Time-Blocking

The useful part of time blocking is one sentence: decide in advance what a stretch of time is for, so you are not deciding at the moment you sit down. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth doing. ...

You blocked the time. It is still on the calendar, and there is a meeting on top of it. This happens for six reasons, they are mutually exclusive, and each one needs a different fix — which is why the general advice to “protect your blocks” has never once worked for anybody. You cannot protect a focus period until you know which way it is failing. ...

A block of focus time survives for one of two reasons. Either nobody can see it well enough to book over it, or the person who books over it expects to get a reply. If other people have booking rights on your calendar and you have no standing to refuse them, you are working entirely on the second reason — which means focus time is not really a calendar problem for you. It is a correspondence problem, and the calendar settings are only the part that reduces how much correspondence you have to do. ...

Two people have eleven meeting hours this week. The first has them in four blocks: Monday afternoon, Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, Friday morning. Three of her days contain a clear stretch of four hours or more. The second has them spread across ten sessions, roughly one every ninety minutes, every day. His longest uninterrupted stretch all week is fifty-five minutes, and it is on Friday at 4pm. ...