Time block a day or a week so your important work has slots set aside for it.
Open your calendar for tomorrow and look at the hours between when you start work and when you finish. The empty hours are where the tasks on your list need to go. If you put them there now, you won't have to decide later.
Take the list of four things for tomorrow that you wrote in lesson 3.2. A day with a list like that often goes like this. At 9am you open the laptop, glance at the list and decide to clear a few emails first. At 10.15 a colleague asks for "five minutes". At 11 you have a call. At 12.30 you look at the list again, and the most important task has not been started, even though the morning was technically free. A list tells you what to do but not when, and the "when" decision is the one that keeps getting postponed.
Time blocking means assigning tasks to specific slots on your calendar instead of keeping them only on a list. A blocked task has a start time, an end time and a place in the day. A block can also say which part of the task it covers, for example "9.00 to 11.00, write campaign brief, sections 1 to 3".
Time blocking gives you two things. First, when you plan, you find out whether the day can hold what you want from it. If your four tasks need six hours and only three hours are available, the calendar shows you that before 9am instead of at 5pm. Second, when a block arrives you don't have to decide what to work on. You made that decision earlier, when you were calm and could see the whole week.
Cal Newport, a computer scientist and author of the book Deep Work, is one of the best-known advocates of time blocking. In Deep Work he recommends scheduling every minute of the workday in blocks. You decide in advance what each part of the day is for, including email and breaks, and you write it down. He also says the plan will often break, for example when something urgent arrives or a task takes longer than you guessed. When that happens, don't abandon the plan. Revise the rest of the day's blocks at the next chance you get, so you are still working from a plan, just an updated one. Some days you may revise it several times. The aim is that at every moment you are doing something you chose deliberately, rather than whatever is loudest.
Many people find planning every hour too rigid at first, and that is fine. You can start by blocking your most important task plus two or three other blocks, then add more structure as it starts to feel natural.
Most of what breaks up a day is small: emails, chat replies, forms, approvals, quick calls. If you handle each one as it arrives, they scatter across the day and cut every larger block into pieces. Group them into one or two message and admin blocks a day, for example 30 minutes before lunch and 45 minutes at 4.30pm. Between those blocks, messages wait unless something is truly urgent. Priya calls her message blocks inbox and Teams and keeps them at 11.30am and 4.30pm. Module 5 covers how to make grouped message blocks work with email and chat, and how to tell your team about them.
You can group errands and personal admin the same way. Three personal admin items, such as paying town council conservancy charges or renewing road tax, can share one 20-minute block instead of interrupting the afternoon three times.
Meetings are already on your calendar, but people often leave out what surrounds them: prep, travel to another building or office, and follow-up actions. Block those as well, for example 15 minutes for prep. Say you have a one-hour client meeting at Raffles Place at 2pm and your office is in one-north. Once you add travel there and back, the meeting really runs from about 1.20pm to 3.30pm.
Once every meeting, travel slot, admin block and focus block is on the calendar, it shows the true shape of your day. A full calendar also helps colleagues who are looking for a free slot, while an empty calendar invites bookings. A visible focus block, such as "focus: campaign brief" from 9 to 11, works as a signal, and many people will pick another time without being asked.
Lesson 3.2 made the case for a buffer. On a time-blocked calendar the buffer block is a block of its own, often in the afternoon, labelled honestly as "buffer" or "catch-up". If the morning overruns, the overrun work moves into the buffer. If nothing overruns, use it for the next item on your list or to start tomorrow's most important task early.
Priya's blocked Wednesday runs in this order:
8.30 to 9: plan the day and a quick message check 9 to 11: the brief 11 to 11.30: call 11.30 to 12: inbox and Teams 12 to 1: lunch 1 to 1.45: check report data 2 to 3.30: meeting, with prep included 3.30 to 4.30: buffer from 4.30: a second inbox and Teams block then agency feedback, finished before 6pm
When 9am arrives she doesn't have to decide what to do, because the block already says "the brief".
Your activity is to build the same picture for tomorrow, from the moment your workday starts to the moment it ends, with a block for messages and a buffer block included. Give each task from your list a start time, an end time and the part of the task it covers, and check that the day can hold the work. Group small items into one or two message and admin blocks and errands into one short shared block. Around each meeting, block the prep, the travel there and back, and the follow-up.
Time block tomorrow from the start to the end of your workday. Include one block for messages and one buffer block.
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