📆✅ How to time block your tasks

Blocking off time in your calendar to accomplish specific tasks is a fantastic productivity hack.

For example, you might allocate 30 minutes to check and respond to Slack messages first thing in the morning. Or maybe you need to finish writing an article, so you schedule an hour after lunch to write it.

Confining tasks to an allotted time slot has several benefits. Because you know time is limited, you’re less likely to find yourself getting distracted or scrolling social media. Time blocking also gives you a wildly accurate sense of how long it takes to accomplish things. If you are particularly productive, you will viscerally notice the extra time in your day.

The rest of this email will walk you through a time blocking workflow that you can use in your notes.

1. Setup your calendar for the day

Use whatever calendar tool you like, but make sure only you have access to this particular calendar. It’s your todo list after all, and you might want to put sensitive things on it.

Then, go through and outline what you need to get done in the day. Start with the most important things. Try to be realistic about how long things will take, but understand if something comes up, the last things may not get done.

Don’t create time blocks shorter than 15 minutes or it will get hard to manage. Most will likely be 30 minutes.

Include everything, even if not work related. Add your lunch, exercise, etc. You want to literally outline what you hope your day looks like. If you’d like, you can categorize things using colors.

2. Add the events as todo items in your notes

A calendar is not a good note-taking replacement.

Most calendar apps don’t let you mark items as complete. They just assume the event happened if it wasn’t deleted. They also aren’t great at storing information.

Thankfully it’s pretty easy to add events into your notes. Reflect has a calendar integration that inserts calendar events into your notes directly.

If your note-taking tool doesn’t have a calendar integration, you can add them manually. You can choose to either add them all at once at the beginning of your day, or add them as you go.

3. Take notes under each line item

As your day goes along, you can also take more detailed notes under each bullet point. This could include next steps or reminders. The end result will be a very complete log of what happened in your day.

For those important things that must get done, you can add them as “tasks” so that they show up in your task manager.

Time blocking your tasks in your calendar takes a few extra minutes, but you’re likely to get substantially more done. And remember, it’s particularly nice to wake up with your day outlined ahead of time.