Planning
Time blocking
Time blocking is planning your day as a series of blocks on the calendar, each one for a single task. Instead of a list, every task gets a time. Time blocking plans the day. Writing down what happened checks the plan, and the gap between the two is the useful number.
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
What it is
Time blocking gives every task a time.
Time blocking turns a to-do list into a schedule. Each task gets a start and an end on the calendar, such as the report from nine to eleven, and the day is planned before it begins. A task without a block waits until there is time, which often means never.
You may also hear about a few close relatives, which work well alongside it. Task batching puts similar small tasks, like email or calls, into one block. Day theming gives a whole day to one area of work, such as keeping Mondays for meetings. Timeboxing sets a hard limit on a task and stops when the time is up, even if the task is not finished.
Step by step
How to time block your day.
Time blocking takes 6 steps, and all you need is a calendar or a sheet of paper. The first five happen the evening before or first thing in the morning. The last one happens at night, once the day is over.
Step 1
List what the day has to hold.
Write down the tasks, meetings and errands for tomorrow. Include the small things, like email and the walk home, because they take real time even though they never feel like tasks.
Step 2
Give each task a size.
Guess how long each task takes, then add a little spare time on top. Most tasks take longer than the first guess, and the spare time keeps one slow task from pushing the whole day back.
Step 3
Put focused work where you think well.
Block the task that needs the most thought first, in the part of the day when your head is clear. Put meetings and small chores like email around it.
Step 4
Block the whole day, breaks included.
Give every hour a block, including lunch, email and time to switch. A day with gaps fills them with whatever is urgent.
Step 5
Guard the blocks.
During a focus block, close the inbox and silence the phone. When something urgent lands, move a block rather than stacking two.
Step 6
At night, check the blocks against what happened.
Write what each block really held, in a line or two, and add up the hours. The gap between the plan and the day is what you adjust tomorrow, for example by making a block longer or moving it.
The spare time in step two is there because first guesses run short, and not only for the disorganized. Psychologists call it the planning fallacy. In one of the first studies of it, Buehler and colleagues (1994) asked 37 students writing an honors thesis when they expected to finish. On average they expected to need 33.9 days, and the thesis took 55.5. Even when asked for the date if everything went as badly as it possibly could, they guessed 48.6 days, still short of what it took.
That is why the last step matters most. A plan sized from hope stays wrong, while a plan sized from last week’s real blocks gets closer every week.
An example day
A time-blocked day, beside what really happened.
A plan only becomes useful once you compare it with the day you really had. Here is one example, written for this page: a workday planned in blocks the evening before, from nine in the morning to ten at night, with a proposal to write, a design review, dinner with a sister and some reading.
That night the same person wrote down what really happened, in a few plain sentences, the way you might in a notebook. Those words were then run through the parser in Think in Numbers, the part of the app that reads plain words and places each stretch of time on the clock, and the right-hand column shows exactly what it returned. A client call broke the first focus block, the design review ran long, and the reading went to the phone.
The plan
What happened
Each block, with the words that filled it
| The plan | What really happened |
|---|---|
| Deep work: the proposal to |
|
| Lunch to |
|
| Admin and email to |
|
| Design review to |
|
| Deep work: the proposal to |
|
| Walk home to |
|
| Spare to | Unaccounted |
| Dinner with my sister to |
|
| Read to |
|
Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored exactly as it came out, not edited.
The gap
The gap between the plan and the day.
Adding up the same day shows how far it drifted, and that gap between plan and day is where time blocking gets better, because it tells you how to size tomorrow’s blocks. The proposal was planned for 5h and got 3h 30m. The review was planned for 1h and took 1h 30m. The evening reading block went to the phone instead.
| Block | Planned | Real |
|---|---|---|
| The proposal | 5h | 3h 30m |
| The design review | 1h | 1h 30m |
| ReadingThe block went to the phone | 1h 30m | None, 1h 30m on the phone |
| UnaccountedTime the words never mentioned | Not planned | 4h 20m |
Plan, then check
Time blocking plans the day. Time journaling checks it.
Time blocking on its own only tells you what you meant to do. The check is a short note of what happened, written the same day, in plain words, like the example above. Doing that every day, and adding it up by category, is called time journaling.
Paper works fine for this. The hourly planner template has a column for the plan and a column for what happened. The weekly planner template does the same for a week. A time audit, a week of writing down everything you do, checks a whole week without a plan.
On paper, the check is the step most people drop, because it means writing the day out and then adding it up, every night.
A good way to check takes the day from your own words, with no timer running in each block, and sets those hours beside what you planned, so tomorrow’s blocks can change. Most journaling apps stop at how the day felt. That is worth keeping, but it cannot show which block slipped or where its hours went.
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: each block you planned, what happened instead, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. It can also offer your phone calendar’s events as hours, and its weekly plan sits against your real hours.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
In the app
Time block by voice in Think in Numbers.
In Think in Numbers you can also time block by saying it out loud, or typing it, to the app. Say the day, the task and its start and end, and the task becomes a to-do with that time on it. When the task is done, that time goes onto your day as real hours, so the plan and what happened sit side by side. Here is one block, from what you say to what lands on your day.
You say
“Tomorrow, work on the proposal from nine to eleven. Remind me at a quarter to nine. It counts when the first draft is sent.”
It becomes a to-do
Work on the proposal
- When
- Tomorrow
- Time
- to
- Reminder
- Done when
- The first draft is sent
When it’s done
Tick it, or just say “I sent the proposal draft.” The block from to goes onto your day as work.
Your day, with the block in place.
- Say the day: “tomorrow”, “on Thursday”, or a date.
- Give it a start and an end, or a start and a length: “from nine to eleven”, “at five for an hour”.
- Add a reminder, and a note on what counts as done, if you want them.
- Type it instead of saying it, if that suits you better. Either way works.
- If the block runs long, or your phone takes half of it, your day shows what really happened.
Keep reading.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
- Hourly planner templateEvery hour from 6 AM to midnight: the plan beside what happened.
- Weekly planner templateSeven days, Sunday first: the plan, what happened, and the week's hours.
- Time auditA week of writing down what you did, then adding it up.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
Questions
Questions people ask.
What is time blocking?
Time blocking is planning the day as a series of blocks on a calendar, each one for a single task or kind of work. Every task gets a time, not just a place on a list.
Is time blocking the same as timeboxing?
Time blocking and timeboxing are close. Time blocking gives each task a place in the day. Timeboxing gives a task a fixed limit and stops when the time is up. Many people use both.
What if my time blocks never survive the day?
Time blocks that never survive the day are sized wrong, not a sign of failure. Write down what each block really held. In the example on this page, the proposal was planned for 5h and got 3h 30m. A week of notes like that shows how big to make the blocks.
Should I time block every hour?
Block every hour you are awake and working, including breaks and email. Leave some blocks marked as spare. A plan with no spare time breaks the first time a meeting runs over.
Can an app check my time blocks for me?
Yes, if it can read what really happened and set it beside the plan. Most journaling apps stop at how the day felt, so they cannot. One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in, for iPhone and Android. You write or say what really happened, it returns the hours by category, and it can offer the events on your phone's calendar as hours, so the plan and the day sit side by side.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.