ÜBER DIESE EPISODE
"It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope... Each letter was then extracted, unfolded, smoothed flat with the palm of his hand, and read with deliberate, unhurried precision. Only when one piece of correspondence was thoroughly digested and placed in its neat, appointed stack would he permit himself to move on to the next."
That’s an extract from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot’s continuation novel, The Monogram Murders, which captures a part of Hercule Poirot’s morning routine with his letter-opening ritual. Something he did at the same time each day, at the breakfast table.
And it connects nicely with today’s episode. So let’s begin.
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Script | 434
Hello, and welcome to episode 434 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.
Before we begin, with Apple launching their latest operating systems last Monday, I have updated my Apple Productivity Course.
The course is not about tips and tricks; you can get all those on YouTube. This course is about helping you to build a 100% Apple productivity system that will keep you focused on what matters, when it matters and help keep and store important information so you know where to find it when you need it.
No subscriptions to third-party apps, just a simple set of productivity tools that do exactly what they were designed to do. Keep you on time and organised.
I will put a link in the show notes to where you can learn more about this; if I may say so, fantastic course.
Okay, on with the episode.
Something that many people miss about time blocking is that it’s not just another way to organise your calendar. It’s actually a way to reframe how you approach your work.
Over the last 26 years or so, certainly since the explosion of digital task managers, many people have become focused on the number of things they have to do.
Yet, that wasn’t always the case.
For example, if you had to go into town to buy something, you would also naturally look for other things you may have to do while you were in town. Perhaps drop some dry cleaning off, or buy some stamps at the post office.
You would do as many of these chores as you could in the time that you had available.
I’ve spoken before about how the likes of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and CS Lewis had time set aside for dealing with their correspondence. It was never about how many letters they replied to. It was simply spending an hour or so each day writing replies.
If they didn’t get through their pile of letters in the time they had, they would leave what was left until the next day when they replied to their letters.
Yet today, I find that so many people are stressed out and worried about the number of things they have on their lists and the size of their backlogs.
Yet, it really doesn’t matter how many things you’ve got to do; if you’re like most people, you will have far more things than you will ever have the time to do anyway.
What really matters is how you use the time you have available to do the things that really matter.
That leads me nicely on to this week’s question. Unfortunately, the Mystery Podcast Voice is locked away in a room preparing for an important exam tomorrow, so once again, you’re stuck with me asking the question.
This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried organising my calendar and protecting time, as you call it, for doing my email and messages and focused work. Yet, I really struggle. I find I ignore the time blocks and then feel guilty at the end of the day because I didn’t get done what I wanted to do. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Jim, thank you for your question.
Well, the simple answer, and I know this will be a bit harsh, is that you are ignoring your protected time.
Time blocking only works if you respect the time blocks you set for yourself.
However, let me take you back to the opening of this podcast and the excerpt I shared from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot continuation novel.
“It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope…”
The key part of this was “it was Hercule Poirot’s custom…”
The key to succeeding with time blocking is consistency. If it was your custom to drink a cup of tea or coffee each morning when you wake up, it would never be something you would ignore. It’s your “custom” to drink tea or coffee when you wake up.
If someone dragged you out of bed for whatever reason, it would not be long before you were structuring your day mentally, wondering where you would get your morning tea or coffee.
As I write this script, my mother is currently at Dublin Airport waiting for a flight to Paris. She’s travelled through the night by bus and, on arrival at the airport, the first thing she did was to go and get herself a cup of tea.
Why? Because it’s her “custom” to have tea first thing in the morning. And while it is not a normal day, she still follows her routine.
The most successful coaching clients I have are the ones who decide to protect the same time each day for doing their most important work.
Now, the CEOs among these clients find this easier, as they are in a position of authority and find saying “no” to interruptions easier than most.
One client of mine gets to his office at around 8:00 am and from 8:30 to 10 am he closes his office door and does the most pressing pieces of work he has that day.
Because he knows there will be no interruptions—everyone in his office knows not to interrupt him during this time—he can sit down and give 100% focus to the work he is doing.
And because he does this every day, none of his team ever considers interrupting him.
But time blocking goes beyond this.
I mentioned earlier that time blocking is not another cool way to organise your calendar. It’s a reframing exercise.
What I mean by this is that the purpose of time blocking is to say I have this large pile of work to do. I am going to work on it for the next two hours. When the two hours are up, I will stop.
It doesn’t matter whether there are twenty, thirty, fifty or a hundred things to do. You do as many as you can in the time that you have. Stop, and return to the pile the next time you have a time block for working on the pile.
Now there is an interesting shift that happens to your mind when you focus on the time you have rather than the number you have.
Let’s imagine you have twenty things to do and you have 90 minutes protected for doing them.
As you begin, you’re not that aware of the time. But once you go past sixty minutes and you see you only have 30 minutes left, your focus narrows. You tense up slightly, and you speed up.
It might have taken you an hour to do eleven tasks; I can promise you that if you have nine tasks left and only twenty-five minutes in which to do them, you will finish.
You become hyper-focused, blocking out all external distractions.
This is the reverse of what happens when you don’t have a time constraint. With no time constraint, you will let in all sorts of distractions.
- Oh, I must check to see if those shoes have come back into stock.
- Oh, I’ll just message Jessica to see how her presentation went yesterday.
- Oh yeah, how did Arsenal get on last night in the FA Cup?
- I’d better go and refill my water bottle.
And how much time do all these little things swallow up? Just those 4, if all you did was exactly what those four things said, that’ll be ten lost minutes, at least.
But you know Jessica will reply, and you will feel obliged to reply to her reply, and now you’re in a full-blown conversation. You’re suddenly focused on trying to do your tasks and thinking of your replies to Jessica.
That’s why you should never begin a message thread just before sitting down to do some focused work. Do it when you’re finished, or else you’ll find yourself splitting your concentration and not doing either thing well.
Another mistake with time blocking is to block too much time in any given day.
Really, for time blocking to be effective, I would advise caution.
Two hours for focused work and another hour of admin and communications is a good balance. That leaves you with at least five hours where you can attend meetings, deal with sudden and unexpected emergencies and the regular daily workplace socialising. (And of course your mandatory mid-morning and afternoon tea breaks)
I’ve seen people try and protect far too much time, which then leaves them with little to no flexibility.
Days never go according to plan. Each day will throw something unexpected up. That could be a traffic jam, a colleague calling in sick, or Andy from the accounts cornering you in the staff canteen to tell you a bit of gossip.
Or your computer crashes, the Internet goes down, your boss calls an urgent meeting in 30 minutes in meeting room five—the one where they keep the difficult questions and uncomfortable chairs. You know the kind of meeting they can be.
I’ve found, after working with nearly 500 clients over the years, that the optimum time for time blocking is three hours a day. If you can get to that level and be consistent with your times, you’ll find that adopting time blocking techniques quickly becomes a custom you follow every day.
You don’t become more productive and better at managing time passively. It requires action. It’s up to you to decide whether you will shut off potential interruptions, say no to a spurious meeting request or allow yourself to be distracted by low-level things like checking football scores or shoe availability.
Yet the thing to always remember is that of all the things in your control each day, the one thing that will remain constant is the passing of time. Time does not recognise a vacuum. It continues whether you stare out the window wondering what to do next, scroll through the news or take a nap.
It’s fixed. All you have are your 24 hours each day.
The one variable you have is what you do each day. That remains your decision.
If you give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of each day to decide what your priorities will be tomorrow and what you will do in your protected time, you will find that, on the whole, you will get a lot of what you planned to do done.
I hope this has helped, Jim, and thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
