Why Time Blocking Stops Working (And What to Do Instead)

Quick answer: Time blocking helps you plan when work will happen, but it can fall short when you overlook the attention that work requires and your capacity to give it. Biology helps explain why that capacity varies. Keep the structure, then use your bio data and experience to choose which tasks belong in each block, allowing room to adjust as the day unfolds.

Time blocking earns its place in the productivity toolkit. It makes you confront the distance between everything you intend to do and the hours you have to do it. A proposal that has spent a fortnight on your to-do list finally gets a morning to itself, whilst the email must wait.

That is useful progress. Yet you can protect the hour, know what needs doing and still spend most of it getting very little done. When this happens repeatedly, the usual response is to refine the schedule: start earlier, make the blocks shorter, become more disciplined about sticking to them.

It’s also worth questioning what went into the plan. We’re used to checking our availability before booking work, but much less used to considering whether the work will suit us at that time. Whilst deadlines and commitments shape the day, our biology helps shape what we can bring to it.

What time blocking gets right

Time blocking means assigning periods in your calendar to specific activities. A morning might contain an hour for a proposal, a client meeting and half an hour for email. As you place the work, you begin to see what you’ve promised yourself. Something will have to move if the proposal needs three hours.

This is one of the method’s real strengths. It encourages better scoping by asking you to consider the time and attention a task will require. You have to decide what completing the work involves, rather than leaving ‘finish proposal’ on a list and hoping for a convenient gap.

Cal Newport’s approach to time blocking also allows for the fact that other people exist. When a task overruns or an urgent request arrives, you revise the remaining day. Being intentional about your time can include changing your mind about how to use it.

There’s room for energy in that approach, too. The missing step is knowing how to bring it into the decision. A free afternoon and an approaching deadline are easy to see; the kind of thinking you’re best placed to do needs a little more consideration.

Why a sensible schedule can still be hard to follow

Some plans fail because the workload is unrealistic. Six hours of work won’t fit into four, however thoughtfully you arrange it. But even when the plan does fit the time allowed, the way you set things up can still be a poor use of your attention.

Take the proposal. Perhaps you clear your inbox first because it feels good to start with a few things finished. By the time you get to the recommendation, the concentration you needed has become harder to find. Tomorrow, you repeat the order, with a little more urgency and rather less patience with yourself.

Moving the block to the next available gap can leave that pattern intact, because you’ve found another hour without asking whether it’s a better hour for this particular task. We explore a related problem in what deep work and flow are missing: removing distractions is valuable, but the conditions around you are only part of what makes concentration possible.

Your body clock has a say in the timing

Circadian rhythms help organise daily patterns in alertness and sleep. People also differ in chronotype, their tendency towards earlier or later sleep and wake timing. That makes ‘do your hardest work first thing’ a less universal instruction than it sounds.

In a study of 56 healthy adults, early and late chronotypes showed different patterns of performance across the day. Late chronotypes performed worse than early chronotypes on the morning tests, including measures of attention and executive function (Facer-Childs et al., 2018).

You can learn your own rhythm, by noticing when demanding work tends to go well, including what you get done and how much you need to revisit. If you consistently think more clearly later in the morning, try protecting some of that time before it disappears into routine updates. Compare it with the same task at your usual time, rather than judging the experiment on one unusually good morning.

Plan the thinking as well as the task

Biology becomes more useful to planning when you’re specific about the work. ‘Prepare the client presentation’ might be the next step for that proposal, but it conceals several different subtasks, all requiring different skills. Building the argument requires you to weigh evidence and decide what matters. Rehearsing asks you to explain it clearly. Formatting slides may be relatively familiar once those decisions are made.

Breaking up the task gives you choices that a single two-hour block doesn’t. You can reserve a period of good concentration for the argument and leave the formatting for another slot. This also stops the easier, more immediately satisfying parts of a project from consuming all the time when protecting space for the more complex parts is crucial.

Begin with the commitments that cannot move, then identify the most important piece of thinking still to be done. Give it a specific outcome: decide which recommendation the evidence supports, for example. That is more useful than an appointment with yourself labelled ‘be productive’.

Before starting, take stock of the day you’re having. How did you sleep? Can you hold the argument in mind, or are you repeatedly losing your place? Use what you notice to adjust the scope or order of the work, without spending of your allotted time redesigning the day.

Adjust the work without losing the priority

If the recommendation is proving difficult, there may be another useful way into it. Gather the missing evidence, write down the competing options or identify the question you cannot yet answer. You can make progress on the same priority while changing what the next hour asks of you.

There are limits. When the decision is due today, postponing it may create a bigger problem. Reduce other demands, put your reasoning on paper and ask a colleague to check it. Leave room between blocks for breaks and overruns, rather than relying on every task going exactly as expected.

Be honest about avoidance, too. Moving a difficult task can be sensible; moving it every day needs investigation. An unclear brief or an uncomfortable conversation won’t necessarily improve with better timing. Over a fortnight, notice which changes help you finish useful work and which merely make the calendar look more manageable. There’s more on choosing priorities and making realistic plans in our focus and planning guides.

How to use this with Phase

Phase brings your biology into the planning process through a cognitive profile, which it maps against your tasks and calendar to produce an alignment score. That gives you a view of how well the work you’ve planned fits your estimated state that day.

Phase looks at your underlying bio data – your sleep, HRV and cycle data. It then ranks imported tasks by bio fit, helping you choose between the pieces of work competing for your time. You can read more about the model and its research on the science behind Phase.

For the presentation, that means reviewing the preparation as well as the meeting itself. The client’s time may be fixed, whilst the argument, rehearsal and slide work can move. Phase helps you consider those choices alongside the rest of your workload, using the tasks and commitments you already have. You retain the judgement about what can change, especially where someone else depends on your work.

Make one change to next week’s calendar

Choose a task that has been moving from one day to the next. Look at what is holding it up and, where timing seems to be part of the problem, give its most demanding step a period when you usually concentrate well. Afterwards, judge the change by whether the work moved forward and held up on review.

Time blocking gives that work a place in your day. Biology gives you more information about where to put it. Join the Phase waitlist to be first to trial Phase when we are live.

References

Newport, C. (2020) Focus Week: Take Control of Your Time. Available at: calnewport.com.

Facer-Childs, E.R., Boiling, S. and Balanos, G.M. (2018) 'The effects of time of day and chronotype on cognitive and physical performance in healthy volunteers', Sports Medicine - Open, 4, 47. doi: 10.1186/s40798-018-0162-z.

Medical Disclaimer

The information in this post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. If you have concerns about your health or wellbeing, please consult a qualified healthcare professional.