How to Increase Your Productivity Using Time Blocking
How to Flourish #3, 7th Feb 2025 | drjonbeale.com
Highlights:
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:
List article requirements (pitch, length, tone, context, aims).
Brainstorm initial ideas for article based on current knowledge.
Use ideas in (2) to map out tentative three-part structure (intro, main body, conclusion).
Use structure in (3) to map out additional three-part sub-structure for main body.
Check whether I need to do any additional research to complete article, and if so, list what this is likely to be.
Draft introduction.
Draft conclusion.
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:
List article requirements (pitch, length, tone, context, aims). (5 mins)
Brainstorm initial ideas for article based on current knowledge (30 mins)
Use ideas in (2) to map out tentative three-part structure (intro, main body, conclusion). (10 mins)
Use structure in (3) to map out additional three-part sub-structure for main body. (10 mins)
Check whether I need to do any additional research to complete article, and if so, list what this is likely to be. (10 mins)
Draft introduction. (25 mins)
Draft conclusion. (25 mins)
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:
overcoming procrastination;
increasing learning and skill development;
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
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