When you picture your happy place, what are you doing? Bathing in the sea with your family during sunset? Gazing at the stars around a campfire with your friends? Lying face down on a massage table at your favourite spa?

Wherever it is, whatever you’re doing, and whomever you’re with, I bet one thing is absent: goals. A common feature of our most cherished memories is that they offered us a brief escape from them.

I discovered this in an unhappy place: the operating table.

A few years ago I had a gastroscopy: an operation in which a tube with a camera is fed down your throat and into your stomach. It’s a dreadful experience. The doctor pumps air into your stomach to look around and you can feel the camera prodding your insides, like an alien trying to escape. I could hear my heart beating on the monitor and the nurse repeating soothing phrases to keep me calm: “you’re doing really well…”, “it’ll be over soon…” It was anxiety-inducing.

I closed my eyes and desperately searched for something to take my mind off the ordeal. I tried to find my happy place. After what felt like ten minutes but was probably ten seconds, I found it.

I landed back in a paradise I’d visited two years earlier: a comfy sofa on a patio overlooking the sea on the stunning Greek island of Hydra. I sat in the shade, the ocean breeze on my face keeping me blissfully cool despite the blistering heat. The white patio glistened under the sun in a cloudless sky. I was reading The Thread by Victoria Hislop – an excellent historical novel about Thessaloniki. All I could hear were waves and the clicking of donkey hooves on the pebbled streets (thanks to Hydra banning automobiles in the 1950s). I don’t know what time it was; I’d lost track of time and wasn’t wearing a watch or carrying a phone.

In Hydra, summer 2020 (and in much need of a haircut)

For the first – and still only – time in my life I’d taken a ten-day digital detox. I’d turned on out of office replies, my laptop stayed closed, and I only deactivated my phone from airplane mode every other day to check on my parents. I was reading purely for pleasure rather than research. It was the summer break in the academic year. No meetings or pressing deadlines. Everything could wait.

There are many reasons this became my happy place. But above all, it was because I’d taken a total break from goals. It felt liberating.

We live in an obsessively goal-oriented time. It’s now normal to turn every area of our lives into a relentlessly goal-driven pursuit: goals for our fitness, health, relationships, travel, home, hobbies – the list goes on. Goals are great, and I’d be the last to recommend against them. But when all our time becomes goal-structured, we leave no room for the freedom to fully engage in some of life’s greatest experiences.

Many of the highlights of our lives are goalless. The times we felt briefly freed from the misplaced guilt that everything we do should be another step towards a goal, and allowed ourselves the freedom to think, play, or simply be in the present moment.

That tranquil morning you wandered along the beach after setting out with no plan. That fun afternoon you got lost hiking with friends and stumbled upon caves you’d never discovered otherwise. That serene evening you roamed the streets of a new city with your partner, with no agenda and nowhere you had to be.

Setting goals would have destroyed these experiences. Would you have become even more absorbed in the novel that became your favourite book if you’d set that as your goal when you opened it? Or felt even more refreshed after that incredible massage at your favourite spa if you’d got clear about that goal before you lay on the massage table? Setting goals for these experiences is more likely to prevent you from feeling the positive emotions you associate with them, much like trying to fall asleep often makes it harder to do so.

One reason we remember moments like these so fondly is that they were goalless. They become our happy places because they help us escape and recover from a world obsessed with productivity, performance and optimisation. They are as restorative as a great night’s sleep.

We don’t need to travel to a Greek island to find them, though. We can find them much more easily by simply making time for goalless activity.

Going for a walk not to reach somewhere or for exercise, but just to wander. Reading not to hit your ‘book a week’ target this year, but simply for pleasure. Socialising not to network, but for fun.

We’ve all done this, but many of us have forgotten how. Kids do this all the time. My niece and nephew often jump on the sofa and pretend it’s something else – a train, a fort, or a giant Lego construction with each cushion a block. They don’t set any goals or rules; they just play, for the sake of playing.

I once asked my niece what they were doing as she jumped on the sofa with my nephew. “We’re going on the train”, she replied. “Where to?”, I asked. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “I dunno”. “Why?”, I asked next. She looked at me, bemused, then said in a precocious, teacherly tone: “because it’s fun”.

Fun for the sake of fun. This is goalless fun. And it’s often fun of the best kind.

Many of us have forgotten how to have goalless fun. Everything has become a goal-saturated activity, optimised for performance and productivity in the hopeless pursuit of perfection. It’s exhausting.

Some regard this as exemplary productivity, but it can actually be counterproductive. Mental health expert has convincingly argued that when we try to make every area of life meticulously goal-oriented, productivity becomes ‘toxic’. This can have an inverse effect on our productivity, life satisfaction, well-being and health because it can increase our risk of burnout. I discussed this with Israa in this podcast interview.

Goalless time is arguably more important than ever, in our burned-out world. Estimates on how much of the world’s workforce is burned out vary, but they’re all shockingly high. Studies over the past three years vary from 48% across eight countries to 66% in the USA and 85% in the UK.

This weekend, why not give yourself permission to indulge in some goalless time? To wander, read, sit in a café or explore somewhere unfamiliar, without worrying about the next item on your to-do list or event in your calendar.

Notice where your mind goes when you’re not trying to get somewhere. Reflect on how you felt afterwards. You might even reach a flow state.

Just don’t make that – or anything else – your goal.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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The obvious fix: block out 30 minutes a day – say, in the evening. But in our era of ‘time famine’, most of us don’t feel we can spare 30 minutes a day, so this would come at the sacrifice of something else. The things people often cut back to free up time are high value activities: sleep less, exercise less, socialise less. None are desirable.

A much more desirable approach is to replace wasted time with useful time. Rather than finding more time, this involves using the time we already have more intentionally.

Three of the most common sources of wasted time today are needlessly checking digital communication, spending too long in meetings, and – worst of all – scrolling. Across these three sources alone there’s an abundance of wasted time we could convert into useful time. The average person spends over four and a half hours a day on their phone. So it really shouldn’t be hard to find 30 minutes a day for additional reading, without this coming at the cost of scaling back on high value activities.

Here’s a simple strategy for converting wasted time into time you can spend reading. I call it book over phone.

It goes like this:

1. When you work, put your phone in a different room. Research shows this improves our cognitive performance.

2. Put the book you’re reading on top of your phone. Now, the next time you’re tempted to pick up your phone, the first thing you’ll encounter won’t be your phone – it’ll be the book.

3. Whenever you’re tempted to pick up your phone, read a page of the book instead.

If you only have time to read a paragraph, that’s fine. Whatever the amount, we’ve turned a moment of distraction into a moment of reading.

If you want to go deeper, also listen to the audiobook while commuting. I’ve found I retain more from books by doing this. Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry have both narrated audiobooks of The Odyssey (albeit different versions – McKellen’s is of a translation, Fry’s is of his re-telling of the myth). That’s an impossible choice. I spend a lot of time cycling and taking the subway, so… I might just listen to both.

You could apply a similar principle to other activities you want to do:

• Want to learn the piano? Hide your phone under your piano. Piano over phone.

• Want to learn a language? Put your flashcards on top of your phone. Language over phone.

• Want to meditate more? Put your meditation cushion on top of your phone. Meditation over phone.

The key is to make your desired activity easier to start than the distraction.

We rarely need to sacrifice sleep, exercise, or time with the people we love to spend more time on simple passions like reading. We just need to replace something stealing our time with something worth investing it in.

The next time you find yourself thinking, “I’d love to do that, but I don’t have the time”, ask yourself: where can I turn wasted time into useful time?

Invitation to a free online masterclass on this topic:

‘The Five Hours You Didn’t Know You Had’

📅 Tuesday 9th June

⏰ 12-1pm ET

This free masterclass will be built around a single diagnostic practice: our new ‘Values-Time Audit’. We’ll look at where your time is going across your calendar, your screen time, and the hours that never show up on either, and we’ll compare that against your priorities. The gap between those two pictures is where your five hours are hiding.

Click here to learn more. Hope to see you there!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Here’s a principle I try to live by: when I find something difficult, this gives me more reason to do it than not to do it. The more difficult I find it, the greater the reason to do it.

This is because in many cases, the harder something feels, the more we’ll gain from doing it.

I started trying to live by this in 2019, when I was doing research on the science of learning, which has found that learning is strongest when it’s effortful. The more effort you make to perform a cognitive task, the more you’ll retain the knowledge and understanding you gain.

This is because effortful cognitive activities have a greater impact on neuroplasticity. The more effort we make, the more we form new and stronger neural pathways in the brain. This improves our retention of what we’ve learned in our long-term memory, and our fluency in retrieving and applying our knowledge. If learning requires little effort, it’s likely to be forgotten quickly and only generate surface-level gains.

Effortful learning also offers health benefits. For example, one of the most demanding cognitive activities is learning a new language. Learning a second language and using it daily over many years during adolescence or midlife can delay neurocognitive decline. It’s related to later onset of dementia by five to seven years compared to monolinguals.

This is why some learning methods that feel harder actually improve learning. These are known as ‘desirable difficulties’. For example, if we leave a reasonable gap of time between learning something and being tested on it, we start to forget what we learned and so have to think harder to retrieve our knowledge. The additional effort means that retrieving our knowledge feels harder, but this process strengthens our knowledge. The difficulty is therefore desirable.

I came to think that we can apply the idea behind desirable difficulties more widely in our lives. We often experience growth – not just cognitively, but also physically and emotionally – from difficult experiences. So, before opting for easier alternatives, we should ask ourselves if the difficulty we face is actually desirable. It often is.

Struggling with writing, but learning more through the struggle (credit: Matt Maude at Write Club London)

In physical activities the relationship between difficulty and growth is clearer. The more you exert yourself physically, through cardiovascular or strength training, the greater your fitness or strength will become – as long as you use good techniques and recover effectively.

For example, when you lift heavy weights, you stress the muscles you’re training. The muscles break down, but after effective recovery, your strength increases. This leads to neurological adaptation, where adaptive changes take place within the nervous system that enable us to better activate and co-ordinate the muscles we’ve trained. This process is called supercompensation.

Emotional challenges can also be powerful sources of growth. Think how much you’ve built your character by enduring emotional difficulties. For example, how heartbreak or setbacks have built your resilience, grit and patience.

Overcoming shared adversity can also strengthen relationships. Think how much your relationship with a loved one improved after you supported one another through grief, or patched things up after a conflict.

This principle has limits, though. Not every difficulty is beneficial.

For many activities – but not all – the more difficult we find it, the more we’ll benefit from doing it. Some people never fully recover from trauma. You won’t benefit from an advanced coding class if you’ve never coded. And you risk severe injury skiing if you haven’t done basic training. The greatest growth usually happens when the difficulty is challenging but manageable.

The most common theme across all our Flourish FM episodes is that for us to flourish, it’s vital that we learn how to cope with adversity. This topic has emerged spontaneously in many of our conversations, but it was the key focus of our most recent interview, with writer . The central theme in his work is how we can improve our lives by doing hard things. He’s published three excellent books on this: The Comfort Crisis, Scarcity Brain and Walk With Weight. We’ll release the episode next month.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

In The Comfort Crisis, Easter argues that modern life has become too easy, to the detriment of our health and well-being. He argues that an antidote is seeking out what he calls ‘purposeful discomfort’: intentional acts of voluntary discomfort. These don’t need to be extreme; they can be small, everyday actions in all areas of our lives – cognitive, physical or emotional.

For example, try figuring out the route before opening Google Maps. Try doing the arithmetic with pen and paper before using a calculator. Try answering the question yourself before asking ChatGPT. Use these tools to check your thinking rather than do your thinking for you.

Take the stairs rather than the escalator or elevator. If you’re in a rush, walk up the escalator. When you shop for groceries, carry a basket rather than pushing a trolley.

The next time you face a difficult conversation, have it right away rather than delaying and ruminating over it. Schedule time tomorrow to reply to that message you’ve been avoiding.

Here we’re simply adding a little friction to our everyday activities to promote growth. As Easter points out, modern life removes friction wherever possible. But friction is often where growth happens.

So:

What’s something you found difficult that led to growth? I’d love to hear ⤵️

Invitation to a free online masterclass on this topic:

‘Why Doing Hard Things Makes Life Better’

📅 Tuesday 14th April

⏰ 12-1pm ET

We’ll cover:

• what research shows about the benefits of doing difficult things for our health and well-being;

• simple practical strategies for leaning into challenges;

• an invitation to our Flow Lab 30-day daily difficulty challenge.

Click here to learn more. Hope to see you there!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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A way to significantly reduce time famine is deceptively simple: get better at saying ‘no’. One reason many people find this so hard is that they lack an effective system for doing it.

Saying ‘no’ is more difficult when we make decisions on a case-by-case basis. It becomes much easier when we have rules. We can then build a rule-based decision system for saying ‘no’.

I gave a talk on this topic a few days ago at Harvard. In that talk, I described two key steps we should start with when building a rule-based decision system for saying ‘no’. I describe these below.

Step 1: identify your biggest ‘yes’

Think of this as the top priority, or ultimate goal, of your professional life.

When we’re clear about our top priority, saying ‘no’ is often much easier. Think, for example, of when a loved one is sick and we need to care for them. Our top priority is obvious: helping them recover. We tend to say ‘no’ to anything that stands in the way. That relatively unimportant meeting you’d usually consider accepting is now an immediate ‘no’.

Outside of states of emergency, though, identifying our top priority is hard. One of the most effective ways I’ve found for identifying our top priority is in Greg McKeown’s excellent 2014 book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. ‘Essentialism’ is a powerful mindset shift, where we focus on and orient our lives around what is most important – that is, what is essential.

McKeown defines essentialism as follows:

‘Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. … It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.’ (Essentialism, p. 5.)

Essentialism (credit: Greg McKeown)

Using essentialism as a guide, think of your biggest ‘yes’ as your highest point of contribution.

What is this, for you? Given your skills, experience, role, values, and how you like to spend your time, what’s your highest point of contribution?

Make this as specific as you can, while recognising that a goal this broad will be somewhat vague. For example, ‘advancing responsible AI technology in primary healthcare’, or ‘writing impactful books and articles on political history for a general audience’.

Pause for a moment and think what yours might be.

Once you have a rough idea of your highest point of contribution, move onto the next step.

Step 2: use the 80/20 filter

We now need to figure out what the ‘wisest possible investment’ of our time and energy is that supports our highest point of contribution. This is where a second tool is extremely useful: the Pareto principle.

Walter Gmelch, ‘It’s About Time’, Academe (1996), p. 25

In many areas of life, a small number of inputs produce most of the results. For example, roughly 20% of customers generate 80% of revenue and roughly 20% of the activities we do at work produce 80% of progress toward our goals. The percentages vary, but the precise numbers don’t matter. What matters is the pattern: a small number of things matter far more than the rest.

The ‘Pareto principle’, or ‘80/20 rule’, goes back to the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). He observed that 80% of land in Italy in the nineteenth century was owned by 20% of the population. He found that this also applied to wealth, and that similar patterns occurred in other countries.

Many other instances of the Pareto principle have been identified since. You probably wear ~20% of your wardrobe ~80% of the time, for example.

We can use this principle in conjunction with essentialism to build a system for saying ‘no’. Recall that in the definition above, essentialism is:

‘about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution’.

When we’re trying to figure out whether what we’re doing is the wisest possible investment of our resources, McKeown recommends we ask ourselves:

‘Is this the very most important thing I should be doing with my time and resources right now?’ (Essentialism, p. 2.)

How do we figure out whether we’re spending our time and other resources on the ‘very most important thing’? Here we can turn to the Pareto principle. The very most important thing must fall within the small number of activities that contribute to our highest point of contribution.

Think of the ultimate goal of your professional life you identified earlier. Now imagine an opportunity comes your way. It might be an invitation to collaborate on a project, join an advisory board, be interviewed for a podcast or attend a networking event.

Ask yourself: does this opportunity fall within the ~20% of activities most likely to help me reach my highest point of contribution?

If it doesn’t, say ‘no’.

By synthesising essentialism and the Pareto principle, we’re constructing a rule-based decision system for saying ‘no’. This saves us time in making decisions about what opportunities to pursue or decline. It thereby alleviates time famine.

To calculate the value of an opportunity or activity, you’ll need to figure out which inputs and outputs are relevant to making judgements using the Pareto principle in your particular context. For instance, it might be revenue generation, client acquisition or audience reach. Or, in your personal life, it might be how energising you find one hobby compared to others, so you decide to stick to one hobby rather than juggle several.

This isn’t an exact science. This process won’t always give us an immediate answer about whether we should say ‘no’. We’ll need to make estimates about the value of inputs and outputs. But it gives us a system for making these decisions, which can be improved over time.

By implementing this system, we can build an extremely important, but often neglected, skill: the ability to say ‘no’. This enables us to focus more on the few things that matter most.

The next time a new opportunity arises, ask yourself two questions:

1. What is my highest point of contribution?

2. Does this opportunity fall within the ~20% of those most likely to help me reach it?

If the answer to the second question is ‘no’, decline the opportunity.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Reaching the highest level of sustained focus, a flow state, has never been harder. Yet, it has never been more important.

Flow is the state of optimal attention and performance, in which we completely concentrate on a challenging but doable activity, stretching a skill to its limit. It was identified in the 70s by the “father of flow,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote in his 1990 book Flow that it,

“tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.”1

Flow is that feeling of being “in the zone”: when you’re playing a sport, solving a complex problem, or so lost in a book you can’t put it down. It can happen alone or with others, like when you improvize in a jam session or ideate in a team sprint.

Me, deep in flow, playing with NEA Jazz Master Dave Liebman at Paine Hall, Harvard, 2012

Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow” because of the way thousands of people he interviewed often described their experiences of completely focusing on a challenging activity. They reported being totally absorbed such that they lost track of time and stopped thinking about what they were doing. They engaged at their highest level effortlessly, yet felt a greater sense of control. They were one with their actions, in flow with them.

Research has shown that flow improves our health, well-being and performance. From interviewing over 10,000 people, Csikszentmihalyi found that those who often experience flow “tend … to report more positive states overall and to feel that their lives are more purposeful and meaningful.”2 Many described flow experiences as the highlights of their lives.3 This led to flow becoming one of the components of human flourishing posited by positive psychology, the scientific study of flourishing.

In recent years, many more benefits have been discovered of regularly experiencing flow, known as being “flow prone.” A 2024 study of almost 9,500 people showed that “flow proneness” reduces our risk of several mental and physical health diagnoses. People with higher flow proneness had lower risk of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, stress-related disorders and cardiovascular disorders.

Other research has found that people who are flow prone report lower levels of emotional exhaustion, which reduces the risk of burnout. Flow is associated with greater creativity, intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, productivity, student engagement, self-esteem, coping strategies, life satisfaction and psychological well-being.

So flow isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a measurable predictor of health and flourishing.

But reaching flow has never been so difficult. Our attention spans are shrinking at an alarming rate, which is making it harder to reach the level of sustained focus necessary for flow. Attention expert Gloria Mark has discovered that the average time office workers today focus on a single task before switching their attention is 47 seconds. That’s data from studies in 2023. In 2004, the average was two and a half minutes. That’s a reduction of over 100 seconds in under 20 years. Given the trend, today our attention spans are probably even shorter.

Getting into flow is like falling asleep: you can’t force it, but you can optimize the conditions for reaching it. It almost always takes much longer than 47 seconds. But in today’s world, most of us aren’t sustaining our attention on a task for long enough to reach flow.

Research shows that when our focus is interrupted, it takes an average of almost 25 and a half minutes to regain focus on the interrupted task.4 On our journey back to the task, we typically work on at least two other things.5 So when you’re focusing on an important task and your phone pings, the interruption is longer than the few seconds it took to pick up your phone and put it back down. It takes much longer to restore your focus, and you’ll likely turn to a couple of other things, such as replying to an email and a text message.

When we switch our attention, we also don’t immediately switch to full focus. There’s a lag, which psychologists call “attention residue”: the residual effect a previous object of our attention leaves in our minds. Rather than flipping like a lightswitch, our attention gradually fades from one thing as it increases on another.

Mark calls the most common type of attention in our working lives today “kinetic attention”: a “dynamic state of attention characterized by rapid shifts, such as between applications, social media and internet sites, or between the computer and phone.”6 Mastering kinetic attention is important today. But it’s problematic if you’re spending most of your time in this state and not much time focusing for a sustained period of time.

A shrinking attention span doesn’t only negatively impact our ability to reach flow. It also harms our health. Research suggests that inattention and shortening attention spans are negatively impacting our mental and physical health. Studies show that the faster students switch attention, the higher their stress.7 Multitasking is associated with negative emotions such as stress and anxiety, and can lead to burnout.8

Increasing evidence shows associations between inattention, lower mental health and academic attainment. A longitudinal study in the UK published in 2024 found that hyperactivity and inattention were consistently identified as the mental health behaviors most strongly associated with lower academic attainment. Three quarters of the association was due to these. The study’s author, Matthew van Poortvliet, writes that the findings “add to a growing body of evidence supporting the conclusion that … hyperactivity/inattention is the principal predictor of low attainment.”9

In a world where kinetic attention is the norm, those who become flow prone also have a professional advantage. In his 2016 book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that the ability to do “deep work” – “activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit”10 – is “becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.”11 The fundamentals of deep work are the same as flow: totally focusing on activities that push our skills to their limit. And the ability to engage in deep work is arguably as beneficial as flow: Newport writes that “the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”12

Newport isn’t exaggerating. Given the benefits of flow and the risks of reduced attention, finding focus, let alone flow, in today’s world can prevent us from languishing and help us flourish.

Cultivating our ability to do deep work and reach flow is difficult in a distracted world. The good news is that people often report most frequently experiencing flow doing the thing we spend most of our lives doing: work. The other good news is that we can experience flow in a huge array of tasks. It most often occurs in creative activities, such as painting, but you can reach flow doing everything from sewing to surfing. The key is that you’re not switching your attention rapidly, but totally focusing on a challenging task.

Want to find your flow? To start, think of challenging activities you become so immersed doing that you lose track of time. Yoga, writing, reading, running, coding – whatever activity stretches your skills and requires your total concentration. Chances are, that’s one of your flow experiences. Now ask: how can I make more space for that?

Protect your attention. Find your flow. And make more time for it.

This is a crosspost of a blog I wrote for Flow Prone this week, available here.

Want to learn more? You can attend monthly masterclasses and access resources on flow states by joining our free online community, the Flow Lab.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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‘Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it’.

That’s one of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever read. It’s from The Power of Now by the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle (1997, p. 35). It’s also the most effective reframing technique I’ve ever used.

Positive reframing is the psychological technique of shifting our perspective on an experience from purely negative to something constructive. It’s a powerful tool for coping with adversity.

For instance, when we face a distressing situation, we can shift our focus from seeing it as an undesirable problem to a challenge that could improve our character. Or when we worry we’ve made a dreadful mistake, we can reorient our perspective from dwelling on regret to learning an important lesson.

Positive reframing doesn’t change what happened. It changes what it means.

It helps us cope with the most difficult experiences in life and even improves our happiness. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – pioneer of positive psychology, the scientific study of human flourishing – wrote:

‘happiness is not something that happens. … It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them’ (Flow, 1990, p. 2).

One way of applying Tolle’s precept is to live as if you’d chosen what’s happened. In other words, for any experience, even traumatic ones, imagine you’d chosen this.

Think of a difficult experience in your own life. Perhaps you didn’t get a job you desperately wanted, or you burned out so badly you had to take a year off work, or a partner you were in love with broke up with you.

Now imagine you chose this to happen.

Your attention instantly shifts. You’re now searching for reasons why you’d choose this.

What did you learn? What will you change? What will you no longer ignore? What mistakes will you avoid making again? How could this improve your character? Which new paths can you now pursue?

Sometimes you’ll realise that what happened was a blessing in disguise. While you were devastated at the time, in hindsight you’re grateful it happened. You realise you wouldn’t have enjoyed the job you didn’t get, or your ex wasn’t right for you.

But positive reframing has limits. There are experiences you would have never chosen, and reframing won’t change that. Nor should it.

For instance, I would have obviously never chosen for my father to have had a major stroke a few years ago, resulting in a long hospital stay and leaving him unable to walk unaided. It’d be abhorrent to want such a thing to happen. If I had a genie in a lamp, one of my wishes would be for my father to walk unaided again.

But reframing can still be used to help us cope with even the worst experiences life throws at us. Reframing isn’t always a way of accessing truth. Sometimes it’s simply a way of coping with life. And a highly effective one.

I can’t do anything to change what happened. But living as if I’d chosen it helps me move forward and find opportunities for growth.

I’ve become closer to my father. We speak every day. I visit much more. Our conversations are deeper. We know each other better. I’m less reactive to trivial disagreements. I prioritise quality time with him. I’m currently planning our next trip together.

So positive reframing not only enables me to cope; it also brings out the best side of my character.

A recent photo with my dad, James Beale

Tolle goes on to write:

‘This will miraculously transform your entire life’.

He isn’t exaggerating. I remind myself of this quote and practise positive reframing whenever I face a distressing experience. It immediately improves my mood, perspective, and motivation to take action in the face of it.

I invite you to try this yourself.

Choose one unwanted event in your life. Ask yourself: if I had chosen this, why would I have done so?

Notice what changes.

Now ask: how can I live as if I had chosen this?

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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A great example is Alex Honnold. A few weeks ago, he climbed to the top of a 1,667-foot skyscraper in Taiwan, Taipei 101, without a rope, harness or safety equipment (‘free soloing’). It’s breathtaking to watch.

Image credit: Netflix

People have been fascinated with Honnold since he free soloed El Capitan, a 3,000-foot rock face in Yosemite National Park, in 2017. What fascinates people most is Honnold’s conquest of fear. He’s at constant risk of death when free soloing. How has he conquered his fear of death?

Honnold, casually saying hi to his wife while free soloing Taipei 101 (credit: Independent)

The fascination with Honnold’s courage led neuroscientists to see whether his brain responds differently to fear. In 2016, Honnold lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine – a brain scanner that measures brain activity by tracing blood flow. He was presented with black and white images designed to test his responses to fear, to see whether his brain reacts differently.

The researchers looked at Honnold’s amygdala, the brain region primarily associated with emotional regulation, including our responses to fear. His amygdala showed lower activity to another male rock climber of similar age who participated in the study.

One of the researchers, cognitive neuroscientist Jane Joseph, said it could be that Honnold’s amygdala ‘is not firing’, but that it could also be ‘that he has such a well-honed regulatory system [and] his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down’.

Honnold is sceptical that his responses to fear are due to differences in his brain. In a recent interview on the Huberman Lab podcast, he says he ‘hates all this stuff’ claiming he’s ‘just wired differently’. Reflecting on the study, he says ‘obviously looking at pictures isn’t going to trigger my fear response’. He adds, ‘obviously, I feel fear’, and that he probably would have reacted like anyone else if the researchers had done something more fear-inducing, like putting a snake in the fMRI machine.

Honnold believes the difference between his reactions and the other climber in the study is that he’s got used to fear. In the trailer for Skyscraper Live, the Netflix show of him climbing Taipei 101, he says ‘I think I’ve gotten used to fear over the years’. In an interview clip around an hour into the climb, he says, ‘Fear is an ever-present part of climbing, particularly free soloing’. ‘If you fall you’re gonna die’, he says while laughing, adding, ‘obviously that’s scary’. He continues:

‘I definitely experience moments of real fear while soloing. But I’ve gotten much better at managing fear, because … I’ve just gotten scared so much’.

There are many lessons we can learn from Honnold. Here’s one: some things will always be scary, no matter how skilled we become.

I’ve learned this from doing two things that are far less terrifying than free soloing, but nonetheless common sources of fear: public speaking and performing as a musician. I no longer do the latter, but increasingly do the former. Giving high-stakes talks to big audiences gets easier each time, but it’s never fear-free.

I used to believe that with enough practice, fear would eventually disappear. But I now believe that for some activities, fear is inescapable. You don’t eliminate it; you learn how to manage it.

This is especially true if you continue challenging yourself, as Honnold does. With each higher level of challenge comes a new level of fear you have to adapt to.

Honnold himself says he used to find public speaking ‘so stressful’ but he’s overcome this from years of giving ‘keynote speeches to giant groups’. He says reducing his stress was ‘all learned’.

That we might never eliminate fear in some domain isn’t bad news. Accomplishing something in the face of fear is a great experience. Without the fear, it wouldn’t feel anywhere near as good. Fear is part of the reward structure. It makes success more meaningful.

Honnold says this of free soloing. Following the quote above from Skyscraper Live, he goes on to say that when free soloing ‘goes right’, ‘it’s probably the best feeling I experience in life’.

In a Flow Lab Masterclass I led this week, I asked the audience, ‘What’s one thing you value doing that will always be highly challenging?’. The responses included public speaking, as well as ice baths, writing, snowboarding, leading teams and conflict resolution. We discussed how we could improve our skills in leaning into these challenges, including managing fear.

My go-to practice to stay calm when I’m nervous is a short breathwork practice called cyclic sighing. A recent study found this to be the most effective five-minute breathwork practice for reducing stress and anxiety while improving mood and energy. You can try this yourself – here’s a short video explaining how.

Below is a photo of me doing this as a guided exercise with an audience at Disney World a few years ago. I’d done the exercise myself backstage a few minutes before going on:

Some fears we never conquer. We just learn how to manage them. And that’s part of what makes the challenge meaningful.

What’s your go-to tool for managing fear? I’d love to hear ⤵️

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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‘It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’

That sentence defines ‘Parkinson’s Law’, the title of the article, published in The Economist in 1955.

Work, Parkinson goes on to write, is ‘elastic in its demands on time’. Productivity – the amount of work we complete in a given time – depends on many factors, such as skills, technology and team dynamics. Parkinson’s Law holds that the amount of time we give ourselves to complete a task is how long we’ll take.

This implies that work can be done in less time. If work expands to fill time, less time means less room to expand.

Everyone wants to be more productive. We all have evidence from our lives showing how elastic productivity is. That time we quadrupled our productivity when we were suddenly invited for a multi-stage job interview in two days and had to prepare while working full-time. That time we quintupled our productivity after leaving an essay to the last minute and wrote in a single day what we’d expected to spend a week writing.

Yet each time, the end result was just as good. Sometimes even better.

On the basis of experiences like these, many of us apply Parkinson’s Law by setting ourselves an ambitious deadline for a task, knowing that we’re capable of reaching it. After all, we’ve managed it before.

The problem is that the deadline isn’t a ‘hard deadline’: we’ve created an artificial one to force ourselves to be more productive. We know we can move the deadline. And work, being elastic, stretches to fill the time we allow for its completion.

But there’s a much more fun way to increase productivity using Parkinson’s Law, which doesn’t rely on artificial deadlines. Find something you love doing.

I discovered this 18 months ago, when I started playing pickleball. I love playing pickleball, especially ‘ladder’ matches, where matches take place over several courts simultaneously, and you move up a court if you win or down if you lose. The best ladders I play in London are on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I used to work late some or all of those evenings. But when I’ve signed up for ladder, it’d have to be an emergency for me to skip it.

Why? Because it’s so much fun. And that’s a great way to increase productivity.

Pickleballing in London, 2024

Ladders start at 6 or 7pm. I’m lucky to live and work near several great pickleball clubs, so I can leave my home or office 15 minutes before. After finishing at 8 or 9pm and cycling home, the last thing I want to do is return to work. I just want to shower and wind down for sleep.

This forces me to finish work by 5.45 or 6.45pm. Not because I’ve created some artificial deadline I’m struggling to reach, but because there’s something I love doing which I’d hate to cancel.

I don’t get less done. I compress the same amount into a shorter window. The laptop’s going to be off by 6.45pm latest, no matter what.

So if you want to stop overworking and get more done in less time, try this: find something you love to do outside of work.

It could be a hobby or a social commitment. Whatever it is, it just needs to fulfil two criteria. First, you’d hate to cancel it. Second, you don’t want to return to work after doing it.

You can find this with any hobby. A running club, reading group, comedy class, language exchange, singing lessons, climbing – whatever you love doing or are curious to try. If you don’t know what hobbies you love, even better – here’s a great opportunity to find out, and have a lot of fun along the way. I’d never played pickleball before 18 months ago and barely played racquet sports before, so I had no idea I’d love it.

Schedule commitments to try hobbies at times you’d like to stop working for the day. Sign up for a yoga class at 6pm on Monday, life drawing at 7pm on Tuesday or ballroom dancing at 8pm on Wednesday. Or all three.

The commitment doesn’t need to be a hobby. It could be a social activity you love, like having dinner with your kids and reading with them afterwards.

Think of it as your ‘Parkinson’s Law Hobby’. Mine’s pickleball. What’s yours?

I’d love to hear what yours is, if you’ve found it, or when you do.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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A study in Chicago asked train and bus commuters during their morning commute to either start a conversation with the person next to them, sit in solitude or do whatever else they usually do, like listen to music. Those who talked to the people next to them reported having a more pleasant commute and feeling significantly happier during their journey than those who didn’t. Other experiments with commuters and people in waiting rooms have found similar results.

A couple of weeks ago I led a Flow Lab masterclass on building social connection. One of the “connection goals” we committed to was to strike up a conversation with a stranger. We checked on our progress in a live group call yesterday. The participants shared some great experiences.

One participant has the awesome New Year’s Resolution of starting a conversation with the person next to him whenever he’s commuting on the bus. He said this was difficult at first, but shortly after opening the first conversation, it “just flowed”. He described how much he enjoyed and learned from recent conversations.

Another reported starting a conversation with a member of his local swimming club. They now speak often, and he referred to the man who was until recently a stranger as now his friend.

Another described a game she loves to play whenever she goes to her favourite coffee shop. If someone’s sitting alone on a park bench nearby, she aims to start a conversation with them and learn something new. A fun recent experience was a philosophical conversation with a man feeding squirrels, about the analogous similarities between the activities of squirrels and our lives as humans.

I track several habits every day, one of which is to strike up a conversation with someone new. This is less difficult than you think. You don’t need to join a new club or go to a networking event. You can make these simple interactions part of your daily routine.

Every day is filled with opportunities for new conversations: the barista who makes your morning coffee, the receptionist who greets you at the gym, the commuter next to you on the subway, the person opposite you in the elevator or behind you in the queue at the supermarket. These lead to new connections, experiences, opportunities, learning and growth. And, perhaps most importantly, they lead to greater happiness.

We underestimate the power of these interactions. One of the most striking findings from the longest ever study of human life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is that relationships of all kinds substantially improve our happiness and even our health. The connections we form by talking to strangers might become strong – for example, becoming friendships – or they might remain ‘weak tie’ relationships, like those with acquaintances such as our neighbours. Either way, they significantly benefit our lives.

So, here’s a simple yet powerful goal for today: talk to a stranger. You’ll probably enjoy it much more than you think.

To learn more about how to build social connection, see this earlier blog. To join our free monthly Flow Lab masterclasses, click here.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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They’re goals for social connection.

These can be simple and quick, yet highly effective.

We can start right now. Try this:

1. Think of someone important to you whom you haven’t spoken to in a while.

2. Pick up your phone and send them a simple message, like: “I was just thinking about you and wanted to check in – how are you?”.

I learned this exercise from and Marc Schulz, directors of the world’s longest study of human life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development. In 2023, a few weeks after a fascinating conversation with Marc on Flourish FM, I went to a talk they gave in London on their excellent book, The Good Life. At the start, they asked everyone in the audience to text someone, like I just described.

I texted one of my closest friends, Doug, whom I’d last seen a few months earlier when I visited him and his family in Massachusetts. I’ve changed phones since and lost the text, but he, fortunately, still has it:

Later, Waldinger asked if anyone had received a reply. I raised my hand, and he asked what it said. Doug’s first message said, “That’s very sweet! I’m glad to hear from you my friend”, and a couple of messages later we’d scheduled a call to catch up.

Simple actions like this strengthen social connection, and can have a powerful impact on our health and happiness. Waldinger and Schulz write that ‘small investments today’ like this ‘can create long-term ripples of well-being’.

We can set ‘connection goals’ just like other goals. Social health expert recommends this in her excellent 2024 book, The Art and Science of Social Connection, where I first came across the phrase ‘connection goals’. She recommends we set these just like career goals. For example, what’s a trip you’ve always wanted to go on? Could you schedule it this year with your partner, family or friends? (Learn more in my conversation with Kasley on Flourish FM.)

Start with simple actions like the text to check in, and work towards bigger connection goals. Next, the call or coffee to catch up. Then, that international adventure you’ve always wanted to go on.

The last international trip I went on with Doug was to Iceland in 2022, captured below. We’ve scheduled a call this Sunday to brainstorm our next adventure.

I led a Flow Lab masterclass last week on building social connection, in which we set connection goals for the year. Here’s a snapshot of the wonderful goals participants shared:

• “Schedule a catch-up meeting with a friend”

• “1x weekly, coffee in real life with a connection I have neglected or might otherwise neglect”

• “Schedule a trip to visit my brother and his wife in Florida”

• “Next flight connect with a stranger on that journey”

• “Spend 1:1 time separately with each of my children at least 1x per month”

• “Experiment with scheduling a monthly call with a friend”

• “On my next trip meet in person with someone I met only via Zoom”

• “Adopt a new activity – snowshoeing – to connect more deeply with a friend who likes to do that”.

You can watch the recording and join free monthly masterclasses here.

What’s your connection goal for 2026? And did you receive a reply to your text? I’d love to hear in the comments ⤵️

To learn more about how to build social connection, see this earlier blog.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Once a month I’ll continue sending you a long-form “How to…” piece, like my previous newsletters, in written, audio and video formats, with recommended resources. My other newsletters will be shorter pieces, like this.

Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. I’m striving this year to make it even better. And that brings us to the focus of this newsletter …

Last week, I gave a talk on my career to a school in Singapore. The organisers asked me to cover areas such as how I went into working on human flourishing and became a performance coach, what led to my research on flow states, and what kind of path someone could take to pursue a similar career.

I thought this would be easy to prepare. Our career is something each of us can explain with no preparation. Turns out, preparing a 30-minute talk on your life is actually difficult. What’s most important to include?

This talk came at the perfect time. Preparing it was a great exercise in getting clear on New Year’s Resolutions – or, rather, their absence.

I noticed when creating my slide deck that over several years, my life went through bigger changes than I’d thought: where I lived, worked, what I was focusing on, and so on. These were especially significant between 2018-2022. But as I got closer to the end of the deck, covering more recent years and the year ahead, the changes became less substantial. After five slides covering 2022, I summed up 2023-2025 in a single slide with the title, “Doing the same but better”.

I then realised something surprising about what I wanted my goal to be for the year ahead: to do nothing new. My goal is to do more of the same. But better.

At first, I thought this can’t be right, and I must be missing something. Surely I’m not being ambitious enough, or thinking big enough? I went and did what I always do when I need to think about something important: meditated in the sauna and got a good night’s sleep. (Both of which I’m aiming to do better this year.)

Returning to finish the deck the following day, I realised this isn’t bad at all. When you’ve reached a place where your goal isn’t to do anything new, but to do what you’re already doing, better, you know you’re on the right path.

This means you don’t need to change direction. You don’t need a dramatic habit shift. You don’t need to move where you live or work. You don’t need to go back to the drawing board or rebuild from the foundations.

It means you’re doing the right things. You just need to improve what you’re already doing.

I summed up 2026 in the deck with another single slide:

As we move into 2026, ask yourself: Do I need to do anything new? Or do I just need to do what I’m already doing, better?

What’s one thing you want to do better this year? I’d love to hear in the comments ⤵️

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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This week’s invitation and recommendation:

Invitation: I’m leading a free masterclass this coming Tuesday, 13th Jan, 12-1pm ET, on the power of relationships for improving our health, happiness and “flow proneness” – our capacity for frequently entering a flow state.

You can join via the Flow Lab, a free community I co-founded which has over 1,100 members.

Recommendation: Check out the recently published Having It All by , influential economist and professor at Wharton. Her book puts forward an evidence-based framework for how women can lead more flourishing lives, and describes how taking on too many commitments can hinder this.

Relatedly, and more broadly, the idea I’ve shared this week is that our best aim this year might not be to take on more commitments, but to do better with our current ones.

• How to massively reduce the time you spend digitally communicating: on email, Slack, Teams, texts, WhatsApp and so on.

• A highly effective five-step method for communication batching.

Watch | Listen 👇

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Many people spend hours, every day, checking inboxes and replying to emails, texts and messages across various platforms. Most of the time, these checks are unnecessary: there’s nothing new and inboxes were checked only a short time ago.

The normal way of working for many people is to have one or several inboxes open all the time in the background, repeatedly moving between work that requires their full concentration and replying to messages. This disrupts attention and prevents us reaching the level of deep focus where we can do our best work.

Add to this the fact that many people also have their phones on their desks while they’re working, and you have an abysmal setup for doing focused work. (On how much phones disrupt our attention when on our desks, see my previous blog.)

How long it takes to regain focus when distracted

These disruptions to our attention last longer than we think. A study on task management and fragmented work showed that when our focus on a task is interrupted, it takes an average of almost 25 and a half minutes to regain focus on the task. (That study was led by attention expert Gloria Mark, with whom I had a great conversation about attention and flourishing on my podcast.)

In research on attention, ‘working sphere’ is used to refer to a unified set of work tasks. For example, when preparing a slide deck, your working sphere might include the draft deck in Powerpoint, your notes in Google Docs, a PDF of a published article you’re referring to, and finding images online to include in the deck. Moving to a different working sphere would involve switching to an unrelated project, or checking emails or messages unrelated to the slide deck.

In her excellent 2023 book Attention Span, Gloria Mark describes the study mentioned above:

‘What happens … when people are interrupted? How long does it take to resume work on that interrupted task? … It took people an average of twenty-five minutes, twenty-six seconds to return to work again on their interrupted working spheres. And … [when] people get interrupted, they do not just turn to another task and then snap right back to their original, interrupted work. They work on an average of 2.26 intervening working spheres before they go back to their original working sphere. … That means that they’re working on one working sphere, then they switch to another, then to still another, and then again another, and finally go back to that original uninterrupted working sphere.’ (Attention Span, p. 102.)

So, when you’re working on a project and you get a notification about an email or message and check it, the length of the interruption often isn’t simply the few seconds it’s taken to check it. It usually takes much longer to restore your focus to where it was before, and on the journey back, you’ll likely turn to a couple of other things.

Imagine this over a full working day. You work on a task for 15 minutes, then check your email. It’s likely to take you almost 25 and a half minutes to regain focus on your original task, and you’ll probably do a couple of other things in the meantime, such as replying to a couple of emails, which are totally unrelated to the work you were focused on.

Over a day this can cost you hours of wasted time. Over a week, up to an entire day. Over a year, several weeks. Imagine what you could do with all that time.

Where did the time go? (Credit: Getty Images)

Attention residue

Add to this the factor of ‘attention residue’: the residual impact of an object of our attention (a term coined by attention expert Sophie Leroy in 2009). When we switch attention, we usually don’t immediately turn from fully focusing on one thing to the next. It often takes time for our attention to fully switch over, especially if we were deeply concentrating on something or it resonated with us emotionally.

For example, if you’re focusing on a task but check your inbox to discover an email from your boss stating that there’s an urgent matter to discuss later, that’s unlikely to immediately fade from your mind when you try to regain focus on your original task. So if, during those 25 and a half minutes, you switch to something important or just something that grabs your attention, the attention residue will add to the amount of time it takes you to regain focus on your original task.

This is a serious problem. Many people finish work feeling exhausted but like they’ve accomplished nothing.

A common predicament today: feeling exhausted from work but like we’ve accomplished nothing (credit: Getty Images)

Communication batching

Fortunately, there’s an effective solution. It’s called communication batching. This is a time and task management method where you only check and reply to digital communication across some or all platforms at scheduled times.

So, rather than being constantly interrupted by messages and switching between focusing on a task and communicating, you decide when you’re going to check and reply to messages, on your schedule. This puts you in control of your two most important resources: your time and attention.

There are obviously occasions when digital communication is extremely important and requires our full concentration. Sometimes sending an email is our most important task for the day – for example, submitting a job application or inviting an eminent figure to speak at an event. These kinds of tasks aren’t what I mean by communication batching. These are examples of what I call high-stakes digital communication: important tasks we should plan into our schedules outside of communication batching times.

‘Communication batching’ refers to scheduled periods of time when we do low-stakes digital communication: checking and replying to the kinds of messages we regularly receive across email and other platforms. For example, daily updates to team members, or checking for agenda updates ahead of meetings.

Take back control of when and how often you digitally communicate (credit: iStock photo)

The “BATCH” method for communication batching

I’ve designed a five-step method for communication batching, which I’ve tried, tested and developed with hundreds of clients I’ve coached or trained. Many of them have found this highly effective and it’s saved them many hours every week.

You can remember this using the acronym “BATCH”.

B: Bound Your Time

Set clear boundaries. Decide what the minimal amount of time is you need to spend reading and replying to emails and other messages every day. Make this as short as possible by reducing to only what is necessary.

Ask yourself: what’s the minimal amount of time I need to check and reply to messages each day? Use this as the amount of time you schedule, and only increase if you absolutely need to.

This will enable you to create a time budget you can test and track, and adjust if necessary. With practice, you should be able to further reduce the time you spend communication batching.

Before you proceed to the next step, look at your calendar and estimate the minimal time you’ll need for communication batching every working day. Try to get this as low as possible. Write this down.

A: Align Your Batching Times

Next, choose when you’ll batch. The aim is to align your batching times with what works best for you and those you need to regularly communicate with, such as team members and clients. Find times that prioritise you focusing on your most important work while remaining responsive enough to the key people you communicate with.

Start this by deciding on your ideal batching time, or times. Ask yourself: in my ideal working day, what time, or times, would I batch?

For instance, if you focus best first thing in the morning, that should be the last time you batch. You might batch in the afternoon when you struggle to fully concentrate, say at 3pm or the final 30 minutes of your working day. I never batch in the morning because that’s when I focus best.

Before proceeding, write down your ideal batching time(s). You don’t need to look at your calendar to figure this out – just decide when, in your ideal working day, you’d batch.

Now compare these times with the times you’re likely to need to reply to important messages. If these times are likely to cause problems, for factors such as time zone differences, amend the times to avoid or at least mitigate these problems.

Compromises often need to be made. In general, steer more towards your preferences, because the ultimate aim is to gain control of your two most important resources, your time and attention, so you can commit more of these to your most important work.

Before proceeding to the next step, check the ideal batching times you picked with the times that are workable for the key people you communicate with. If these don’t align, find a workable compromise that aligns these times. Write these down.

T: Time Box Your Batches

‘Timeboxing’ is a time management method where you schedule fixed, maximum periods of time – ‘time boxes’ – into your calendar for completing specific tasks. Here, we’re timeboxing communication batching: scheduling time boxes when you’ll do all your l0w-stakes digital communication. (‘Timeboxing’ was coined by computer science expert James Martin in his 1991 book, Rapid Application Development. This is different from ‘time blocking’, a highly effective productivity method I explain here.)

Schedule time boxes for communication batching in your calendar based on the times you’ve chosen. It might be one, hour-long batch or two 30-minute batches, at times when the people you most need to communicate with aren’t waiting long for a reply and several time zones are accommodated. Keep this to as few times as possible and make the times as short as possible.

Before proceeding to the next step, schedule these time boxes in your calendar as recurring events every working day (or less frequently, if your schedule allows). Call the recurring events “Batch comms”.

Image credit: todoist

C: Commit and contain

Now comes the hardest part: stick to your communication batching times. Don’t check emails or other messages outside of them.

This will get much easier with practice. Until then, there’ll be times when you struggle to resist. But you will get there, with persistent, daily practice.

If you struggle to resist checking, use apps to block email and other apps. I most recommend the following, all of which are either free, have a free version or offer a free trial:

• Boomerang for Outlook or Gmail: this browser extension has many useful features. The one I like most is ‘Inbox Pause’, which enables you to schedule the times you can receive emails – so people can still email you whenever they like, but emails only appear in your inbox at times you’ve chosen. So if someone emails you in the middle of the night, and you go against your best intentions and check your email, you won’t be able to see the email until the time you’ve scheduled.

• Inbox When Ready for Gmail: this browser extension enables you to hide your inbox, schedule times to check emails, and set limits to the time you spend on email. It’s available in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. I particularly like their ‘Hide Inbox’ function, which hides your inbox when you open your email. So if I need to go into an email folder to pull up an email that contains important information for a project I’m working on, I can do this without seeing my inbox, thereby avoiding potential distractions from new emails.

• Opal: an excellent app for blocking other apps. It enables you to block apps you select for periods of time and set a daily time limit across them. I use this to block Gmail and WhatsApp on my phone every morning.

• Freedom.to: an excellent app and website blocker, which you can use on computers, phones and any browser. Their users report gaining an average of 2.5 hours of productive time each day.

• SelfControl for Mac: blocks distracting websites for a period you decide, from one minute to a 24-hour day. There’s literally nothing you can do to unblock the website once it’s blocked: you can’t restart your computer, turn the app off or delete it – you just have to wait til the time’s up.

Before proceeding to the final step, if you’re not already using one of the apps above or a similar one, pick at least one to download. It’ll enable you to master communication batching quicker and with less friction.

Game-changing: Opal is a brilliant app blocker

H: Highlight Your Boundaries to Others

Finally, communicate to others who need to know about your communication batching times. You could include this in an email signature, saying something like:

‘I check my emails twice a day, at 7am and 12pm ET, and reply to all important emails within 24 hours. If your email is urgent and requires a quicker response, please email my assistant, on [email address], or text or call me on [insert phone number].’

If you include your phone number, only include this signature in emails to people you trust, and don’t put it in your auto-reply to all emails. Otherwise, you’ll probably receive many unwanted calls and texts. Boomerang and some email platforms enable you to customise the contacts to whom a specific email signature gets sent with auto-replies.

Remember: you don’t need to be available all the time – even emergency responders and leaders of nations are rarely available every single hour of the day – and while you might often need to reply quickly, you rarely need to reply immediately. And you should be the one controlling your time and attention – not others, and not technology.

If you’re struggling to implement any of these steps, stop for a second and ask yourself these two questions:

1. Is my constant availability helping me make progress, or actually preventing me from focusing and achieving my goals?

2. Is always being available providing maximum value to others, or actually hindering my ability to provide maximum value, because I’m not able to fully focus or work at my optimal level?

Take a moment now and think about those questions.

Finally, write down whom you’ll need to inform about your new communication batching schedule. Then, either inform those people now, or schedule time in your calendar to do so. And if you’re editing your email signature along the lines described above, do this now, too.

The takeaway

You can save yourself a huge amount of time by communication batching, and maintain your focus for longer on your most important work. Most importantly, this enables you to gain more control over your two most important resources, time and attention.

The five-step method above is a highly effective way to successfully batch your communication. You can implement this immediately.

To learn more about how to focus better and reach the highest level of focus, a flow state, join the Flow Lab, a free platform I recently co-launched. We share resources on flow states, performance and well-being, and run free masterclasses. You can join here.

Which digital communication platform do you most struggle to keep within time-bound batches?

Have you found any other communication batching methods effective?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about communication batching!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Work Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Crown Publishers, 2009 [2007])

• Gloria Mark, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Square Press, 2023)

• James Martin, Rapid Application Development (Macmillan, 1991)

• Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload (Penguin, 2021)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Daniel Biedermann et al., ‘Digital self-control interventions for distracting media multitasking - A systematic review’ (Journal of computer assisted learning, 2021)

• Alexander Dontre, ‘The influence of technology on academic distraction: A review’ (Human behavior and emerging technologies, 2020)

• Victor González & Gloria Mark, ‘“Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness”: managing multiple working spheres’ (CHI 2004, 6: 1, 2004)

• Kaejeung Kim et al., ‘Technology Supported Behavior Restriction for Mitigating Self-Interruptions in Multi-device Environments’ (ACM Digital Library, 2017)

• Jelena Kostic & Kristina Randelovic, ‘Digital distractions: Learning in multitasking environment’ (Psychological Applications and Trends, 2022)

• Sophie Leroy, ‘Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks’ (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009)

• Gloria Mark, Victor González and Justin Harris, ‘No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work’, CHI 2005, pp. 321-330.

• Gloria Mark et al., ‘How blocking distractions affects workplace focus and productivity’ (Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)

• Hylco Nijp, et al., ‘Systematic review on the association between employee worktime control and work-non-work balance, health and well-being, and job-related outcomes’ (Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 2012)

• Melina Throuvala, et al., ‘Mind over Matter: Testing the Efficacy of an Online Randomized Controlled Trial to Reduce Distraction from Smartphone Use’ (Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 2020)

Media articles:

• Luciana Paulise, ‘5 Steps To Start Timeboxing And Improve Your Time-Management Skills’ (Forbes, 2022)

Podcasts:

• ‘How to Use Your Attention to Help You Flourish, with Dr. Gloria Mark’, Flourish FM, 4 June 2023

Blogs:

• Jon Beale, ‘How to Increase Your Productivity Using Time Blocking’, How to Flourish, 7 Feb 2025

• Jon Beale, ‘How to Stop Your Phone Stealing Your Time and Attention’, How to Flourish, 22 Sept 2025

• Why it’s important to change how we use our phones.

• 9 steps you can take today to turn your smartphone from a source of distraction into a tool for improving your life.

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It has never been harder to focus. The main source of distraction today is smartphones. Our two most valuable resources are time and attention. We spend a huge amount of time on our phones, and technology has changed how we use our attention.

Me, taking extreme measures to evade technology to write (photo by Matt Maude)

Recent data show that the average person spends over four and a half hours a day on their phone. That’s over 32 hours a week, which amounts to over 70 days a year. That means that in five years’ time, the average person will have spent almost an entire year of those five on their phone.

Say the average person starts using a phone when they’re 18 years old. By the time they’re 70, they’ll have spent over 10 years on their phone.

These stats don’t break down the many ways we use our phones. Some people spend hours every week on FaceTime with loved ones or learning a language on Duolingo. Those are great ways to use technology. But many hours in these stats are from people wasting their time and feeling bad afterwards, doing things like doomscrolling.

Our attention span when doing computer-based work has shrunk massively in recent years. As of 2023, studies had found that an office worker would spend on average only 47 seconds doing a computer-based task before switching attention. Less than 20 years earlier, the amount of time before switching was over 100 seconds longer.

The good news is that the problem and solution is within our control. One of the most common reasons we switch attention is self-distraction. Research has discovered that when we’re interrupted while working on our computers, the source of the interruption is almost as likely to be ourselves as it is to be someone or something else. We’ve built a tendency to check our phones, emails, social media and so on even when no notification pops up.

Those studies and others suggest we’ve built some bad habits in our relationship with technology. But we can break these habits. The following nine steps help you break these and replace them with good ones, so you can just use your smartphone in a way that improves your life.

For discussion of the above points about attention spans, self-distraction and technology, see my conversation with attention expert Gloria Mark.

Create friction between you and your phone

Breaking a habit requires creating friction between you and the habit. Creating friction involves two key factors: distance and obstacles. The first four steps create distance and obstacles between you and your smartphone.

Step 1: Get a dumbphone

Dumbphones – mobile phones without smart features like apps and cameras – are back in fashion. They perform little other than the two functions mobile phones did when they were invented: calls and texts.

Get one, along with a second SIM to put in it. Give your dumbphone number only to the most important people in your life who might need to contact you anytime: family, partner, closest friends, boss and so on.

This won’t be your only phone, but it’ll be the only one you use when you want to avoid distraction. If, like me, you focus best in the morning, you could just have your dumbphone during mornings, and have your smartphone during afternoons.

You probably still own dumbphones. My sister and I cleared out our parents’ attic recently and found about 10. We’re now using the ones that still work. (If you need to buy one, here’s a recent article on the best ones.)

Clearing out the attic: dumbphones are now more useful than ever

There might be apps you need access to all the time. For example, some schools use WhatsApp communities to send parents important updates. If there’s an app you need access to, download it onto your computer. This isn’t ideal, but it’s less bad than having your computer and smartphone available as sources of distraction.

Step 2: Put your phone in a different room

Even if you get a dumbphone, when you need to focus, put your smartphone in a different room. Research shows that our performance improves when we do this.

In two experiments, people completed tasks measuring their cognitive performance in reasoning, problem-solving, maths, and memorising. One group had their phones face-down on their desks; another had their phones in a different room. All notifications were turned off.

The people who had their phones in a different room performed significantly better than the group who had their phones on their desks. The negative impact on performance for those with their phones on their desks was similar to the effects of being sleep deprived.

The researchers even found similar results when phones were switched off. People still performed better when their phones were in a different room than on their desk – even though they were off.

Put your phone in a different room, and watch how much your performance improves.

The conclusion from this study and others is that when our phones are within our visual sphere, they pull on our attention. This takes up working memory capacity, contributing to cognitive load: the information processing or cognitive effort required to perform a task.

If our cognitive load becomes too high, we restrict our capacity to process more information or learn anything new. The pull on our attention from seeing our phones – even if they’re off – takes up working memory, leaving less available to focus.

Cognitive Load Theory (credit: Barefoot TEFL Teacher)

If you’ve got a dumbphone, ideally also leave this in another room. If you need it closer in case you need to be contacted, keep it out of sight, like in your bag. Don’t keep it within your visual field.

Even better than putting your smartphone in a different room is putting it in another building. I often put my smartphone in a gym locker in the building next door to my co-working space. It’d take me at least five minutes to walk next door and get it, which is enough friction to prevent me doing it. You could also leave your smartphone at home when you go to the office and just take your dumbphone.

Step 3: Lend your phone to someone

If you find that when you put your phone in a different room you’re still tempted to check it, try lending it to someone you trust when you’re trying to focus. Ask them to ask you this simple question when you ask for it back: “Are you sure?”.

It quickly becomes embarrassing asking for your phone back when you lent it out to avoid distraction. Not only are you having to face up to your lack of willpower, but you’re now also distracting someone else! The excuse of “but it’s an emergency” shouldn’t come up if you’ve got yourself a dumbphone.

“Are you sure?”

Step 4: Get a KSafe

Better than lending out your smartphone is getting a kSafe: a time-locked, thick plastic box you can lock your phone in for a set amount of time, from several seconds to 10 days. You can only get it out before the timer finishes by smashing it open.

If you get a kSafe, keep the kSafe, containing your phone, out of sight – ideally in a different room. Even though kSafes weren’t used in the study described above, we can infer that seeing your phone in the kSafe while you try to focus might pull on your attention.

Make your phone less exciting

The four steps so far create friction between you and your phone. Now let’s look at how to make our phones less exciting to use. This helps us overcome our compulsion to use them more than we need.

Step 5: Purge your apps

Go through the apps on your phone and delete any that don’t meet all three of these conditions:

a. Overall, the app provides a net benefit to your life (e.g. Google Maps helps you get around, but you don’t stay up late at night using it).

b. The app needs to be on your phone (e.g. Uber can’t be used on your laptop if you want to use it to get home after a night out).

c. You either use the app often, or, if you don’t use it often, it performs an important role (e.g. a security app, such as an authenticator).

An example of an app that meets condition (c) but not (a) might be a social media app. While you sometimes enjoy using it, you also often regret doing so, and if you consider whether it provides a net benefit to your life, the occasional late night doomscroll makes it overall a net negative. However, you might be able to turn this into a net positive if you instead occasionally use it on your laptop rather than your phone.

An example of an app that meets condition (c) but not (b) might be a streaming app, like Netflix. But you might find that watching Netflix turns into a net positive once you delete the app from your phone and do this on your laptop, less often.

What if you need to use an app occasionally but it doesn’t provide a net benefit to your life? The solution is easy: delete the app, and re-download it when you need to use it. For example, for posting on social media apps like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, re-download them, post, then delete them.

Think that takes too long? It likely takes far less time than the amount you spend on those apps when you keep them on your phone. It takes less than a minute to download an app and login over a decent wifi connection. Compare that to how long you spend scrolling when the app is constantly available. You can check this on the usage data on your phone.

Step 6: Turn off all notifications

Do this for all notifications except the ones you need. ‘Need’ means that turning the notifications off makes your life more difficult.

For example, keep notifications on from transport apps like Uber, to avoid missing your driver when they arrive, and security apps like Find My, in case an item gets stolen.

Step 7: Go greyscale

Try changing the colour scheme on your phone to greyscale. This’ll make you want to look at your phone much less. Try this out and see how long you stay on Instagram now – you often want to get straight off.

Step 8: Make your background a single, plain colour

That photo of you on the beach with your partner and dog captures a wonderful memory. So, rather than it just sitting on your phone as wallpaper, why not print it, frame it and put it in your home?

Try a plain, single colour background as your phone background instead. It’ll make you want to look at your phone less.

Step 9: Download an app blocker

There’s a few excellent app blocking apps, such as Opal, which I use every day. This has functions such as blocking selected apps for periods of time, and having a daily time limit for using apps you select.

The takeaway

We spend a huge amount of our two most important resources – time and attention – on our smartphones. We can put these resources to good or bad use. To only put these to good use on our smartphones, it helps to create friction between us and our smartphones, and make our phones less exciting to use. The nine steps above help you turn your smartphone from a source of distraction into a tool for improving your life.

To learn more about how to focus and reach the highest level of focus, a flow state, join the Flow Lab, a free platform I recently co-launched where we run masterclasses and share resources on flow states. You can join here.

Which digital distractions do you most struggle to overcome?

Have you found any other methods or tools for avoiding digital distractions?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about overcoming digital distractions!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Gloria Mark, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Square Press, 2023)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Daniel Biedermann et al., ‘Digital self-control interventions for distracting media multitasking - A systematic review’ (Journal of computer assisted learning, 2021)

• Alexander Dontre, ‘The influence of technology on academic distration: A review’ (Human behavior and emerging technologies, 2020)

• Victor González & Gloria Mark, ‘“Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness”: managing multiple working spheres’ (CHI 2004, 6: 1, 2004)

• Kaejeung Kim et al., ‘Technology Supported Behavior Restriction for Mitigating Self-Interruptions in Multi-device Environments’ (ACM Digital Library, 2017)

• Jelena Kostic & Kristina Randelovic, ‘Digital distractions: Learning in multitasking environment’ (Psychological Applications and Trends, 2022)

• Gloria Mark et al., ‘How blocking distractions affects workplace focus and productivity’ (Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)

• Melina Throuvala, et al., ‘Mind over Matter: Testing the Efficacy of an Online Randomized Controlled Trial to Reduce Distraction from Smartphone Use’ (Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 2020)

Podcasts:

• ‘How to Use Your Attention to Help You Flourish, with Dr. Gloria Mark’, Flourish FM, 4 June 2023

• Why it’s important to separate planning (strategy) from doing (execution)

• A highly effective four-step method for separating planning from doing

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Many people map out excellent schedules but find their plans fall apart as soon as the working day begins. They’re frequently disrupted by emails, calls, requests for meetings or to do urgent tasks, and their schedule quickly gets thrown out the window. They then move to a reactive mode of working, where they work in reaction to whatever tasks emerge.

Working in a reactive mode rather than following a well designed schedule is less productive, focused and satisfying. It leaves many people finishing their working days feeling exhausted but like they’ve accomplished nothing.

The central problem here is separating planning (strategy) from doing (execution). Overcoming this involves successful planning, where you create an effective and manageable schedule, and successful doing, where you stick to the schedule no matter what (except for genuine emergencies).

I’ve found this to be one of the most common problems people face in their working lives today, from the thousands of people I’ve coached, trained or given talks to, over 700 of whom I’ve coached one-to-one. I’ve tried and tested various methods to solve this, and found that the following four-step method is highly effective for successfully and consistently separating planning from doing.

Step 1: Implement a Work Shutdown Ritual

This is a powerful ritual to end your working day and plan the next. It offers many benefits, not only for increasing productivity, but also for managing stress, preparing for sleep, reducing rumination, and becoming more present during activities outside work, such as time with loved ones. It was devised by Cal Newport, who experimented with several forms of it. In this recent explanation he emphasises its benefits both for productivity and mental health.

The aims of a work shutdown ritual are to:

a. finish your working day;

b. plan the next day;

c. mentally switch off from work.

For (a), at the end of your work shutdown ritual it helps to include an action to signify that your ritual is complete and, therefore, your working day is over. This supports (c). Newport used to have a phrase he said to himself but he now ticks off a box in a planner.

You could do other actions, such as closing your laptop, changing your clothes or switching locations (such as office to home). You just want some action that signifies that your working day is over and you’re now entering a different state of mind.

To implement a successful work shutdown ritual, schedule in your calendar a non-negotiable meeting with yourself, of 15-30 minutes, at the end of every working day. Make yourself unavailable during this time – for calls, meetings or anything else.

If you need external accountability to stick to this, schedule it with a colleague or friend, or, if you have one, your assistant or coach. You could do this with someone else through ‘body doubling’, where you both do your own work shutdown rituals simultaneously, in person or over a call, to ensure you both stick to it. This needn’t be a permanent arrangement, but just one you implement for the first few weeks, to form it as a habit.

To most effectively complete aim (b), of planning the next day, follow the next two steps.

Step 2: Identify Your Essential Task

‘Essentialism’ is a powerful mindset shift, where we focus on and orient our lives around what is most important – in other words, what is essential. It offers many benefits, particularly for prioritisation, focus, overcoming procrastination, and life satisfaction.

Greg McKeown put this forward in his excellent 2014 book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. As he describes it,

‘Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. … It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.’

Essentialism (credit: Greg McKeown)

Many people work long hours and complete many things off their lists each day, but often not the most important things. They’re busy, but not busy doing the things that are most going to help them reach their most meaningful goals. This leads to the predicament I mentioned above: working in a reactive mode, ending the day feeling exhausted but like they’ve accomplished nothing.

Essentialism is a highly effective way to overcome this. A key essentialist practice is to identify our most important task for the next working day – our essential task – and build our day around it. This helps us focus on what matters most.

To plan your day using essentialism, do the following:

a. Look at your to do list and schedule for tomorrow. Ask yourself: What’s the most important (i.e., essential) thing I need to do tomorrow? Another way to ask this is: If I could only do one thing tomorrow (because, for example, an emergency might come up), what should it be?

b. Plan your day around this, so if only one thing gets done, it’s this.

c. Schedule as much time as you can on this at the start of your working day.

d. Schedule any more time you can later in the day to focus on this. (This might involve postponing some commitments.)

e. If it’s a big project that can’t be completed in a single day, break it down into chunks and identify one chunk you can do tomorrow.

So, if you’re preparing to launch a startup, tomorrow’s essential task might be developing your business plan. If you’re writing a book, it might be drafting the next chapter. And if you’re training for a marathon, it might be a long distance run.

On (c): even if it’s only possible to schedule a short time on this before your first meeting or other commitment – say, 10-15 minutes – fine, just schedule that. Working on what is most important is like exercise: there’s no minimum amount of time it isn’t worthwhile to spend doing it. Start with whatever amount of time you can, and gradually increase.

Do the above process (a-e) during Step 1, your work shutdown ritual. So, your work shutdown ritual always involves identifying your essential task for the next day.

For a recent overview of essentialism, check out this conversation between Greg McKeown and Tim Ferriss.

Now that you’ve identified your most important task and scheduled time to do it, let’s plan how to maximise your productivity on that task. The next step does this.

Step 3: Time Block Your Schedule

Time blocking is an extremely effective time management method by Cal Newport, which involves planning every minute of your working day. He reports this can double your productivity. This has also been my experience, and many of my clients have reported the same.

Time blocking: planning every minute of your working day (credit: Cal Newport)

To time block your schedule tomorrow:

a. For every item on your schedule, assign an ambitious but achievable time estimate to it.

b. If it’s a large task or one you might procrastinate from doing, break it down into sub-tasks, and give each sub-task a time estimate.

c. Start by time blocking the time you’ve scheduled on your essential task (the one you identified in Step 2).

For an example of a time blocked schedule, see here.

Cal Newport’s process of time blocking (credit: Cal Newport)

Map out your time blocked schedule during Step 1, your work shutdown ritual. So your work shutdown ritual includes both identifying your essential task for the next day and time blocking how you’ll complete it.

To learn more about time blocking, see this guide I’ve written.

Step 4: Trust the Process

Once you’ve completed the three steps above, you will have identified the most important thing you need to do tomorrow (Step 2) and planned how you’ll execute it (Step 3), both of which you’ve done during your work shutdown ritual (Step 1). We saw above that separating planning from doing involves successful planning, where we create a schedule that’s workable and we can stick to. The three steps so far cover successful planning.

Now it’s onto successful doing. The final step covers this. Here’s how to engage in successful doing:

a. Follow your new schedule, no matter what.

b. If something new comes up, don’t do it now. Make a note of it and do it during the time you’ve planned to do it, later.

The only exception to (a) is genuine emergencies. This emphasises the importance of asking yourself, when you identify the essential thing you need to do, ‘If I could only do one thing tomorrow (because, for example, an emergency might come up), what should it be?’. By following this, even if an emergency does come up, you might have nonetheless completed your essential task.

For (b), use your preferred place to keep notes: a notebook, Google Doc, the tasks list in your calendar, etc. You just need somewhere you can get things out of your mind and store them for your attention, later, so you can maintain focus on the task you’re working on. Build into your schedule time to complete tasks like these later in the day – for example, 15-30 minutes in the late afternoon every weekday.

As we saw above, people often fail to separate planning from doing, despite planning excellent schedules, because their plan falls apart as soon as the working day begins. Some interruptions are unavoidable. But even when these come up, as quickly as possible we need to return to the schedule mapped out in steps 1-3, rather than giving up on the schedule and moving to a reactive mode of work. To do this, we need to trust the process.

Trust the process (credit: HuffPost)

You will be receiving emails, text messages and so on while you’re not looking at your inboxes. But they can wait. There are urgent tasks you need to complete today. But they can also wait. All of these waited while you were asleep, and they can wait a little longer. As long as you’ve scheduled time to reply and complete tasks within a good time frame, it’ll all get done punctually. Right now, trust the process and focus on your essential task, following your time blocked schedule to complete it.

Pre-commitment

To ensure you stick to the process, let’s do some pre-commitment: identify something that could prevent us from doing what we want to do and commit to pre-emptive action, now, to stop that from happening.

Ask yourself: What factor, which is in my power to control, could prevent me from trusting the process?

For example, if you have a tendency to check your emails first thing in the morning, try blocking your email using Freedom.to, Boomerang for Gmail or Outlook, or SelfControl for Mac. Or, if you have a tendency to check social media on your phone while working, put your phone in a different room or block social media using Opal.

Set yourself up to focus, and trust the process (credit: Matt Maude)

What about new, more important opportunities that emerge?

Some people work in roles where new opportunities regularly emerge that are even more important than the task they identified the previous day as the most important one today. This means that the most important task can change over the course of a day, and they might need to shift their priorities if they’re to maintain focus on the essential task. This presents an objection to (b), above. To recap (b):

If something new comes up, don’t do it now. Make a note of it and do it during the time you’ve planned to do it, later.

For example, if you work in sales, you might have identified the previous day that the most important task today is to identify from your mailing list potential customers who have shown interest in your service (‘warm leads’), create an email nurture sequence to build their interest, and send them the first email in the sequence. But then you receive a call or email from a prospective client representing a big company for a lucrative business-to-business sale. Had this opportunity emerged yesterday, you would have identified this as the most important thing to do today. So, what now?

There is nonetheless an effective way to follow all four of these steps even while working in a role where important tasks requiring immediate responses frequently emerge. I recommend two strategies.

1. First, identify the times of day such opportunities are most likely to emerge, and be available for immediate reply during these times.

You can figure this out based on two factors: past experience and the common time zones of your prospective clients. So, for example, if you live in New York and have prospective clients across the USA, Australasia and Europe, you could schedule to be available for immediate responses from 10-11am in New York, which is mid-late afternoon across Europe (3-4pm in the UK and Portugal, and 5-6pm in Greece and several Eastern European countries), and 6-7pm in New York, which is mid-afternoon (3-4pm) on the US west coast, early morning (8-9am) on the east coast of Australia (including Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) and mid-morning (10-11am) in New Zealand.

For anyone contacting you outside those times, you could set up an automated reply stating that you’ll respond within those times, but to call you if an immediate reply is needed. This way, people have received an immediate reply at any hour (be it from you or automated), and they have the option to call you immediately if they need a quicker response.

If you need to be available for immediate response at different times, additional times, or for more than that amount of time, you could tweak as necessary.

2. Schedule the first time you’re available for immediate response as far into the day as possible, so you can make progress on your essential task for the day.

This was point (c) in Step 2: Identify your Essential Task: schedule as much time as you can on your most important task at the start of your working day. This way, if a new task emerges that’s even more important than the one you identified before the day began, you’ve made progress on the one you identified as most important before moving onto tasks that require immediate action.

The takeaway

To separate planning from doing, follow these four steps:

1. Implement a Work Shutdown Ritual

Plan by the end of the day before.

2. Identify Your Essentialism Task

Identify your most important task.

3. Time Block Your Schedule

Assign challenging but doable time blocks to each item in your schedule.

4. Trust the Process

Don’t go back on the plan.

We recently ran a masterclass on separating strategy from execution in the Flow Lab, a free platform I recently co-launched where we run masterclasses and share resources on flow states. To join and watch a recording of the masterclass, click here.

What do you most struggle with when separating planning from doing?

Have you found any other methods effective?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about separating planning from doing!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Ebury Publishing, 2014)

Media articles:

• Frances Bridges, ‘The 3 Steps of Essentialism: How to Achieve More by Doing Less, According to Author Greg McKeown’, Forbes, 29 Nov 2018

• William Arruda, ‘Body Doubling: The Productivity Hack You Didn’t Know You Needed’, Forbes, 28 April 2025

Blogs:

• Jon Beale, ‘How to Increase Your Productivity Using Time Blocking’, How to Flourish #3, 7 Feb 2025

• Cal Newport, ‘Drastically Reduce Stress with a Work Shutdown Ritual’, 8 June 2009

• Cal Newport, ‘Work Less to Work Better: My Experiments with Shutdown Routines’, 2 Aug 2012

• Cal Newport, ‘Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day’, 21 Dec 2013

• Cal Newport, ‘Text File Time Blocking’, 16 March 2020

• Cal Newport, ‘The Time Blocking Revolution Begins’, 10 Nov 2020

Podcasts:

• Greg McKeown and Tim Ferriss, ‘Tactics and Strategies for a 2025 Reboot’, The Tim Ferriss Show, 9 Jan 2025

• Cal Newport and Andrew Huberman, ‘Lower Stress with an End of Day Ritual’, Huberman Lab, 18 April 2024

• The eight areas of life research has identified as most important for human flourishing.

• A method for promoting flourishing by improving these areas.

Watch | Listen 👇

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What does it mean to flourish?

To ‘flourish’ means for a living organism to ‘grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as a result of a particularly congenial environment’. The verb comes from the Latin word florere, meaning ‘to bloom or flower’. When a flower blooms, it reaches the peak of its development. To flourish, as human beings, is to reach our optimal development: to live the best lives we can, given our nature and relative to the environment in which we live.

To find what constitutes optimal human development, we need to identify the factors that most help us reach it. An effective way to do this is to identify factors that fulfil two criteria.

First, those that most significantly improve our well-being. These include health, happiness and strong relationships.

Second, those we pursue as ends in themselves, rather than a means to some further end. These are the ultimate goals of our activities: things we do for their own sake, just because we want to do them. We all desire lives where we have obtained these. The best life for a human being is one in which at least some of these ends have been fulfilled. All the major theories of flourishing, from Aristotle to today, aim to identify these and show us how to reach them.

To illustrate an end in itself, consider the reasons you go walking. You do so as a means to various ends: to reach a destination, exercise or simply because you enjoy walking. If you walk just because you enjoy it, a child might ask you, ‘but why do you want that?’. You could respond that doing things you enjoy makes you happier. Again, the child might ask, ‘but why do you want that?’. It’s now harder to answer, not just because the question is more difficult, but because we’ve reached the end in itself: why wouldn’t you want to be happier?

Happiness is the clearest example of something we pursue for its own sake. We don’t want happiness because it’ll help us reach some further goal; we want it simply because it’s good.

Giving a talk on flourishing on Placencia Beach, Belize, 2021

Theories of flourishing

Aristotle argued that there was only one end in itself: ‘eudaimonia’, which translates to ‘flourishing’ or ‘happiness’. Many great thinkers since have agreed. But in recent decades, researchers have identified several areas of life we pursue for their own sake, and argued that flourishing is best understood as a combination of these.

For example, positive psychology, the scientific study of flourishing, defines flourishing as optimal psychological well-being, consisting of five domains we pursue as ends in themselves which significantly improve our well-being. The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard also identifies five domains, some of which are different to those in positive psychology. Describing this theory of flourishing, Tyler VanderWeele and Tim Lomas from the Human Flourishing Program define flourishing as,

‘the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives’.

‘All aspects of life’ refers to the five domains identified in the Human Flourishing Program’s theory. ‘Contexts’ covers a person’s environment, culture and the time in which they live. For example, if a person has high well-being but lives in a conflict zone or a society in which they’re oppressed, this prevents flourishing.

The eight pillars of human flourishing

Since there are differences across theories of flourishing about the domains that constitute flourishing, an effective way to define flourishing and show how to flourish is to extract all of these areas and find a method for promoting all of them as much as possible. I do this in what follows.

In addition to the two theories of flourishing above, I’ve also looked in particular at the theories of flourishing by UNESCO and the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, and the longest ever study of human life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

From these theories and others, we can identify eight key areas of life that most promote flourishing. Research has shown that these areas significantly improve our well-being. We generally pursue these as ends in themselves.

In what follows, I explain these eight ‘pillars of flourishing’ and describe a method for increasing flourishing by promoting each area. I discuss this research in more detail in this forthcoming book chapter.

Since ‘flourish’ has eight letters, we can use this as an acronym to represent these pillars:

F: Fulfilment

L: Love

O: Optimism and positive emotions

U: Unifying meaning

R: Responsibility

I: Impact

S: States of flow

H: Health

I summarise these in this video.

The eight pillars of human flourishing

1. Fulfilment

Fulfilment has two key senses particularly important for flourishing:

1. Fulfilment of potential

2. Fulfilment in the sense of life satisfaction

We all want to fulfil our potential. Many regard this as the most important aim of life. This is desirable, as long as we use our potential to do good things.

‘Fulfilment’ has a second sense important for flourishing: contentment with our lives. This is sometimes captured in theories of flourishing by ‘life satisfaction’ – for example, by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard.

2. Love

This covers good and close social relationships.

Research shows that relationships have an incredibly powerful impact on our health, happiness and well-being. It’s no exaggeration to say that the strength of our relationships is the most significant predictor of our long-term happiness and well-being.

That’s been the key finding from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked hundreds of people and their families for 87 years. It’s found that relationships are the greatest predictor of happiness, well-being and health. Strong relationships are even better at predicting whether we’ll live a happy and long life than our genes, IQ or social class.

Learn more in this blog and this conversation I had with the study’s Associate Director, Marc Schulz.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

3. Optimism and positive emotions

This encompasses happiness and other positive emotions, such as optimism, joy, laughter and gratitude. We all desire these and they significantly contribute to living a good life.

Gratitude is especially powerful. Experiencing and practising gratitude has been shown to significantly increase happiness and strengthen our relationships, and even help us live longer.

Optimism has also been shown to significantly improve our health and well-being. Optimism is also a skill we can learn. Note, though, that my labelling of this pillar ‘optimism and positive emotions’ isn’t because optimism has greater benefits than all other positive emotions; it’s simply because I needed something suitable to represent ‘O’ in the ‘FLOURISH’ acronym!

4. Unifying meaning

This covers meaning, purpose and mattering.

The first two concern the sense of meaning and purpose we find in our lives and our most important activities, such as our relationships and work. The final concerns how much we feel we matter in our roles at work and how much we feel our work matters. For example, we feel like our work makes a positive difference and we’re not easily dispensable. (I’ve called these ‘unifying’ to bring these three areas together, and to make this fit the acronym!)

‘Mattering’ has been identified as increasingly important in workplace well-being in recent years. This led to it being added to positive psychology’s theory of flourishing.

For a discussion of mattering, see this conversion I had with Zach Mercurio, author of The Power of Mattering (2025), and on mattering in positive psychology, see this conversation I had with Gabriella Kellerman, co-author of Tomorrowmind (2023) with one of the founding psychologists behind positive psychology, Martin Seligman.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

5. Responsibility

This represents good character, which we can develop by building character virtues or strengths.

This also covers building good habits which develop virtues and strengths. For example, building the habit of a strong work ethic develops the virtue of conscientiousness.

Character development is vital for various areas of flourishing, such as fulfilling our potential and reaching happiness. Most importantly, it’s vital for becoming a good person, because a good person is someone with good character virtues who uses them to promote good in the world.

Aristotle emphasised the importance of character for flourishing. Today, neo-Aristotelian theories such as that by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues focus on character as the most important area of flourishing.

6. Impact

This covers meaningful accomplishments.

These range from everyday wins like giving it our all in a morning fitness class to lifetime achievements like landing our dream job. Accomplishments we find meaningful significantly improve our lives in ways important for flourishing, such as eliciting positive emotions and bringing us life satisfaction.

7. States of flow

Flow is the state of optimal attention and performance, where we completely concentrate on a challenging activity that stretches our skills to their limits. You experience flow when you’re ‘in the zone’ playing a sport or so engrossed by a book you can’t put it down. You can experience flow alone or in groups, hence there being multiple ‘states’.

Research has shown that flow has a substantial impact on areas important for flourishing: our health, happiness, sense of meaning in life, psychological well-being, and performance (for a summary, see this forthcoming book chapter of mine).

Flow is one of the five areas of well-being constituting positive psychology’s theory of flourishing. For a description of flow’s connection with flourishing, see this talk of mine.

To learn more about flow and attend free monthly masterclasses on flow, join the free platform I recently co-launched, Flow Lab.

8. Health

This covers mental and physical health, and vitality: the feeling of energy we have in our day to day lives (for example, a person suffering from flu or a hangover has low vitality).

Health is obviously vital for flourishing and is an area most people desire as an end in itself.

How to flourish by promoting each area

The most effective way to improve flourishing is to do the following (which I also explain this in this video):

build all of the eight pillars as much as you reasonably can, without your efforts to build any of them risking significantly depleting any others long-term.

For example, many people prioritise I (Impact), by working extremely hard to accomplish as much as they can. Their work is also a major source of meaning (U) and fulfilment (F) in their lives. So this supports flourishing.

However, they prioritise work so much that it takes a significant toll on their health (H) and relationships (L). Many people worldwide are lonely, chronically sleep deprived and at high risk of burnout primarily because of how much they prioritise work over everything else.

This is an example of how an excessive focus on areas of life important for flourishing depletes other important areas. A highly successful but unhealthy and lonely person isn’t flourishing.

Short-term, such actions don’t threaten a person’s flourishing: there are periods of life when we need to prioritise things that promote flourishing but have a detrimental impact on our health – for example, sleep deprivation while raising a child, or a period of high stress to achieve a meaningful work goal. But long-term, significantly depleting any of the eight areas limits the potential for flourishing. For example, chronic sleep deprivation and stress significantly negatively impact health and vitality, positive emotions, our ability to work and be present in our relationships, and so on.

This is among the reasons flourishing is a long-term state of being. People flourish for substantial periods of their lives, not for a few days or weeks.

Flourishing is relative

There isn’t an objective ‘score’ you need to reach to flourish, nor a precise balance you need to strike across all eight of the areas. People differ in terms of which of the areas they most prioritise, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with prioritising your relationships or health over your work, or vice versa, as long as you don’t prioritise any of these so much that their prioritisation has a significant detrimental impact on any others long-term.

Validated measures on flourishing provide you with useful results, but these shouldn’t be used to conclude that there’s some precise score across some or all of the eight areas you need to reach to flourish. They are, rather, useful measures to identify which areas you should prioritise to improve your well-being, and to assess your growth over time.

I most recommend using the Flourish Measure by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and the PERMA measure by the UPenn Positive Psychology Center. These are both freely available online.

So there isn’t the same objective level nor the same balance across all eight areas we all need to reach to flourish. To flourish, we should aim to reach a good level relative to our condition and situation.

For example, the degree to which our health needs to be good to support flourishing is relative to our condition and situation, such as our stage of life. Many of the factors that enable an elderly person to be in good health are different from those that enable a teenager to be in good health. (It’s noteworthy that research has found that older adults report the highest level of emotional well-being of all age groups, despite their physical health generally being lowest of all age groups.)

This is among the reasons why, as we saw above, VanderWeele and Lomas of the Human Flourishing Program define flourishing as ‘the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good’.

The Takeaway

From research on flourishing we can identify eight key areas of life that most support flourishing. These I call the eight ‘pillars of flourishing’:

F: Fulfilment

L: Love

O: Optimism and positive emotions

U: Unifying meaning

R: Responsibility

I: Impact

S: States of flow

H: Health

I would define flourishing as:

A long-term state of being in which each of these pillars is strong, relative to an individual and their environment.

I use ‘environment’ to cover the time, place and situation in which one lives.

The most effective way to promote flourishing is to build all of the pillars as much as you reasonably can, without your efforts to build any of them risking significantly depleting any others long-term.

Try to do this, but watch out for where your efforts to build any area risk significantly depleting any of the others. When there is this risk, reassess your approach, looking for ways to continue building each area while avoiding this risk.

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [c. 350 BCE], translated by W. D. Ross, revised by J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1984)

• Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, edited & translated by Anthony Kenny (Oxford University Press, 2011)

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness (Rider, 2002 [1990])

• Kristján Kristjánsson, Flourishing as the Aim of Education: A Neo-Aristotelian View (Routledge, 2020)

• Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2011 [2005])

• Christopher Peterson & Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2004)

• Gabriella Kellerman and Martin Seligman, Tomorrowmind: Thrive at Work with Resilience, Creativity and Connection, Now and in an Uncertain Future (Atria Books, 2023)

• Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (Simon and Schuster, 2011)

• Robert Waldinger & and Marc Schulz, The Good Life and How to Live It: Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Tim Lomas & Tyler VanderWeele, ‘The Garden and the Orchestra: Generative Metaphors for Conceptualizing the Complexities of Well-Being’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19: 21: 14544 (2022)

• Jacolyn Norrish et al., ‘An Applied Framework for Positive Education’, International Journal of Wellbeing 3 (2013)

• Martin Seligman & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’, American Psychologist, January 2000

• Tyler VanderWeele, ‘On the Promotion of Human Flourishing’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, 31 (2017)

• Tyler VanderWeele & Tim Lomas, ‘Terminology and the Well-being Literature’, Affective Science (2022)

Peer-reviewed book chapters:

• Jon Beale, ‘What Role Should Human Flourishing Play Among Education’s Aims?’, in Jon Beale & Christina Easton (eds.), The Future of Education: Reimagining Its Aims and Responsibilities (Oxford University Press, 2025)

White papers and research briefs:

• Doret de Ruyter et al., ‘Meaning(s) of Human Flourishing and Education: A Research Brief by the ISEE Assessment’ (UNESCO, 2020).

• Jubilee Centre, Framework for Character Education in Schools, (Third Edition, 2022 [2017]).

Podcasts:

• Flourish FM: a podcast for the good life (referenced above: episodes with Marc Schulz, Gabriella Kellerman and Zach Mercurio)

• Why it’s important to reduce the time you’re spending in meetings

• Two key questions to ask about any meeting

• A five-step method for cutting down your meetings by at least 50%

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What would you do if you had an additional 27 hours a week?

Spend more time with friends and family? Exercise and sleep more? Start that hobby you’ve always longed to try? Read those books that have gathered dust on your shelf for years? Or… all these?

Or, you could work a four-day week. Maybe even a three-day week. And more of that time could be spent doing meaningful work.

Meetings are a huge time suck. Most of us have way too many. And most are a waste of time. Even useful meetings are usually way too long.

Most of us spend far more time than necessary in meetings (credit: iStock photo)

The good news is, there’s an effective method of massively reducing the time you spend in meetings while increasing productivity, efficiency and effectiveness – both for yourself and your team. This method can also improve team-building, even though you reduce the time you spend in team meetings.

Most importantly, getting this time back can significantly improve your health, happiness and well-being, because you can put the time to much better use: investing it in your relationships, health and activities you love.

I’ve developed this method through coaching or training thousands of clients (over 700 of whom I’ve coached one-to-one), many of whom had enormous meeting schedules when we started working together. Some had over 30 hours a week of meetings. Every client who has implemented this method has significantly reduced the time they spend in meetings. Some cut a schedule of over 30 hours of meetings a week down to a maximum of three a week.

That’s a reduction of at least 27 hours a week. Imagine what you could do with an additional 27 hours a week. Sleep deprived? Not any more. More quality time with your loved ones? Plenty. Got time to workout today? Sure. Enough time to finally read War and Peace? Absolutely.

Freeing up more time to do things you love (credit: Jacob Lund)

When we reduce meeting time, we also reduce the time associated with them: scheduling, writing agendas, circulating minutes, following up on actions and so on. In Slow Productivity (2024), Cal Newport points out that we tend to massively underestimate the ‘administrative overhead’ associated with meetings, which can take at least as much time as the meetings. So cutting back on meetings could also get you back much of the time taken up with administrative overhead.

The following method is described for people in a position to make decisions about meetings. For those of you not in this position – for example, it’s up to your boss whether to cancel a meeting – I’ll post a future blog on how to most effectively communicate to the meeting’s decision-maker that this method is followed.

After describing the method, I offer responses to common objections.

Step 1: Cancel all unnecessary meetings

To figure out if a meeting is necessary, ask yourself:

1. Does this meeting need to happen? In other words, will anything bad happen if we don’t meet?

2. Is there a strong chance something very good will happen if we do meet?

If the answer to both is “no”, cancel the meeting.

Step 2: Reduce the length of all meetings

For meetings that remain, ask: What’s the minimum amount of time we need to meet to achieve the meeting’s objective?

There’s rarely a need to meet for longer than half an hour. That’s enough time for a team to make decisions and agree on key actions.

Default all your meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes. Only meet for longer if there’s an exceptionally good reason – for example, it’s your first meeting with a high-stakes client.

Don’t stop there. Any 30-minute meeting can be done in 25. So, if you’ve reduced a meeting to 30 minutes, now reduce it to 25.

Google Calendar has a useful function called ‘Speedy Meetings’, which shortens your preset meeting time (the default time Google Calendar will schedule for meetings) by 5 minutes. So if your preset meeting time is 30 minutes, your meetings will automatically schedule for 25 in your calendar.

‘Speedy Meetings’ in Google Calendar

Don’t stop here, either. If you can reduce a meeting to 25 minutes, you might be able to reduce it to 15. If the meeting is a ‘check in’ with a small team, or it’s to make a decision on an important but not complex issue, you can probably do it in 15.

To identify whether a meeting can be reduced to 15 minutes, ask yourself slightly different versions of the two questions earlier:

3. Will anything bad happen if we reduce this meeting to 15 minutes?

4. Is there a strong chance something very good will happen if we meet for longer?

If the answer to both (3) and (4) is “no”, shorten the meeting to 15 minutes.

That 30-minute meeting has now been halved.

Step 3: Reduce the frequency of all meetings

Many people have recurring weekly meetings for no other reason than it’s common practice or to ‘check in’. These aren’t good reasons to meet.

Meet if there’s a need to: for instance, a problem that can be solved much more effectively over synchronous discussion rather than back and forth asynchronous messages.

Take a look at your recurring meetings. Now ask yourself another variant of the two questions earlier:

5. Will anything bad happen if we only meet half as often?

6. Is there a strong chance something very good will happen if we continue to meet as often as we currently are?

If the answer to both (5) and (6) is “no”, reduce the recurring meeting by half.

So:

• If you meet twice a week, reduce it to once a week.

• If you meet weekly, reduce it to every other week.

• If you meet every other week, reduce it to monthly.

Step 4: Schedule all meetings outside your optimal focus time

What time of day do you focus best?

This is when you absolutely shouldn’t schedule meetings.

Meetings are rarely occasions when we do work that requires our optimal focus or exerts our cognitive capacities to their limit. They’re usually occasions for completing logistical tasks, agreeing or following up on actions, and receiving updates from team members (the majority of which could be completed asynchronously).

Focus best in the mornings? Don’t schedule any morning meetings, unless you have no other option. Protect that time for your most important work.

I focus best in the mornings and prefer to exercise earlier in the day, so I don’t schedule any meetings before 2pm, unless I have no other option. An example of ‘no other option’ would be an important meeting with a client based in Australia, where, given the timezone differences, we’d need to meet in the morning or evening when I’m in the UK.

Step 5: Change the form of all meetings to what saves most time

Only your most important meetings need ever be in person – for example, for off-sites or to meet with new high-stakes clients.

You might also enjoy these meetings more because they’re in person. I often love meeting in person. But face-to-face meetings take much longer, given the commuting and that it’s usually weird to dash off after meeting in person for 30 minutes. So, limit these only to those where there’s excellent reason to meet face-to-face.

Even meetings with your most important clients and colleagues needn’t be in person every time: it’s fine to only occasionally meet face-to-face, and those meetings might be more effective and fun if the expectation isn’t that you meet in person every time.

Meeting in person is often great. But limit it to your most important meetings. And you don’t need to meet in person every time.

Follow this process to change the form of meetings to save time:

1. If the meeting is in-person, ask yourself:

Can it be done over Zoom, without any significant negative impact on outcomes?

2. If the meeting can be done over Zoom, ask yourself:

Can it be done over a phone call, without any significant negative impact on outcomes?

If it can, you can go for a walk, rather than sitting at your screen for yet more hours.

3. If the meeting can be done over a phone call, ask yourself:

Can it be done over an email or message without any significant negative impact on outcomes?

If the answer’s “yes”, you’ve just cancelled the meeting.

Replies to common objections

1. “But… surely reducing meetings will reduce productivity?”

No – it’s more likely to increase productivity.

You’re most productive when you’re doing what Cal Newport calls ‘deep work’: work that requires you to focus, without distractions, for a significant time, on a cognitively demanding task that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limits. The activities you do during deep work, Newport writes, ‘create new value [and] improve your skill’ (Deep Work, p. 3).

Meetings are rarely occasions for deep work. You can do deep work in teams, but this generally requires each team member to work in silence, checking in occasionally for feedback or to contribute a completed sub-task to a task the team is collectively solving. But if the team’s doing that, there’s no need to be in a meeting – they can do this asynchronously, checking in via a communication platform like Slack.

Meetings take time to organise, even if you optimise the process using meeting apps like Calendly (which I highly recommend), and there’s an administrative overhead associated with any meeting. Again, this adds to the time taken away from getting work done, so reduces productivity.

Optimise the process for organising meetings using apps like Calendly

2. “But… meetings are great for team-building”

Some meetings are. Most aren’t. Many are counterproductive for team-building, because the time spent in meetings and the administrative overhead creates additional stress.

Less meeting time gives you time to plan far more effective team-building exercises, like off-sites or staff socials.

If you want a regular time when team members can meet with you or get together, schedule 15-30 minutes every week or two for office hours, where colleagues are free to meet with you or each other if they want to, with no expectation that they have do. Now you’ve given them the autonomy to meet.

Everyone in the meeting will appreciate the additional time they gain from less meetings and the autonomy of being able to check in if they need to.

Time and autonomy. Those are great for team-building, not more required meetings.

You can engage more effectively in team building by reducing meeting time

If you’re in the early stages of launching a business and getting to know your team, regular and reasonably long meetings can be beneficial. But even then, try to keep them as short and infrequent as possible: it’ll improve the team’s efficiency and effectiveness, and in the early stages of a business, everyone’s schedules are even more packed than usual. Again, freeing up as much time as possible will be appreciated by everyone.

3. “But… what’s the point in cutting meetings from 30 minutes to 25 – it only saves five minutes?”

Five minutes is a long time if you’ve got hours of back-to-back meetings. Now everyone at least has a chance to grab a coffee and use the toilet.

These five-minute chunks quickly add up if you’ve got a packed meeting schedule. Getting that back over six 30-minute meetings gives you an additional 30 minutes. That’s time you can use to complete some of the administrative overhead associated with the meetings, which you might otherwise be working late to complete.

In a world where ‘time famine’ has become the norm, getting back five minutes here and there is extremely valuable, and it adds up fast.

4. “But… I can’t possibly reduce my appointments with my clients – they pay me for my time.”

I’m not suggesting this method be applied to commitments such as teaching classes, coaching calls, therapy sessions, giving presentations, etc. For these and various other commitments, a reduction in time usually results in a reduction in value: a client is, for example, paying you to give a presentation for an hour and answer questions for 30 minutes, or coach them for an hour a week, and so on.

This method is to be applied to meetings: occasions where at least two people meet to discuss work-related matters, in person, online or over the phone.

5. “But… I’m not in a position to make decisions about my meetings – my boss is.”

I’ll post a future blog on what you can do to convince your boss to follow the method above.

The takeaway

Everyone complains about not having enough time. Meetings are a massive time suck. We can alleviate time famine by significantly reducing the amount, duration and frequency of meetings.

Try the five-step strategy above to reduce meeting time by at least half. You could get back several hours a week – perhaps even several days.

How much time did you get back following the above method?

Have you found any other strategies effective for reducing meeting time?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about reducing meeting time!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Work Anywhere and Join the New Rich (Crown Publishers, 2009 [2007])Cal Newport, Slow Burnout (Penguin, 2024)

Peer-reviewed articles:Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without

• Hylco Nijp, et al., ‘Systematic review on the association between employee worktime control and work-non-work balance, health and well-being, and job-related outcomes’ (Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 2012)

• Leslie Perlow, ‘The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time’ (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999)

Media articles:

• Caroline Castrillon, ‘How To Reduce Unnecessary Meetings At Work’ (Forbes, 5 Jan 2023)

• Jacqueline Howard, ‘How to fight “time famine” and boost your happiness’ (CNN Health, 28 Feb 2018)

• Ruth Ogden, ‘5 simple, science-backed ways to get more time in your day and beat burnout’ (BBC Science Focus, 11 May 2024)

• Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley & Eunice Eun, ‘Stop the Meeting Madness: How to free up time for meaningful work’ (Harvard Business Review, 2017)

• Bryan Robinson, ‘Is Time Famine Starving You? How To Satisfy Your Hunger For More’ (Forbes, 15 Sept 2019)

Podcasts:

• ‘Why Meetings Suck and How to Fix Them’, Re-Thinking with Adam Grant, 2023

• The ten most important strategies for optimizing your sleep

• Why each strategy is so important

• A five-step method for sleep optimization

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Sleep is vital for all areas of our mental and physical health, well-being and performance. It’s been described as the ‘foundation’ of health and performance, because it impacts every single area of them.

Discussing the relation between sleep, diet and exercise in his 2017 book Why We Sleep, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, Matthew Walker, writes,

Sleep is … the foundation on which the other two health bastions [diet and exercise] sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective.

Andrew Huberman goes further:

Sleep is the foundation of our mental and physical health and performance in all endeavors.

Sleep is a skill, and like all skills, we can be good or bad at it, but it’s also trainable. Given its importance, we should all prioritize building this skill.

Here, I describe the ten most important strategies for optimizing sleep we can extract from current sleep research. These aren’t ranked in order of importance, except for the first two, which research suggests are the most important.

Sleep is a vital skill we can all build (credit: UC Davis Health)

1. Consistency

Arguably the most important sleep habit is to keep your sleep times consistent. Go to bed and wake up as close as possible to the same times every day.

I’ve ranked this as more important than the next strategy, which concerns how much sleep we get, because recent research has found that sleep regularity is more important for health outcomes than sleep duration. The study showed that irregular sleep more strongly predicts our mortality risk than how much sleep we get.

At the end of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker describes twelve strategies for improving sleep. He writes that if we can only do one, focus on consistency.

If, however, you’re sleep deprived from the working week, allow yourself to sleep in over the weekend. A recent study of over 90,000 adults over 14 years showed that catching up on sleep over the weekend is beneficial for our health even if it means sleeping later than usual.

To figure out what time is best for you to go to bed, find out your chronotype: the time of day you naturally feel tired. To get an accurate estimate, do the following:

a. Take the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ).

It takes five minutes. It asks you questions that identify when your melatonin onset is likely to be – the time of night when your brain releases melatonin, the hormone that signals to the body to prepare for sleep.

b. Track your sleep.

A good sleep tracker (such as an Oura Ring or Whoop) will record what your sleep times were. Look for trends, over periods of at least two weeks.

c. Reflect on your own experience.

When do you tend to feel tired and, if you weren’t to set an alarm, when would you tend to wake up? You have a ton of data to draw upon.

On the third, I recommend running an experiment on yourself: if your schedule allows it, for a period of at least two weeks try not setting an alarm and seeing what time you naturally wake up (while keeping your bedtime consistent). Then compare the data with what you gathered from a, b and c.

2. Time

Set your schedule so it’s possible to get at least seven hours of sleep.

Much research has shown that at least seven hours is required by the vast majority of people to maintain good health (see for example this study). Many studies have shown that regularly getting less than seven hours can negatively impact our nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems.

There’s a tiny minority of people with a gene mutation that enables them to fully function on four to six hours of sleep. For everyone else, research recommends at least seven.

Take into account how long it usually takes you to fall asleep. A good sleep tracker will tell you this, under ‘sleep latency’, which is how long it takes you to fall asleep after the lights go out. So, if it usually takes you 15-30 mins to fall asleep and you set an alarm for 7am, go to bed by the latest 11.30pm.

Set your schedule so it’s possible to get at least seven hours of sleep (credit: Sleep Foundation)

3. Light

Get natural light in your eyes as soon as possible after waking. This sets your circadian rhythm for the day. On a sunny day, get 5-10 minutes; on a cloudy day, 15-20.

You want natural light, so either go outside or open a window and look outside (looking through a window will limit the power of natural light). Don’t look directly at the sun. Just being outside will provide far more light than artificial light.

If you wake up before the sun rises, get an artificial light that generates at least 10,000 lux and use for 5-10 minutes (‘lux’ is the term used to measure the amount of light produced by something).

Getting natural light first thing in the morning improves sleep (credit: Alfcermed)

4. Separation

Do very little else in your bedroom other than sleep. Most importantly, don’t use your bedroom as an office.

When we spend a lot of time doing things in our bedroom other than sleep, such as working or watching films, our brains associate our bedroom with other activities, which can make it more difficult to sleep. This can cause sleep issues, and to solve them we then need to break the psychological association we form between our bedrooms and activities other than sleep.

It’s fine to spend a little time doing other things in your bedroom, like reading a novel in bed as you’re going to sleep. And of course it’s fine to have sex in your bedroom! But avoid spending a lot of time doing other things you don’t associate with relaxing, like doing a day’s work, which will happen if your bedroom is also your office.

Several friends of mine have experienced chronic sleep issues and seen sleep coaches. They’ve told me that the first two strategies their coach recommended was this, separation, and the previous strategy, light. (The recommendation they received for this strategy was “do nothing in your bedroom except sleep and have sex”.)

5. Temperature

As we fall asleep, our body temperature falls, and as we wake up, it rises. We sleep better in a moderately cold temperature, because it keeps our body in the cooler state it naturally goes into when we sleep. Optimal temperature is 16-18℃ / 60-65℉.

If you’re not able to set the exact temperature for your room, a decent way of assessing whether your room is cool enough is that you should need the duvet over you to keep you from being cold.

Open the window, turn on the air con, or, best of all, get an Eight Sleep, which will regulate the temperature of your mattress in relation to your body temperature to ensure optimal temperature.

Optimal temperature for sleep is 16-18℃ / 60-65℉ (credit: Southern Seasons)

6. Exercise

Finish your workout at least an hour before you go to bed.

Recent studies have shown that exercising less than an hour before bed negatively impacts sleep. Exercise is great for sleep, as long as we don’t do it too close before bedtime.

It shouldn’t be difficult to implement this – just allow at least an hour before the end of your workout and going to bed.

Exercise is great for sleep, as long as you do it at least an hour before bed (credit: Jacob Lund)

7. Silence

Make your bedroom silent – unless you need white noise to sleep.

Even low-level noise disrupts sleep. Studies have shown that noise as low as 33 decibels can affect sleep quality (for reference, 20-30 DB is about as loud as a whisper, and 40 DB would be a quiet library).

Wear ear plugs if necessary. I take ear plugs whenever I travel, because of the risk of getting to accommodation where there might be noise during the night. I recommend silicone ear plugs, which you can mould to the shape of your ear. If you want to go further, see an audiologist to create moulded ear plugs for you.

8. Substances

I’m going to cover the two most common substances people consume which disrupt sleep: caffeine and alcohol.

If you consume either, the general rule is: the earlier in the day you stop consuming them, the less they’ll impact your sleep. Both disrupt sleep, and caffeine prevents us falling asleep.

Caffeine has an average half life of 5-6 hours. Half life is the time required by our bodies to eliminate half the amount of a substance we’ve consumed. This means that after you consume caffeine, it’ll likely take 10-12 hours for it to leave your body. For some people it can take much longer – research has found it can take up to 19 hours.

So, to increase the likelihood that caffeine has left your body by the time you go to sleep, finish your last caffeinated drink at least 12 hours before you go to bed. If you go to bed at 11pm, finish your last caffeinated drink by 11am.

If that’s too difficult, start with 10 hours. Consuming substances with small amounts of caffeine after this aren’t problematic for sleep: decaf coffee or tea, dark chocolate and so on.

If you drink alcohol, finish drinking as long as possible before going to bed, so your body has more time to metabolize and eliminate it from your system.

Alcohol is a sedative, meaning it makes us feel tired, but it disrupts and impairs sleep quality. The less you drink alcohol, the better, but if you do drink, stop as long as possible before bed. A boozy brunch will negatively impact your sleep less than a boozy dinner.

Finish drinking your final coffee 12 hours before bed (credit: International Comunicaffe)

9. Fluids

Waking up in the night occasionally to use the toilet is fine. But if you wake up several times a night to do this, stop consuming fluids 10 hours after waking and at least 90 minutes before bed.

If you need to drink water beyond those periods, just sip, rather than drink. That’ll quench your thirst while reducing the need to use the toilet.

10. Darkness

Three key points here:

• Keep lights as low as possible at least an hour before bed.

• Don’t look at any screens at least an hour before bed.

• Make your bedroom as dark as possible.

We become more awake in response to light. That’s one of the reasons why strategy 3, light, is important. Light can keep us awake and prevent us falling or staying asleep.

Get blackout curtains and/or an eye mask if you need to make your room darker. Try using extremely dim light or candlelight in the hour before bed.

Take steps to make your room completely dark at night, such as wearing a sleep mask (credit: AleksandarGeorgiev/Getty Images, The Guardian)

How to improve your skills in the ten strategies

To improve your sleep, use the following five-step method.

1. Give yourself a score out of 10 for how well you’re implementing each of the strategies.

10 would be perfect – there’s no room for improvement. For example, for strategy 7, a score of 10 would mean your home is absolutely silent when you sleep such that noise disturbances never happen.

A score of 0 would be terrible, meaning it’d be difficult for it to be worse. For example, for strategy 2, you never make enough time for it to even be possible to get seven hours of sleep – you never go to bed before midnight and set your alarm for 6am every day.

2. Ask yourself, ‘What’s one step I can take to improve my score by one point for that strategy?’.

Think about small, incremental steps, rather than massive improvements. These should be improvements you could make today. For example, if your room isn’t pitch black at night, you could start wearing an eye mask. Or if you tend to have a warm bedroom at night, you could turn the heating off or open the window.

If you haven’t scored 10 for any of the strategies (which is fine – don’t worry), you’ll have 10 steps you now need to take. That’s a lot to try to do at once. The next stage resolves this.

3. Pick at least one and at most three steps to implement today.

Start by prioritizing the first and second strategies, consistency and time, because these are the most important. Then prioritize those where you scored lowest.

I recommend picking a maximum of three steps to implement today because this is going to take work: you’re trying to improve a skill you’ve been building since the day you were born, and you might have entrenched bad habits you need to unlearn.

You want to master each small step before moving onto the next. That’s been shown to be a highly effective strategy for improving learning and skill development.

4. Once you’ve mastered a step, add a new one.

This ensures you’re always working on improving at least one and at most three steps to optimize your sleep. If you’ve chosen three, once you’ve mastered one of those consistently, replace that with a new one you’re going to master.

The measure of ‘mastering’ a step would be doing so consistently over a long period of time – at least a month – with decreasing effort, to the point where it becomes a habit. Once it’s a habit, it’ll be something you do unconsciously, without effort.

But you needn’t reach full mastery before adding a new step – just demonstrating solid, consistent improvement is sufficient for adding a new step. Once you’ve consistently implemented a new step for at least a week, add a new step to those you’re working towards mastering.

5. Track your progress.

Create a method of tracking. This involves two stages. First, track your sleep using a good wearable tracker. I use and recommend the Oura Ring. Whoop is also good. While you could track with an Apple Watch, I don’t recommend getting one because they’re extremely distracting.

Keep a record of important data in your tracker. The wearable will automatically pick up when you’ve exercised, but manually enter other data that’ll impact your sleep, such as if you’re stressed, anxious, jet lagged, or you’ve meditated, had a massage and so on. You can tag all these and other important areas in the tracker, and create your own tags.

Second, keep a record of which good sleep habits and new steps you successfully implemented each day, and how this impacted your sleep. You could do all this in the tracking device, using tags – e.g. ‘didn’t work in bedroom’, if you’re trying to improve your skills in strategy 4, separation. Or you could track elsewhere, such as in a sleep journal, a spreadsheet, the notes app in your phone, your calendar or whichever app or platform you like using.

Two important notes about sleep tracking using technology. First, when going through your data, just look for trends, not one-off scores. It doesn’t matter if you occasionally have nights of sub-optimal sleep – this will happen, especially with factors outside your control such as jet lag and illness. What matters is that your sleep is generally good and improving, moving towards consistently being optimal. (Andrew Huberman recommends aiming for excellent sleep for 80% of the nights of our lives.)

Look for trends over periods of at least two weeks and note what you can improve on from those trends. Oura Ring creates seasonal reports and can send you PDFs of your sleep data. I don’t recommend analysing the data more frequently than every two weeks. Looking for trends over those periods.

Second important note about tracking: if you feel like you sleep well, don’t look at your sleep score until your working day is done. Knowing your sleep score can negatively impact your performance.

For example, you might wake up feeling good, but check your sleep score and it was bad, which can have a negative psychological impact on your performance – you’re now concerned that you’re not sufficiently rested to be able to perform at your best, which now prevents you from doing so. You might now get stressed ahead of the presentation you’re giving this afternoon, concerned that you’ve not had enough sleep and consequently won’t be able to answer difficult questions to the capacity you usually can.

Of course, knowing your sleep score could also have the inverse effect: you wake up feeling groggy, but check your score and see it was actually good, and now feel a bit better. That can benefit your performance. So, only apply this rule when you feel like you’ve slept well.

If you feel like you haven’t slept well, then check your sleep score whenever. That’ll be particularly important if you’re planning to do an intense workout that day, because you’ll be more injury-prone if you haven’t slept well.

The obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep driven by sleep tracking data is called orthosomnia. Beware of this. Use tracking to improve your sleep and learn more about what impacts your sleep. But no piece of technology, no matter how advanced, should tell us how we should feel. If you wake up feeling good, make the most of it – don’t risk harming your performance by checking your sleep score.

Track your sleep, but not obsessively (credit: The Independent)

The takeaway

Sleep is a skill. The ten strategies above are the most important to focus on to optimize your sleep, based on current sleep research. The first two are the most important. Try the five-step strategy for building your skills in mastering each of those strategies.

What steps have you found most effective for optimizing your sleep or any of the ten strategies above?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about optimizing sleep!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• ​Daniel Windred et al., ‘Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration: A prospective cohort study’ (Sleep, 2024)

• Alexandra Shriane et al., ‘Healthy sleep practices for shift workers: consensus sleep hygiene guidelines using a Delphi methodology’ (Sleep, 2023)

• Christopher Barnes & Nathaniel Watson, ‘Why healthy sleep is good for business’ (Sleep Med Rev., 2019)

• Connor Sheehan et al., ‘Quantity, timing, and type of childhood adversity and sleep quality in adulthood’ (Sleep Health, 2020)

• Marco Hafner et al., ‘Why Sleep Matters—The Economic Costs of Insufficient Sleep’ (Rand Health Q, 2017)

• Michael Hamlin et al., ‘The Effect of Sleep Quality and Quantity on Athlete's Health and Perceived Training Quality’ (Front. Sports Act. Living, 2021)

• Katarína Evansová et al., ‘The effect of chronotype and time of assessment on cognitive performance’ (Biological Rhythm Research, 2022)

• Jacques Taillard et al., ‘Sleep timing, chronotype and social jetlag: Impact on cognitive abilities and psychiatric disorders’ (Biochemical Pharmacology, 2021)

• Samuel Jones et al., ‘Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms’ (Nature Communications, 2019)

• Jodi Mindell & Ariel Williamson, ‘Benefits of a bedtime routine in young children: Sleep, development, and beyond’ (Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2018)

• Nathaniel Watson et al., ‘Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: A Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society’ (Sleep, 2015)

• Stijn Massar et al., ‘Working-from-home persistently influences sleep and physical activity 2 years after the Covid-19 pandemic onset: a longitudinal sleep tracker and electronic diary-based study’ (Front. Psychol., 2023)

• Anna Nagele et al., ‘The Subjectivities of Wearable Sleep-Trackers - A Discourse Analysis’ (Association for Computing Machinery. 2022)

• K. G. Baron et al., ‘How are consumer sleep technology data being used to deliver behavioral sleep medicine interventions? A systematic review’ (Behav Sleep Med, 2021)

• Hadi Nobari et al., ‘Overview of the impact of sleep monitoring on optimal performance, immune system function and injury risk reduction in athletes: A narrative review’ (Sci Prog, 2023)

Survey:

• M. Terman et al., ‘AutoMEQ - Your circadian rhythm type’ (New York Psychiatric Institute, 2001)

Peer-reviewed web articles:

• ‘Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency: Diagnosis’ (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 2022)

• ‘About Sleep’ (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024)

• ‘How Sleep Works: How Much Sleep Is Enough?’ (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 2022)

• Eric Suni & Abhinav Singh, ‘How Much Sleep Do You Need?’ (Sleep Foundation, 2024)

• ​Jen Fisher et al., ‘You snooze, you win: Why organizations should prioritize having a well-rested workforce’ (Deloitte Insights, 2019)

Media articles:

• Jeff Haden, ‘Use the Military Method to Fall Asleep Within 2 Minutes, Starting Tonight’ (Inc., 2022)

• Tracey Ramsden, ‘The best sleep aids recommended by experts’ (The Guardian, 22 Oct 2024)

• Matthew Reid, ‘Are sleep trackers accurate? Here’s what researchers currently know’ (The Conversation, 2021)

Podcasts:

• ‘Andrew Huberman’s Toolkit for Sleep’, Huberman Lab, 2021

• The Matthew Walker Podcast

• ‘Guest Series: Dr. Matt Walker: The Biology of Sleep & Your Unique Sleep Needs’, Huberman Lab, 2024

• ‘Sleep and Exercise Pt. 4’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023

• ‘Dr Matthew Walker on sleep for parents of young children’, CognitaSchools, 2019

• ‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 1’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023

• ‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 2’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023

• ‘Sleep and Kids Pt. 3’, The Matt Walker Podcast, 2023

• Why deliberate practice is so effective for mastering skills.

• The key components of deliberate practice.

• How to engage in deliberate practice.

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One of the most effective ways to master a skill is through ‘deliberate practice’. This is a systematic method of effortful, highly focused, goal-oriented practice which has been shown to significantly improve performance and learning.

Deliberate practice was developed in the 1970s by Anders Ericsson, former Professor of Psychology at Florida State University and a renowned expert on the psychology of expertise and performance.

Some of the key strategies involved in deliberate practice (credit: learntrepreneurs)

Deliberate practice involves eight strategies:

1. Break goals into small steps

Set a clear, overall goal for any work session where you’re building a skill or your knowledge. Break that down into a set of clear, small steps.

Each step should function as part of a set of steps leading to the overall goal. Each step should be an incremental increase beyond the previous one, situated just outside your comfort zone.

Breaking down learning into small steps has been shown to be highly effective for improving learning. You can also apply this principle to task completion, by breaking down a task into smaller sub-tasks.

Break skills and tasks down into smaller steps (credit: pixelshot)

2. Repeat

Regularly rehearse areas in need of improvement. Only move onto the next step when you’ve mastered the current one.

3. Focus on what most needs improvement

Focus on areas where improvement is most needed. Avoid practising what you already know well. Identify areas of improvement during your self-reflection time (see strategy 6).

4. More effort = more learning

Research has shown that learning and skill development are most effective when they require high effort. The more effort you make, the more you’ll learn.

Effortful learning has a greater impact on neuroplasticity than less effortful learning, forming new connections in the brain and increasing our intellectual abilities more. If learning requires little effort, it’s likely to be forgotten quickly and only generates surface-level gains.

In this way, learning and skill development are analogous to physical fitness and strength training: the harder you train, the fitter you’ll get, and the heavier the weights you lift, the stronger you’ll get (as long as you recover effectively and use good techniques).

Deliberate practice often won’t be enjoyable while doing it, since it’s hard and involves regular setbacks (see strategy 7). The enjoyment usually comes later, from the satisfaction of having built your skills thanks to sustained effort.

Always situate the step in your learning process just outside your comfort zone, so you’re constantly having to make high effort to master the step you’re on.

More effort = more learning (Credit:Getty Images)

5. Concentrate

The most effortful learning always requires our optimal focus. So, create an environment that facilitates your highest level of concentration.

Find the conditions that help you reach optimal focus (credit: Matt Maude)

To create a high-focus environment, consider three factors:

a. Time

The time of day you focus best, and how long you maintain optimal focus when you work.

For example, you might focus best first thing in the morning for a period of about three hours, divided into 50-minute periods with 10-minute breaks in between. In a previous blog I described how a friend of mine structures his deliberate music practice into 15-minute periods with two minutes break between each. Test and track what works best for you.

Music practice is most effective when it’s deliberate (performing live at Boomtown Fair, 2018)

b. Environment

Optimize your physical environment for concentration. Work in a room dedicated to work, and never work in your bedroom (it negatively impacts sleep). Remove any object that could be a physical distraction, such as a cookie jar, a to do list of items unrelated to what you’re focusing on, and – most importantly – your phone. Put your phone in a different room: research shows that performance improves when we do this.

c. Digital distractions

I’m going to emphasize the previous point because it’s so important: put your phone in a different room.

Smartphones are the greatest source of distraction ever invented, and none of us are immune to their capacity for distraction. If you still find you get distracted by checking your phone even with it in a different room, get a kSafe: a time-locked, thick plastic box you can lock your phone in for a set amount of time, from several seconds to 10 days, and the only way you get it out is to smash the box open.

On your computer, use the following apps to reduce digital distractions: Freedom, SelfControl for Mac, and Boomerang (available for Gmail and Outlook).

Create an environment that optimizes focus and efficiency, like an exam hall (credit: Getty Images)

6. Self-reflect

Regularly self-assess your performance and reflect on areas where improvement is most needed. Do this after each focused session and ahead of the next one.

If deliberate practice is part of your daily work routine, I recommend spending time after your deliberate practice session assessing your performance and planning tomorrow’s session. Ideally, use time blocking to plan tomorrow’s session, for maximum productivity.

Regularly review your own performance (credit: Getty Images)

7. Persevere

Since you’re trying to do things you cannot yet do, deliberate practice will involve regular failure, which you’ll need to persist through.

This will be difficult, but has important benefits. First, it shows you’re consistently pushing yourself outside your comfort zone (supporting strategy 4), which shows you’re maximizing your capacity for learning and skill development.

Second, the setbacks we experience when trying to meet goals provide us with extremely useful information that enables us to change our learning and practice methods to more effectively meet our goals. This can also build our metacognition and helps cultivate a growth mindset.

As Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel put it in their seminal 2014 book on the science of learning, Make It Stick, striving ‘builds expertise’ (p. 201), because it provides ‘essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery’ (p. 226). Setbacks should be interpreted as signs of effort rather than failure. This helps us build a growth mindset.

8. Get expert feedback

You need regular feedback, ideally from an expert, on where improvement is needed and how to most effectively improve.

This feedback can also improve your skills in deliberate practice and learn how to give yourself effective feedback during self-reflection (strategy 6). Anders Ericsson wrote that to reach expertise, you’ll need ‘a well-informed coach’, to ‘guide you through deliberate practice’ and ‘help you learn how to coach yourself’.

My sister, Liz, giving expert feedback on how to create ceramics (credit: Make Bristol)

For some skills, the feedback is most effective when it’s immediate. For example, in musicianship, sports and other physical activities such as yoga, immediate feedback enables you to make rapid and significant progress and avoid learning bad habits you’ll need to unlearn later. Seek out immediate, expert feedback wherever possible.

Some skills have a significant subjective element to the effectiveness of their methods, and in these cases immediate feedback is less important. Take writing, for example. A writer might spend hours working on a new piece, during which time they pace around the room, print out their work to edit it, read it aloud to themselves and so on. All of these might be highly effective strategies for some writers, to varying degrees. What they’ll most need feedback on is the draft, which they can send to an expert writer, perhaps their writing coach.

They could, of course, get feedback on the writing process too, and this can always be improved, but it’s less clear why or how a writer should change their method of pacing, printing, editing and so on than a yogi should change their yoga pose or a footballer should change the position of their foot when they cross the ball. In the latter cases, the skills can be improved immediately, but given how widely varied effective writing methods are, it’s more difficult to identify when immediate feedback should be offered or what it should be offered on.

Indications of less effective practice

By contrast with the above, less effective, non-deliberate practice often involves:

1. mindlessly repeating tasks;

2. a feeling of ease due to lack of effort;

3. staying within your comfort zone;

4. a lack of specific goals;

5. practising what you already know or understand well;

6. focusing on enjoying the practice rather than improving performance.

These are six hazards you should watch out for when practising a skill or engaged in deep learning.

The Takeaway

Experts and those on the path towards becoming experts employ the eight strategies above. They consistently challenge themselves with increasingly difficult tasks; analyse their performance to identify areas that most need improvement; refine their techniques using feedback from other experts; and practise with high focus and effort.

The best performers — whether in sports, music, science, or business — employ these strategies to continuously refine their skills.

What skills or areas of learning do you use deliberate practice to improve? What strategies have you found most effective for deliberate practice?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about deliberate practice, learning or skill development!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

Recommended resources

Books:

• Anders Ericsson & Robert Poole, Peak: How all of us can achieve extraordinary things (Penguin, 2016)

• Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Duncan Mascarenhas and Nickolas Smith, ‘Developing the performance brain: decision making under pressure’, Performance Psychology, 2011

Media and web articles:

• Kristen Duke, Adrian Ward, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos, ‘Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking’, Harvard Business Review, 20 March 2018

• K. Anders Ericsson, Michael Prietula and Edward Cokely, ‘The Making of an Expert’, Harvard Business Review, 2007

• William Park, ‘How to master new skills with “deliberate practice”’, BBC Worklife, 2019

• Farnam Street, ‘The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide’ (accessed 2025)

Blogs:

• Jon Beale, ‘How to Increase Your Productivity Using Time Blocking’, How to Flourish #3, 7 Feb 2025

• Jon Beale, ‘Metacognition’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 22 June 2021

• Jon Beale, ‘Four Learning Strategies to Make Learning Stick’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 23 March 2021

• Jon Beale, ‘Don’t Just Learn, Overlearn’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 28 Jan 2020

• James Clear, ‘Deliberate Practice: What It Is and How to Use It’, jamesclear.com (accessed 2025)

• James Clear, ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice’, jamesclear.com (accessed 2025)

• The powerful impact relationships have on our health, happiness and well-being

• Why our ‘social health’ and ‘social fitness’ are so important

• Effective strategies for building and strengthening relationships

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Research shows that relationships have an incredibly powerful impact on our health, happiness and well-being. So powerful, in fact, that it’s no exaggeration to say that the strength of our relationships is the most significant predictor of our long-term happiness and well-being.

Findings from the world’s longest study of human life

The longest study of human life is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938. Over the past 87 years it has tracked hundreds of individuals and their families over their entire lifetimes across three generations. It’s now studying the descendants of the original participants, and is today tracking the lifetimes of over 2,000 people. The study’s aim is to find out what makes people flourish: which factors predict a long, healthy, happy life.

The study’s key finding is that the greatest predictor of happiness, well-being and health is the quality of our relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to be happy and fulfilled, and to live healthier, longer lives. Strong relationships are even better at predicting whether we’ll live a happy and long life than our genes, IQ or social class.

Social connection has incredible benefits for our health, happiness and well-being (credit: Getty Images Signature)

In a recent book on the study, The Good Life (2023), the book’s authors and the study’s current directors, Drs. Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, write that,

good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-[seven] years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living … it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. (The Good Life, p. 10.)

They also write that ‘relationships seem to be the key to a flourishing life’ (p. 17). Close social relationships have been identified as one of the key predictors of human flourishing. These are included in every major theory of flourishing, such as the theories put forward by positive psychology and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. Of all the factors that predict our happiness, well-being and health, good relationships stand out for their power and consistency in supporting each of these pillars of a good life (p. 20).

See this conversation I had with Marc Schulz about the study.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

The ways relationships improve our health

The study has found that social connection reduces our risk of depression, diabetes and heart disease. It increases the likelihood of surviving in any year of life by more than 50% (p. 47). Study participants who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at 80 (p. 23). Relationship satisfaction at age 50 is an even better predictor of health at age 80 than cholesterol levels.

Close relationships reduce stress and help us manage stress, because they provide us with emotional support. For example, if you’ve had a long and difficult day but you have someone you can talk to at home or over the phone afterwards, it can help you calm down and relax, regulating your nervous system.

Close relationships are great for managing stress (credit: Getty Images Signature)

What other studies on relationships have shown

Many other studies have also shown that good relationships are crucial to our mental and physical health, and the longevity of our healthspan and lifespan.

Social connection is even more important for our health than diet or exercise. Meta-analyses have found that exercise decreases our risk of death by 23-30% and diet by up to 24%, but a large social network decreases our risk of death by 45%.

Good relationships even help us recover more quickly from injury. Research has shown that the speed at which a married person heals from a wound is correlated with the quality of their marriage. In one experiment, study participants were given a small puncture wound in their arm. Those who reported being in more satisfying and lower-conflict marriages healed more quickly than those who reported being in unsatisfying and higher-conflict marriages.

Good relationships even help us recover more quickly from injury (credit: Studio Spain)

In her recent book The Art and Science of Connection (2024), social health expert Kasley Killam describes research showing that people with a strong sense of belonging are 2.6 times more likely to report good or excellent health, but people who lack social support are up to 53% more likely to die from any cause.

See this conversation I had with Kasley about connection and social health.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

Dr. Marisa Franco, one of the world’s leading experts on social connection and author of Platonic (2022), describes research showing that out of 106 factors that influence depression, having someone to confide in is the strongest preventative factor.

See this conversation I had with Marisa about connection and friendship.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

Which types of relationships are most good for us?

The Harvard Study has found that relationships of all kinds benefit us. This includes our ‘weak tie’ relationships with our acquaintances, such as with our neighbours, the players in our weekend sports club and our local baristas. All of these contribute to the sense of community and belonging which support our happiness, well-being and health.

The most significant relationships, though, are with those we can rely on to support us anytime. The study asks participants the following question: “Who could you call in the middle of the night if you’re sick or scared?”. Positive psychology, the scientific study of human flourishing, asks a similar question: “Who could you call, anytime of day or night, if you need help?”. Having at least one person like this in your life significantly improves your happiness, health and well-being.

Who would you call at such times? The person you’re thinking of is likely someone with whom you have a strong relationship. Of all your relationships, nurture these the most.

How to build your social health and fitness

We often talk about physical and mental health, and often about physical fitness. But we rarely talk about social health or social fitness.

Killam defines ‘social health’ as the dimension of well-being that stems from relationships. Waldinger and Schulz define ‘social fitness’ as the ability to engage in healthy and productive personal and professional relationships. Killam argues that we should prioritize our social health as much as our physical and mental health, and Waldinger and Schulz argue that social fitness is ‘massively important’ – as important for our health and well-being as physical fitness (The Good Life, p. 25).

Here’s steps you can take right away to build your social health and fitness:

1. Make contact with someone important in your life

Waldinger and Schulz recommend the following exercise. Think of a friend or family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Pick up your phone now and send them a message to say something simple, like, “I was just thinking about you and wanted to check in – how are you?”.

Small actions like this, they write, ‘can create long-term ripples of well-being’.

This will be someone you’re grateful to have in your life. Perhaps they’ve done something kind for you for which you’re thankful. If so, you could go further and write them a gratitude letter, which will have profound benefits for the well-being of both of you.

2. Set connection goals

Killam recommends we set ‘connection goals’, just like we’d set career goals. For example, what’s a trip you’ve always wanted to go on which you could schedule sometime over the next year with a friend, family member or your partner? What’s a hobby a friend has which you’ve always wanted to try, or a hobby you have which you could invite a friend to do with you?

These goals can help us build new relationships as well as strengthen existing ones.

Try a new hobby with others, or invite others to join you on one of your hobbies (credit: Jacob Lund)

3. Talk to a stranger

Here’s a simple strategy for building new relationships that has been shown to increase happiness: strike up a conversation with someone new.

A study in Chicago asked train and bus commuters during their morning commute to either strike up a conversation with the person next to them, sit in solitude or do whatever else they usually do – like listen to music or scroll social media. The people who talked to the people next to them reported having a more pleasant commute and feeling significantly happier during their journey than those who didn’t.

Other experiments with commuters using buses and taxis, and with people sitting in waiting rooms, have found similar results.

4. Establish social routines with your loved ones

Going for lunch or a walk, grabbing coffee or just having a phone call once a month can make a real difference to building and sustaining relationships. Try turning it into a routine: coffee on the final Friday or lunch on the final Sunday of every month, or an annual get-together to go to an event or watch a sports match.

5. Treat your social fitness like your physical fitness

Improving physical fitness takes regular practice. Social fitness is the same. To create new relationships or strengthen existing ones, we need to be intentional about building them and nurture them regularly.

The directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development argue that social fitness is as important for our health as physical fitness (credit: The Independent)

For some relationships it needn’t be daily, weekly or even monthly – seeing some people in our lives every few months or even once a year can be just the right amount for that kind of relationship. We just need to avoid losing touch altogether.

As well-being and relationships expert Dr. Rick Hanson points out in his recent book Making Great Relationships (2023), thousands of scientific studies have shown that relationships are made rather than given. And just as we can make ourselves more physically fit through exercise, we can do the same to become more socially fit with effective practices, such as those described above.

See this conversation I had with Rick about how to build relationships.

Artwork by Kelly Malka

The takeaway

Investing time in building your relationships is one of the best investments you can make for improving your happiness, health and well-being. Try the strategies above for creating new relationships or strengthening existing ones.

What impact have you noticed relationships have on your well-being? Have you tried any of the strategies above, or others for building relationships?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about how to build relationships!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Marisa Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends (G. P.Putnam’s Sons, 2022)

• Rick Hanson, Making Great Relationships: Simple Practices for Solving Conflicts, Building Connection and Fostering Love (Rider, 2023)

• Kasley Killam, The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier (HarperCollins, 2024)

• Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing – and How to Achieve Them (Nicholas Brearley Publishing, 2011)

• Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, ‘Marriage, Divorce, and the Immune System’, Am Psychol., 2018

• Zeljko Pedisic & Nipun Shrestha et al., ‘Is running associated with a lower risk of all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality, and is the more the better? A systematic review and meta-analysis’, Br J Sports Med., 2020

• Martin Seligman & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’ (American Psychologist, 2000)

• Zianglan Zhang & Xiao-Ou Shu et al., ‘Cruciferous vegetable consumption is associated with a reduced risk of total and cardiovascular disease mortality’, Am J Clin Nutr., 2011

Media and web articles:

• Nicholas Epley & Juliana Schroeder, ‘The surprising benefits of talking to strangers’, BBC, 12 June 2019

• Ian Leslie, ‘Why your “weak-tie” friendships may mean more than you think’, BBC, 3 July 2020

• Liz Mineo, ‘Good genes are nice, but joy is better’, Harvard Gazette, 11 April 2017

• Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz, ‘What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life’, The Atlantic, 19 Jan 2023

• Alice Walton, ‘Talk to a Stranger: It’ll Make You Happier’, Chicago Booth Review, 2 Dec 2014

Blogs:

• Jon Beale, ‘How to Increase Your Happiness and Well-Being through Gratitude’, How to Flourish, 25 Jan 2025

Podcasts:

• ‘The Science and Friendship of Flourishing, with Dr. Marisa Franco’, Flourish FM, 22 Nov 2022

• ‘Digging into How to Build Relationships, with Dr. Rick Hanson’, Flourish FM, 28 May 2024

• ‘The Art and Science of Social Connection, with Kasley Killam’, Flourish FM, 3 Sept 2024

• ‘Lessons from the World’s Longest Study on Happiness, with Dr. Marc Schulz’, Flourish FM, 22 March 2023

• How to time block effectively

• Why time blocking increases productivity

• Benefits of time blocking for overcoming procrastination, increasing learning and skill development, and improving time management and planning skills

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Imagine you have important work to do tomorrow that requires your complete concentration. You’ve cleared most of your morning of other commitments so you can devote a couple of hours to this – say, from 10am til midday.

You have a vague idea of what you need to do: it might be to complete your business plan, draft chapter three of your book, or prepare the slide deck for a presentation you’re giving this afternoon. You’ve done tasks like this before, so you have a pretty clear idea of the process you should follow to get it done efficiently.

To ensure focus during this time, you’ve turned your phone off and blocked incoming email (if you don’t already do this, try Boomerang). You’ve also blocked all social media and other distracting websites (using an app like SelfControl).

Optimized for productivity, it seems (credit: Burst)

You had a reasonably productive session, but you didn’t complete the task and now you need to continue working through your lunch break to get it done in time for this afternoon. You complete the task shortly before 1pm, grab a quick snack and head into a packed afternoon of meetings, in one of which you have to present the work you did that morning.

How could the above process be improved? You cleared your schedule to focus on this task. You’d slept well and felt energized and focused that morning. You knew what you had to do and you’d done this kind of task before. You had a clear goal for the session. You avoided distractions and even used distraction blocking apps to help you. It sounds like an optimal process, yet the work still took almost 50% longer than you estimated. (This is often because of a common form of cognitive bias called the planning fallacy, discussed below).

Where did the time go? (Credit: Getty Images)

Many of us have been in similar situations. It’s extremely frustrating when it seems you did everything you could to optimize a process yet didn’t achieve the desired result. Fortunately, there’s a highly effective way to significantly improve the above process and our productivity in general, thanks to the excellent work of Cal Newport. It’s called time blocking.

What is time blocking?

Time blocking is a productivity method where you plan every minute of your working day. Newport put forward this method in 2013 and developed it in his 2016 book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. He developed it further in 2020, in the Time Block Planner.

Time blocking: planning every minute of your working day (credit: Cal Newport)

Time blocking doesn’t require planning every single minute. Time blocking an hour of work doesn’t mean you have to create sixty individual notes for each minute of the hour. But it does mean that you account for every minute of your day when you plan your schedule, rather than just planning which tasks you’ll do without assigning time constraints to them.

Imagine that the goal for your two-hour morning work session is to write the first draft of a short media article – say, a 1,000-word op ed – which you’ll re-draft and finish the following day. You’re clear on your overall goal: ‘write draft of article’. You sit down to work. Now what?

Where do I start? Where next? (Credit: Volodymyr Shtun)

There are many places you could begin, some of which aren’t obviously any better than some others, and their effectiveness will be relative to the writer’s ways of working. Some writers would start by planning out the article in clear detail; others by brainstorming everything they already know about the topic; others would just dive in and write a rough draft based on their current knowledge, and once that’s complete, figure out what remains to be done. Each of these approaches could be planned out and broken down into a set of time-bound goals, so the steps involved in completing the task in the most efficient way are mapped out ahead of time, in sequence.

Planning with time-bound steps (credit: Pranithan Chorruangsak)

The first step in time blocking is to take the overall goal – ‘write draft of article’ – and break it down into a set of smaller, ordered goals. Imagine you map this out the day before the work session. Breaking down that goal into such a set might look like this:

1. List article requirements (pitch, length, tone, context, aims).

2. Brainstorm initial ideas for article based on current knowledge.

3. Use ideas in (2) to map out tentative three-part structure (intro, main body, conclusion).

4. Use structure in (3) to map out additional three-part sub-structure for main body.

5. Check whether I need to do any additional research to complete article, and if so, list what this is likely to be.

6. Draft introduction.

7. Draft conclusion.

8. Plan tomorrow’s completion session.

The morning’s session now has a much clearer structure than it had with only the single overall goal. You now know exactly what you should do during the session ahead of time, the sequence of steps is clear, and you’ve thought about how you’ll proceed through the sequence ahead of starting.

This process is not yet time blocked, though. To time block it, we need to assign an estimated amount of time to each step. You could time block the sequence over two hours as follows:

1. List article requirements (pitch, length, tone, context, aims). (5 mins)

2. Brainstorm initial ideas for article based on current knowledge (30 mins)

3. Use ideas in (2) to map out tentative three-part structure (intro, main body, conclusion). (10 mins)

4. Use structure in (3) to map out additional three-part sub-structure for main body. (10 mins)

5. Check whether I need to do any additional research to complete article, and if so, list what this is likely to be. (10 mins)

6. Draft introduction. (25 mins)

7. Draft conclusion. (25 mins)

8. Plan tomorrow’s session. (5 mins)

How long should you estimate for each block? Be ambitious but realistic. It should be possible to complete the task in the time you estimate, but only by working at your optimal level of efficiency and focus.

Think of time blocked work like sitting an exam over those two hours, in which you’ll need to work at your maximum level of performance to answer all the questions in time. This is one of the ways time blocking can generate ‘a massive amount of productivity’, as Newport puts it.

Create an environment that optimizes focus and efficiency, like an exam hall (credit: Getty Images)

If it helps, you could also go a step further and create sub-steps for longer blocks of time, so the process is clearer for that block. The longest step above is the second one, brainstorming, to which 30 minutes have been allocated. You could subdivide that as follows:

2a. Brainstorm key ideas for article theme based on current research. (10 mins)

2b. Rank ideas for article theme using requirements in (1) as criteria for the ranking. (10 mins)

2c. Pick top ranked idea as theme to focus on and bullet point key areas to cover in that theme. (10 mins)

You needn’t go into this level of granularity, though. Newport describes his process of time blocking as less granular. Just plan to a level of detail where it’s clear:

a. what you should be doing each minute throughout the whole process, and

b. how long it should take to complete each step in the total allotted time (with you working at maximum capacity).

Cal Newport’s process of time blocking (credit: Cal Newport)

How long does it take to plan a time-blocked day?

Planning your day to the minute might seem like an unnecessarily detailed level of planning which will take so long that you won’t save time overall. But it doesn’t take long: Newport writes that it takes him ‘ten to twenty minutes every evening’ to plan his time-blocked schedule for the next working day. I schedule 30 minutes at the end of every day for planning my next working day using time blocking and wrapping up the current working day.

You could make planning much more efficient using ChatGPT or another AI tool (such as Motion). A friend of mine, who’s a musician I’ve played many gigs with (this was among the most fun ones), recently showed me how he uses ChatGPT-4o to plan his entire daily schedule, including time blocking parts of his day for music practice.

He’s trained ChatGPT to learn his preferences for time blocking his practice, into blocks of fifteen minutes of deliberate practice followed by two-minute breaks over two hours, repeated twice each day, so he can do four hours of deliberate music practice every day. ChatGPT produces a daily schedule, including these time blocks, and he then manually adds specific details for what he’ll focus on during each fifteen-minute block. ChatGPT then exports the schedule as a file he can import into Google Calendar, and his calendar populates with the schedule, including the time blocks. This whole process can be completed in only a few minutes.

You could use ChatGPT in this way for any repeatable task where you follow a schedule, such as research, language study or daily writing sessions. I’m now learning how to use ChatGPT for planning time blocking.

AI can significantly reduce how long it takes to plan your schedule (credit: studioroman)

If you don’t use AI to help create your schedule, I recommend starting off by setting aside 30 minutes to plan your next working day with time blocking, as you start building this as a daily habit. As you master it, try to cut this down to 15 minutes. Once you’ve mastered that, you could get it down to even less. You’ll be able to get it down to much less using ChatGPT or another AI tool.

How effective is time blocking?

I’m not aware of any randomized controlled trials on time blocking, but there is much anecdotal evidence to support its effectiveness. Everyone I’ve trained to use time blocking as part of their work routine has seen a significant increase in their productivity whenever they’ve done it (and I’ve now coached or trained over a thousand clients, over 700 of whom I’ve coached one-to-one). Newport estimates that it generates a 50-100% increase in productivity:

‘Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.’

He writes that ‘time blocking is the secret to [his] productivity’ and that, in his experience,

‘time blockers accomplish roughly twice as much work per week as compared to those who use more reactive methods, and enjoy a much clearer separation between work and non-work time, significantly reducing professional stress and anxiety.’

‘Reactive methods’ of working are those where you structure your day to respond quickly – perhaps immediately – to tasks that emerge throughout the day, such as requests from meetings, emails or other communication, and decide which tasks to do and when to do them based on those requests.

Reactive methods sometimes involve little to no planning of the time allocated to tasks – a person might sit down to work and the first thing they do is open their email inbox, respond to new emails and complete the associated tasks in those emails, and then only do the things on their list for the day once the tasks in their new emails have been completed. If more tasks emerge through the day, little progress, if any, will be made accomplishing the tasks in the original list.

Reactive methods are far less productive than time blocking (credit: Getty Images)

Time blocking is far more effective than reactive methods. So the additional time spent planning is typically gained back very quickly by the significant increase in productivity over a time blocked day.

Other common questions about time blocking

Which time should you time block?

The primary time should be your focused work time, which Newport calls your periods of ‘deep work’. During this time you can focus on your most important work and you have more freedom to plan how you’ll use the time.

Credit: thewriting.dev

When should you plan time blocking?

Create your time blocked schedule the day before you do the task. This way, you’re separating planning from execution, knowing ahead of time what you need to do, in what order and in what timings.

I recommend doing it at the end of your working day. That way, you know exactly what time you can time block the following day, since it’s less likely you’ll receive requests for meetings and so on which will impact your schedule the following day than it would if you did your planning earlier in the day. You want to avoid as much as possible having to change the schedule if an unexpected commitment arises.

How do I keep track of timings?

To avoid constantly clock watching, you could set up a set of alarms or an interval timer to follow the timings you’ve scheduled. I recommend doing these on a computer rather than a phone, because you want your phone well away from you while you’re focusing – ideally off and in a different room. Phones are the greatest source of distraction we’ve ever known, and none of us are immune to their distractive capacities.

Just search online for ‘interval timer’ and you’ll find free timers (like this one), and you could enter the time blocks as separate intervals into the timer.

Working with time-bound goals (credit: Getty Images)

But won’t tracking my time interrupt my focus?

No. There are many activities in which people are constantly aware of the time yet reach a state of complete concentration – often even a flow state. Think of professional chess players, constantly aware of the clock and stopping it after each move. Or think of students sitting an exam, basketball players with seconds left to win the game, or athletes trying to break a new record.

For answers to other questions about time blocking, see this episode of Newport’s podcast.

Note: you probably already time block, sometimes

If time blocking sounds unusual, note that you probably already do it for some tasks. For a minority of tasks, we plan our time right down to each minute.

Think for instance of a high-stakes presentation you have to give as part of a job interview. You’re told you have 15 minutes to give the presentation. You really want the job. You’ll likely plan the amount of time it’ll take you to explain each slide in your slide deck, to make sure you cover each part of the presentation within the allotted time without rushing. Some slides will take you around a minute to explain, others two, others three. You’ll have made reliable estimates based on rehearsing the presentation ahead of the interview. You’ve planned this task to the minute.

We time block in some areas of our lives already (credit: Getty Images Signature)

Some activities are even planned down to the second. Go to any good fitness class and they’ll time the activities within the total period of the class, usually 45 minutes to an hour, to the number of seconds within each minute. For example, high intensity interval training classes often involve doing an exercise for 45 seconds with 15 seconds of rest, repeating those sets several times, then taking a longer break for a couple of minutes, and then doing another round of different exercises to the same timing. The timings are planned to the second.

A fitness instructor’s entire daily schedule might consist of classes structured in this way. So, it’s possible for the majority of a working day to be planned out in this level of granularity.

Fitness classes: time blocked to the second (credit: The Independent)

For time blocking your whole working day, consider every part of your working day like a slide in a long slide deck or a fitness class in a series of classes. You have estimated timings for each part of the work you need to stick to if you’re going to complete all the steps in your list by the end of the day.

Additional benefits of time blocking

Here are three additional benefits of time blocking:

1. overcoming procrastination;

2. increasing learning and skill development;

3. improving planning and time management skills.

Overcoming procrastination

One of the reasons we procrastinate is because we feel overwhelmed by a task and consequently avoid doing it. When we feel this way, we’re sometimes tempted to do something else which is less overwhelming.

For example, we might put off writing an essay or completing a tax return because it’s a huge task which will take a long time, and instead, we reply to a bunch of emails. Some people call this ‘productive procrastination’, since we’re doing things we need to do, but not the most important things.

Why is it easier to reply to emails than to do the bigger and more important tasks? One of the reasons is that replying to emails involves several small goals, and we’re clear about what we need to do to complete each one.

One way to overcome procrastination is to change the form of the bigger task to make it more like the form of tasks with smaller goals, such as replying to emails. This can be done by breaking down a larger task into a set of smaller ones, each with its own shorter deadline.

In behavioural psychology this process is called ‘shaping’. Time blocking involves shaping, and can therefore help overcome procrastination.

Breaking tasks down into smaller ones (credit: pixelshot)

Increasing learning and skill development

Research has shown that we learn better when we break down what we need to learn into smaller steps. Breaking down a task into smaller sub-tasks, each of which constitutes a step along the path towards building expertise, is one of the components of Anders Ericsson’s influential theory of deliberate practice: a systematic method of effortful, highly focused, goal-oriented practice which has been shown to improve performance. As described above, a friend of mine uses time blocking to map out his schedule for deliberate music practice.

Learning new material in small steps with practice after each step is one of Barak Rosenshine’s influential ‘Principles of Instruction’ (2010). These principles were based on research from three areas: cognitive science, particularly on how the brain acquires and uses new information; studies in which learning strategies were taught to students; and observations of ‘master teachers’ – teachers whose students made the greatest gains in achievement tests. See this blog of mine for an overview of Rosenshine’s principles.

Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’ (2010) (credit: Oliver Caviglioli)

The process through which our minds divide information into smaller pieces is known as ‘chunking’ in cognitive psychology. The smaller ‘chunks’ of information are easier to retain in our working memory.

Our working memory is quite small – we can only hold or process a small amount of information in it at once. Each item in our working memory contributes to our cognitive load: the information processing or cognitive effort required to perform a task. If our cognitive load becomes too high, we restrict our capacity to process more information or learn anything new.

Cognitive Load Theory (credit: Barefoot TEFL Teacher)

Improving planning and time management skills

We often underestimate how long it’ll take us to complete a task, despite knowing that it’s often taken us longer to complete similar tasks in the past. This is a common form of cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy.

Research has identified several reasons this happens. One is that when we focus on a task, we tend to ignore our previous experience of how long it has taken us to do similar tasks.

Another reason is that we often overestimate our efficiency, which is related to another common type of cognitive bias, optimism bias. Another common form of cognitive bias can also exacerbate the planning fallacy, the Dunning-Kruger effect: our tendency to overestimate our skill and underestimate our lack of skill in some area. In the case of planning, the skill we may overestimate is our efficiency – how quickly we can complete a particular task.

Time blocking helps us counteract the planning fallacy and the negative impact of these other cognitive biases on our time management and planning skills. This is because we have to make realistic time predictions for how we will complete tasks based on structured, time-bound steps.

To improve your skills in time blocking, regularly review your progress in meeting your time blocks and recalibrate your time estimates for them accordingly.

For an excellent overview of the planning fallacy, see this doctoral thesis by my friend, Dyedra Morrissey, lecturer at Oxford University.

The takeaway

Time blocking is a highly effective productivity method that can be quickly and easily implemented. It can also improve learning and skill development, build time management and planning skills, and reduce procrastination. Using AI to plan time blocking can make the planning process much quicker. Time blocking is something we already do in some areas of our lives.

Try time blocking using the method above. I’ve linked resources below.

Have you tried time blocking, and if so, how did you find it? How much do you estimate it increased your productivity? What’s your system for time blocking? Have you noticed any additional benefits?

I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments, or any other thoughts you have about time blocking!

drjonbeale.com | @drjonbeale

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Recommended resources

Books:

• Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central Publishing, 2016)

• Cal Newport, The Time Block Planner (second edition) (Penguin, 2023)

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin & Johanna Peetz, ‘The Planning Fallacy: Cognitive, Motivational, and Social Origins’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2010

• Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin & Michael Ross, ‘Exploring the “Planning Fallacy”: Why People Underestimate their Task Completion Times’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994

• Gary Jones, ‘Why Chunking Should be Considered as an Explanation for Developmental Change before Short-Term Memory Capacity and Processing Speed’, Front Psychol. 2012.

• Barak Rosenshine, ‘Principles of Instruction’ (2010), originally published by the International Academy of Education, republished in 2012 as ‘Principles of Instruction: Research-based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know’, in American Educator.

• Tali Sharot, ‘The Optimism Bias’, Current Biology, 2011

• Dominic Shibli & Rachel West, ‘Cognitive Load Theory and Its Application in the Classroom’, Impact, 2018

• Mirko Thalmann, Alessandra Souza & Klaus Oberauer, ‘How does chunking help working memory?’, J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn, 2019.

Doctoral thesis:

• Dyedra Morrissey, ‘The Planning Fallacy put into Context: Investigating the Role of Control in Human Time Perception’, University of Oxford Doctoral Thesis in Experimental Psychology, 2019

Media and web articles:

• Christian Jarrett, ‘Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining Our Fight for Focus’, BBC Worklife, Nov 2020

• David Robson, ‘Constantly late with work? Blame the planning fallacy’, BBC Worklife, 18 May 2020

• ‘What is Cognitive Load Theory?’, Medicine College of Wisconsin, May 2022

• ‘Why You Put Things Off Until the Last Minute’, Mass General Brigham McLean, 7 Aug 2024

Blogs:

• Jon Beale, ‘Barak Rosenshine’s “Principles of Instruction”’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 7 Jan 2020

• Jon Beale, ‘Metacognition’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 22 June 2021

• Jon Beale, ‘Don’t Just Learn, Overlearn’, CIRL at Eton College blog, 28 Jan 2020

• Cal Newport, ‘Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day’, 21 Dec 2013

• Cal Newport, ‘Text File Time Blocking’, 16 March 2020

• Cal Newport, ‘The Time Blocking Revolution Begins’, 10 Nov 2020

Podcasts:

• Cal Newport, ‘The Simple Rule to Double Your Productivity Everyday’, Deep Questions Podcast, Aug 2023

• Cal Newport, ‘Is Time Blocking Oppressive?’, Deep Questions Podcast, June 2024