Becoming a productivity machine

On time-blocking and planning your week

Not my calendar, but mine looks very similar…

Left to my own devices, I would dart from writing to researching to emailing with no real plan, my day punctuated with way too much scrolling on social media. I would probably spend much of my time hunched over a laptop, never seeming to find the time to exercise or even walk around, or eat somewhere other than in front of a screen. For years, as a freelancer, this was my life. I always seemed to be busy, never got enough done, and never had a healthy day to day existence. When my optician told me to look away from my screen every 20 minutes, I laughed at the idea.

A couple of years ago I came across the idea of time-blocking, or mapping out your day according to chunks of activity. I have a love-hate relationship with productivity hacks because ultimately, I don’t believe that optimising our productivity so can win in the capitalist version of life is why we’re on this planet. But this one really spoke to me as I can spend days laser-focused on a single piece, allowing other deadlines, emails and pitches to languish. And I would find that I’d be emailing at weekends or evenings as there just didn’t seem to be enough hours in the work day.

In a bid to take back control over my time, I tentatively started to time-block. First, a few days at a time, and now at least two weeks at a time. This is what I’ve learnt so far.

1.     Don’t just time-block work, include your personal life

This might feel ridiculous and way too granular, and like you have less control over your day rather than more. Who needs to schedule in going for a walk? Or having lunch out in a cafe? Turns out, I do! What initially felt like overscheduling now feels like the best way I can protect time to do the things that nourish me – like having lunch with a friend (yesterday) or going for a swim in the sea (heading there now).

I have a young kid and so my time is never truly my own after about 5.30pm. I’ve been powerlifting three times a week for the past couple of years, and I need to allow at least 1.5 hours for it, and if I don’t schedule it in, it literally doesn’t happen.

2.     Schedule similar things together

There’s decent evidence that hopping from task to task, or trying to multitask, actually means we’re losing a lot of efficiency and most likely doing each task worse than if we focused. This is definitely true for me if I try and answer emails or do other things in between writing.

As much as possible, I try and bunch up similar tasks. So I might allocate one afternoon for calls and emails, and in any dead time between these, go for a walk or make a coffee, but not try and squeeze in writing.

When I need to really focus on a piece of writing, I’ll try and allocate at least 2-3 hours with my phone turned off or on airplane mode.

3.     Build in movement and activity in the middle of the day

I used to try and exercise first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and would schedule any appointments in town similarly as a way of preserving my work time uninterrupted.

But doing that meant that by the end of the day I would be so drained from bashing away at my laptop for eight hours that I knew I had to experiment and switch it up.

So I began exercising just before lunchtime, which left me with the morning hours to write or focus (as it’s when my brain is sharpest). After the gym, I then have lunch and come back to work a few hours later feeling much more refreshed than if I had just ploughed through, eating at my desk. Or I might book in a chiropractor appointment at lunch, so that I also get in a 45 minute walk there and back.

Not everything in my calendar goes to plan of course, and I do move things around, or have to push something onto the next day or another time in the week if I run out of time, but on the whole this has given me so much more balance in my working life. And while I want to do good work and make sure my clients love me, having been through several burnouts in my career, the most important thing for me is working in a way that is kind to my mental and physical health.