, but the world won’t end if we don’t get to them today.

In the lower-left are the things that are urgent but not important. These are things that don’t really move the needle but keep us busy.

And on the lower-right are the things that are neither important nor urgent. These are things we could stop doing right now, and our life would probably improve.

Most people spend their days living out of the urgent column. Some of it matters, but a lot of it doesn’t. And it all has one thing in common: it’s loud. Your phone buzzes, someone pings you on Slack, a meeting gets dropped on your calendar, and you respond. All day long.

That’s what I call living by default. You’re not really choosing what to do; you’re just reacting to whatever shows up.

The hard part is that urgency often masquerades as importance. For example, email is a to-do list other people can write on. Anyone who has your email address can add something to your task list with zero ramifications for doing so. And if you’re a recovering people pleaser like me, it can be really hard to say no when someone asks you for help.

But if you want to do more of what matters, you have to get clear about what’s really important. You need to live on the top of this matrix:

That top-right quadrant is where your life actually changes, but it doesn’t happen by default. It only happens if you plan for it.

You have to realize that not everything is actually important. And your job is to decide what is before the urgent stuff gets loud and decides for you.

Task manager vs. calendar

You probably have a task list of some kind, and you probably have a calendar too.

But they probably don’t talk to each other much. And they should.

Your task list can tell you what to do, but it can’t tell you when to do it. As a result, it basically assumes that you have unlimited time. If your list has 40 things on it, it’s easy to go into your day thinking you need to get all of them done.

You won’t, obviously. Honestly, nobody would. This forces you to triage throughout your entire day, and you end up grabbing whatever task is screaming at you the loudest.

It usually isn’t what matters most.

But everything you need to do has to get done within the context of time. So the trick is to figure out when you are going to do the things that really need to get done, and to make sure that you set aside the time for those things to actually happen.

If you don’t decide when something will get done, it probably never will. “Write my newsletter” is just a wish. It’s something I’d like to get done, but probably won’t. But “write the newsletter on Tuesday from 9 to 10:30” is a plan. And the moment I put that plan on my calendar, the odds of me following through increase exponentially.

The key is that you have to answer some tough questions about when it’s going to happen. Where does this actually fit inside the hours I have available? What do I need to move to make this thing possible? If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?

A plan for your day doesn’t let you hide from questions like these.

There’s one more reason to give your work a time, and it’s called Parkinson’s Law. This says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

You’ve probably experienced Parkinson’s Law before. You intend to spend an hour on a report, but it ends up eating your whole morning, and the last two hours you spend just tweaking the layout of the slides. Or you sit down for a quick email check, and when you look up, three hours have gone by.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and effective tactic we can use to fight back against Parkinson’s Law: time blocking.

How to time block

Time blocking isn’t some fancy new productivity method. Benjamin Franklin was blocking his time hundreds of years ago.

You can do it with a calendar, an app, or even a blank page with a line down the left side and every hour labeled from when you wake up to when you go to bed.

Use whatever you want, but the best tool is the one that has the least amount of friction for you.

The key is to do it consistently.

There are four steps to time blocking:

1. Schedule your appointments. These are the things that are already fixed on your calendar, like meetings, calls, picking the kids up from school, etc. These things will likely happen whether you plan around them or not, so it’s important to put them on the calendar first.
2. Schedule your MITs, or Most Important Tasks. These are the few things that, if they got done today, would make it a good day. Not the whole list, just three to five things, max.
3. Schedule your routines. This helps you consistently take action on the important but not urgent stuff, like exercise, reading, writing, planning, and time with the people you love.
4. Fill in the gaps. Now look at what’s left, and fill it all in until every hour has a job.

Working within these constraints may feel limiting at first, but you’ll likely notice that it actually helps you do more than you would otherwise. The small stuff still gets done; it just doesn’t get first pick anymore.

So that’s the whole method: appointments, MITs, routines, and then fill in the gaps. In that order, every single day.

Getting Started with Time Blocking

I’ve been time blocking for years, and if I had to pick one productivity technique that had the biggest ROI, this would be it.

But I’m also always surprised how many people haven’t time blocked before. So I put together a short course to show you exactly how I do it.

It’s called Getting Started with Time Blocking, and in about 35 minutes you’ll learn where your time is actually going, how to tell the urgent stuff from the important stuff, and I’ll walk you through this simple four-step method for blocking out your day that I introduced in this newsletter. I’ll even give you a time blocking template you can use to time block your day and take consistent action on the things that matter most.

There’s no new app to learn and no complicated system to set up. And as a newsletter subscriber, I’m making Getting Started with Time Blocking available to you at over 50% off at launch! As a newsletter subscriber, you can get it for only $9 (normally $19).

👉🏼 Click here to get the discount​

The Bottom Line: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything

As Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

The truth is, your plan is going to get punched in the mouth. Probably by 10am. That’s not you failing at time blocking; that’s just life.

So when it happens, don’t get upset. Don’t try to make up for it and push to get back on track.

But don’t throw the plan out either. Just re-plan.

The aforementioned Dwight Eisenhower also said:

This is the key. Your time-blocked plan will almost never go exactly the way you thought. But the act of creating it in the first place is what allows you to focus on the things that really matter anyway.

So even if your day gets completely blown up by 10am, those five or ten minutes you spend time blocking allow you to go through the rest of your day with intention and focus.

Your hours are going to go somewhere. So take a few minutes to decide where.

— Mike