Schedule Every Minute of Your Day

Source: Deep work by Cal Newport

We spend much of our day on autopilot - not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time

If you’re between the ages of 25 and 34 years old and live in Britain, you likely watch more television than you realize. In 2013, the British TV licensing authority surveyed television watchers about their habits. The twenty-five-to thirty-four-year-olds taking the survey estimated that they spend somewhere between fifteen and sixteen hours per week watching TV. This sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a significant underestimate. We know this because when it comes to television-watching habits, we have access to the ground truth. The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (the British equivalent of the American Nielsen Company) places meters in a representative sample of households. These meters record, without bias or wishful thinking, exactly how much people actually watch. The 25 to 34 year-olds who thought they watched fifteen hours a week, it turns out, watch more like twenty-eight hours.

This bad estimate of time usage is not unique to British television watching. When you consider different groups self-estimating different behaviors, similar gaps stubbornly remain. In a Wall Street Journal article on the topic, business writer Laura Vanderkam pointed out several more such examples. A survey by the National Sleep Foundation revealed that Americans think they’re sleeping, on average, somewhere around seven hours a night. The American Time Use Survey, which has people actually measure their sleep, corrected this number to 8.6 hours. Another study found that people who claimed to work sixty to sixty-four hours per week were actually averaging more like forty-four hours per week, while those claiming to work more than seventy-five hours were actually working less than fifty-five.

These examples underscore an important point:

We spend much of our day on autopilot - not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time.

This is a problem.

It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

The strategy described in the following paragraphs is designed to force you into these behaviors. It’s an idea that might seem extreme at first but will soon prove indispensable in your quest to take full advantage of the value of deep work:

Schedule every minute of your day.

How to schedule our day

Here’s my suggestion:

At the beginning of each workday, turn to a new page of lined paper in a notebook you dedicate to this purpose. Down the left-hand side of the page, mark every other line with an hour of the day, covering the full set of hours you typically work. Now comes the important part: Divide the hours of your workday into blocks and assign activities to the blocks. For example, you might block off nine a.m. to eleven a.m. for writing a client’s press release. To do so, actually draw a box that covers the lines corresponding to these hours, then write “press release” inside the box. Not every block need be dedicated to a work task. There might be time blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks. To keep things reasonably clean, the minimum length of a block should be thirty minutes (i.e., one line on your page). This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day - respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report - you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block.

When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.

Disruptions to the schedule

It’s here, of course, that most people will begin to run into trouble.

Two things can (and likely will) go wrong with your schedule once the day progresses.

Incorrect estimates

The first is that your estimates will prove wrong. You might put aside two hours for writing a press release, for example, and in reality it takes two and a half hours.

Interruptions and new obligations

The second problem is that you’ll be interrupted and new obligations will unexpectedly appear on your plate. These events will also break your schedule.

Rewrite the schedule

This is okay. If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions). On some days, you might rewrite your schedule half a dozen times. Don’t despair if this happens. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward - even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.

If you find that schedule revisions become overwhelming in their frequency, there are a few tactics that can inject some more stability.

Recognize that you’re going to underestimate how much time you require for most things

First, you should recognize that almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things.

When people are new to this habit, they tend to use their schedule as an incarnation of wishful thinking - a best-case scenario for their day.

Over time, you should make an effort to accurately (if not somewhat conservatively) predict the time tasks will require.

See

Use Overflow Conditional blocks

The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks.

If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it. If you finish the activity on time, however, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block (for example, some nonurgent tasks). This allows unpredictability in your day without requiring you to keep changing your schedule on paper. For example, returning to our press release example, you might schedule two hours for writing the press release, but then follow it by an additional hour block that you can use to keep writing the release, if needed, but otherwise assign to catching up with e-mail.

Be liberal with your use of task blocks

The third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with your use of task blocks. Deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning.

Lots of things come up during the typical knowledge worker’s day: Having regularly occurring blocks of time to address these surprises keeps things running smoothly.

Before leaving you to put this strategy in practice, I should address a common objection. In my experience pitching the values of daily schedules, I’ve found that many people worry that this level of planning will become burdensomely restrictive. Here, for example, is part of a comment from a reader named Joseph on a blog post I wrote on this topic:

I think you far understate the role of uncertainty… I [worry about] readers applying these observations too seriously, to the point of an obsessive (and unhealthy) relationship with one’s schedule that seems to exaggerate the importance of minute-counting over getting-lost-in-activities, which if we’re talking about artists is often the only really sensible course of action.

I understand these concerns, and Joseph is certainly not the first to raise them. Fortunately, however, they’re also easily addressed. In my own daily scheduling discipline, in addition to regularly scheduling significant blocks of time for speculative thinking and discussion, I maintain a rule that

if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day

(with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped).

I can then stick with this unexpected insight until it loses steam.

At this point, I’ll step back and rebuild my schedule for any time that remains in the day.

In other words, I

not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it.

Joseph’s critique is driven by

the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan.

This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint - it’s instead about thoughtfulness.

It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.

I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured. Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow - e-mail, social media, web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period - the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation. (For example, recall the discussion in Rule #1 about the rigid rituals followed by many great creative thinkers.) And because you’re willing to abandon your plan when an innovative idea arises, you’re just as well suited as the distracted creative to follow up when the muse strikes.

To summarize,

the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect.

A good first step toward this respectful handling is the advice outlined here:

Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.

It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.

How to Use Block Scheduling to Revamp Your Workflow

https://www.wired.com/story/block-scheduling-calendar-workflow-productivity/

Block-scheduling system is an effective and purposeful way to structure days while also leaving flexibility for the unexpected.

It can organize your day into activity blocks for both broad goals (errands, chores, ideation) and specific tasks (answering emails, writing a one-off memo). But block scheduling also offers the flexibility to swap blocks, rearranging them if emergencies arise or a task takes less time than was allocated.

Why is block scheduling effective?

It promotes focused work, like programming, studying, researching, or writing a business proposal, while setting less important tasks aside for later.

Apps, If You’re Inclined

Here are some great apps to use in conjunction with your newfound block-scheduling method. But the moment they lessen your productivity or interfere with the wonder of freely exchanging blocks as your work or family requires, dump them. Some are great tools, but don’t let them lessen your productivity or interfere with your health

Tomato Timer
Google Calendar (Or ProtonMail cal for the privacy-oriented)
Todoist
Edo Agenda
Toggl
Fantastical 2

Options for tools to manage your schedule

A good old fashioned notebook

Pros

More free form

Cons

Not portable
Not searchable easily

Using emacs

Pros
1. Give us different options to view the agenda. Just plan your day using org files and look at the daily/hourly view using any of the tools listed below.
  1. We can always use org-agenda
  2. Other options include
    1. org-timeblock-list
    2. cfw:calendar
2. Don’t have to export anything anywhere. The org files are tracked by git.
3. Just works with existing org files. Don’t need any custom set-up other than setting up the package.
4. Good for looking at tasks that you are procrastinating on (when compared to using pen and paper in notebooks)

Cons
1. Cannot do it online using a website or on paper.
2. Need my computer with me all the time. If the computer is not on hand, this will not work.

Use org-timeblock

Pros
1. It gives a pretty good view of the day/week

Cons
1. Has a dependency on other packages. Pain in the ass to deal with if there are compatibility issues.

Use cfw:open-org-calendar

Pros
1. It gives a pretty good view of the day/week/month

Cons
1. Doesn’t show the day view broken down into 30 minute or 60 minute slots. This is not a deal breaker though.

google calendar

export it to an .ics file using org-agenda export function
import the .ics file into online calendars like google calendar
1. If the online calendar has email and notification support, they will be enabled for emacs tasks automatically.

Cons

Manual approach. Every time we make a small change to the calendar, we have to export it and import it into the google calendar online.
Not two-way enabled. If we make changes to the calendar online, they will not be synced into emacs calendar.

using nextcloud calendar

Plan everything using emacs.
Integrate it with nextcloud.
Enable two-way sync
Use org-caldav in computers
Use DAV x5 (from Droid store) for synchronization between nextcloud and the phone
Set-up a calendar (doesn’t have to be google calendar. The stock Android calendar seems to work best) to work with DAV x5

Pros

We can make changes to the calendar from anywhere - using a phone, or online.
Don’t need to have a computer or emacs with us all the time.

Cons

Setting up a nextcloud instance and maintaining it can be a pain in the butt.
Working with org-caldav is a pain. It always gives weird errors. I wasted so much time trying to get it to work. It is not worth it.

Links to this note

Maintain a thoughtful say in what you are doing with your time