Time Blocking System for Task Management

When does a task become an event, and when does an event become a task? That’s the question I am answering this week. 

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Episode 291 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 291 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

Last week, in my YouTube video, I shared how to get the most out of Todoist’s latest new feature, task duration. This feature allows you to add a duration time to your task so you can estimate how much time you will need. As I explained in the video, this is not a feature I personally would use but I know a lot of people have been requesting this for some time.

This sparked a lot of comments on the subject of Todoist introducing a calendar so people can drag and drop tasks onto a calendar and I know this type of feature appeals to a lot of people. However, there are problems with this approach to task management and this week’s question asks me to explain why this would be a problem. So, I decided to oblige and explain why this is something you do not want to be doing. 

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Steve. Steve asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say in the past that you should not be putting tasks on your calendar and events onto you to-do list. Could you explain your thinking behind that approach?

Hi Steve, thank you for your question.

In the early days of Mac OS 10, in the early 2000s, Apple brought tasks into their calendar app and they lived on the right hand side of the calendar. It seemed logical. Here was a list of all your appointments and on the right hand side there was a list of all the things you needed to do that day. 

It soon became apparent that this was not working. You see tasks and appointments are two very different things. An appointment is a commitment to another person or persons that you will be in a specific place at a specific time. That could be a meeting room, a place or in front of your computer with either Zoom or Teams open. 

A task on the other hand is something you decide needs doing but can be done at any time. You might find you have twenty minutes while waiting for a doctors appointment and you could call the people you need to call or send out those emails you need to send. 

In my case, I might have a blog post to write but it doesn’t matter whether I write it in the morning, afternoon or evening. The only thing that matters is I write it. I could decide to postpone it until tomorrow because I have too many appointments today and that would be fine. I am not letting anyone down. 

The way I look at it is, my calendar is there to tell me what I have committed to and with whom. My task manager tells me what I need to do when I have some free time. 

Now, time does not accept a vacuum. We cannot do nothing, ever. If you think about it laying on the sofa mindlessly scrolling through news or social media feeds is doing something. Similarly, taking an afternoon nap is still doing something. You are always doing something whether you are consciously aware of it or not. 

Now, one of the most important things you can do if you want to be on top of your work is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility means you can direct your attention where it needs to be when it needs to be there. If you cram your calendar full of tasks, you immediately lose that flexibility. It also means if one or two of your meetings overrun, you get held up in a traffic jam or something goes wrong with your company’s CRM system, your carefully curated tasks and appointments are destroyed. 

Now that in itself is not really a disaster, you can reschedule all those tasks, but now you’ve just added another step. Instead of being able to pick the tasks you are able to do in the moment—responding to your messages while being stuck in a traffic jam, for instance, you begin to panic about how much time you are losing and all the work you will now have to reschedule on your calendar. 

This also means you calendar loses it’s power. If you schedule tasks to be done at say, 2pm but you are running behind so you ignore those tasks, what’s the point of your calendar? You took the time to put those tasks there but you just ignore them, what’s the point? 

Because you are human, you need flexibility. You want to be able to choose the right work for the way you are feeling and what’s on your mind at that moment. 

Then there is the human factor. You are not a machine. When planning your day, you will be thinking you will be fully alert, energetic and focused. When you are working the day, you will be tired, distracted and suffering from diminishing energy levels. What you really need is to take a break, but no! You have tasks to complete because you calendar tells you at 2pm you have to spend the next ninety minutes doing your tasks. 

Finally, when you look at your calendar and you see almost ever minute of your day taken up with appointments and tasks it can be demoralising. It just drags you down and leaves you feeling busy, stressed and overwhelmed. Not a great state to be in if you want to make the right decisions about what to do with a clear mind. 

One way to prevent this from happening, and I alluded to this in my YouTube video, is to operate a time blocking system in your calendar. 

What this means is if you have a number of similar tasks to perform, you can block time out for doing this kind of work. For instance, let’s say you need an hour a day for doing your admin and an hour a day to deal with your messages and emails. You could put time blocks in for these. 

I do this every day. At 4pm I have an hour time block for communications. This means I have a dedicated amount of time each day for managing my messages. At 4pm, I will sit down and clear my action folders. Sometimes most of that time is spent in email, other days it might be mainly spend in my messaging apps. 

When I start the day, I have no idea how many communication tasks I will have, but I don’t need to worry because I know I have an hour to deal with them later that day. 

I also have an admin hour blocked in my calendar each day. This hour is for dealing with any administrative tasks I need to do for my accountant, or clients that require a particular type of tax receipt. 

I also use time blocks for the kind of work I do. For example, I do a lot of writing, so I have three, two hour blocks in my calendar. One on Monday, one on Tuesday and one on Friday. In my task manager, I have a label for all the writing tasks I have to do and all I need do is search for any writing tasks dated for that day and I can choose which ones to do. I have the flexibility. If I am feeling great, full of energy and focused I will pick the hardest ones. If I am not feeling great, lacking in focus and tired, I will choose the easier ones. I know I have more writing blocks in the week so it really doesn’t matter which ones I do. 

I do the same with project and my audio/visual work. I have time blocked in the week for working on these tasks. I also make sure that any focused work (writing and project work) is done in the morning—when I am at my most focused. 

However, the key here is blocking time out for the type of work, not the individual tasks. This ensures I maintain flexibility and can decide what to do based on my physical and mental state at that time. 

It also means my calendar never looks overwhelming. You want to ensure there are sufficient gaps between time blocks so you have the flexibility to take a break when needed and pick up anything urgent that may have come in that day. 

Using this method means I am only managing tasks in one place. When I do my daily planning, I can see on my calendar I have a two hour writing block the next day and I can then choose which writing tasks should be done in that time from my writing list in my task manager. If things change overnight, I have the flexibility to change the tasks around the next day if needs be. 

If you go back to the COD principles (Collect, organise and do), you want to be spending a little time as possible organising so you maximise your doing time. I am collecting tasks in my task manager all day, and I will spend around 95% of my work day doing the work. This leaves me with around twenty-minutes each day for the organising and planning. All I need do is look at my calendar for the next day, see what time block I have—lets say an audio visual time block, I can then date any tasks related to audio visual for the next day. 

When the next day arrives, I can then decide which of those tasks I will do based on my energy levels, what is important and what deadlines I have. 

If you are trying to manage individual tasks on your calendar (as well as your task manager) not only are you now duplicating, but you have just given yourself a lot more organising to do. 

I hope that clarifies things for you, Steve. Thank you for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.