How do you balance the need for meetings, emails, group chats, and administrative tasks with time spent on what really matters? If there's one thing that can be said about the modern work environment, it's that if you don't have control over your schedule, it will control your day. We need effective strategies to focus in a world designed to distract us.
That's why time blocks are a valuable tool. Time blocks, or time blocks, along with its close cousin, checkout time, task grouping, and the topic of the day, is a simple yet effective method of taking back control of your workday.
Are you in any of the following situations?
Block time is a time management approach that encourages you to break your day into time slots. Each interval is meant to perform a specific task or group of tasks and nothing else. Instead of keeping an open list of tasks that you would like to complete as much as possible, you will start each day with a concrete plan detailing what you should work on and when.
The key to this method is planning your to-do list in advance, so a weekly review is essential. Consider what awaits you in the coming week and make a rough outline of the time slots you dedicate to each day. At the end of each workday, go over unfinished tasks and new ones that come up, and adjust time slots for the rest of the week accordingly.
With pre-planned days through lockdown time, you don't need to constantly decide what to focus on. You simply have to follow your blocked schedule. If you get off track or get distracted, just look at your schedule and return to the task according to the assigned block.
Often people confuse block time with checkout time, but there is a fundamental difference between the two. Block time involves allocating a certain amount of time to focus on a specific task or activity. For example, you can set aside two hours in the morning to work on a draft of your blog.
On the other hand, box time involves imposing a time limit on the task at hand. For example, you would give yourself the goal of finishing the draft of your blog in two hours.
This time-limited approach forces you to work efficiently, since you don't have all day to complete the task. Also, this can be a fun challenge that makes productivity more exciting.
Time blocking is very effective for several reasons. First, it encourages deep, focused work, allowing you to focus all of your mental energy on a single task, project, or problem. By allocating a specific period of time to work on just one thing, it's easier to stay focused and develop the mental skills necessary for deep work. This helps you to be more productive and improves the quality of your work.
The blocking time also helps to complete surface work efficiently. Light work is the apparent tasks that are urgent but not important to achieving your long-term goals, like document management or answering most emails. By allocating a limited time to perform these tasks, set clear limits on how much time you spend on them. Also, grouping similar tasks reduces the cost of context switching. By packing all of your superficial tasks into a dedicated time block or two, you'll be able to perform them more efficiently and save the rest of your workday for higher-impact tasks.
It is important that, in addition to establishing time blocks, we know how to use the tools that allow us to perform superficial tasks more efficiently, such as document and data management. Although these tasks are a necessary part of our work, they are often tedious and do not add value to our business. To optimize our time and improve our productivity, it is essential to use technologies that help us perform these tasks faster and more efficiently. For example, with a tool like Dijit.app, we can convert an hour of work in just a few minutes, since its OCR technology automatically reads, extracts and organizes the data, without the need to do it manually.
Most people are not good at time management. We are bad at estimating how long tasks will take and have a tendency to commit to our futures. The time block forces you to face your current priorities and commitments and to be intentional about how you spend your finite time. For each new commitment you allow into your life, you must find physical space on your calendar. As a result, the timely cost of saying "yes" becomes more concrete and it is easier to say "no."
