Why Your Schedule Keeps Failing (And What Time Blocking Actually Fixes)

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You've had days where you stayed busy from morning to night and still went to bed feeling like nothing actually got done.

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That's not a discipline problem.

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It's a design problem.

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This episode covers Chapter 3 of How to Finish This Book by Peter Hollins, which makes the case that a to-do list tells you what to do, but time blocking tells you when.

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Hello listeners, welcome to The Science of Self, where you improve your life from the inside out.

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We're breaking down today three moves.

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How to anchor your day around non-negotiable recurring blocks.

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How theming your time slashes the hidden cost of task switching.

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No, multitasking is not a good thing.

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And how a 20-minute weekly scheduling ritual keeps your priorities from getting buried under the urgent.

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Let's get into it.

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Work With the Time Blocking Method

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“You will never find time for anything.

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If you want time you must make it.”

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Charles Buxton

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How can you tell when your tasks are controlling you, rather than you controlling your tasks?

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The signs are clear.

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Your day feels:

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Chaotic

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Scattered

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Reactive

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Stressful

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Wasteful

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Unproductive

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To Do lists are certainly a handy tool and have their place, but the truth is that writing down a list of tasks doesn’t tell you when to do a task, how to do it, or for how long.

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A To Do list can’t tell you what not to do.

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It doesn’t give you any clues about how the tasks fit with one another, or their relative importance.

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Tasks are theoretically infinite.

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What isn’t?

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Time.

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Instead of giving ourselves a daily set of things to accomplish, we can focus our intention on time, and how to budget it properly.

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When you block out portions of time, you not only create a visual expression of your priorities and your intentions, but you also create a script-a path to follow through the day.

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Unlike a To Do list, time blocking gives you structure, definition, and direction.

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It lets you know very clearly whether you are on task, or not.

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No room for argument.

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This way, you cut down on decision fatigue, and you reduce opportunities for procrastination, distraction, and excuse-making.

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The world is positively bursting at the seams with things that demand your energy, time, attention, and resources.

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Unless you consciously allocate your time in a way that suits your values and goals, then soon you won’t have much left to call your time at all.

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Allocating specific tasks to specific blocks of time throughout the day.

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Popularized by Cal Newport, this method is simple yet powerful.

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When you give every hour of your time a purpose, you start to treat time like the precious resource it is.

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Being time conscious means:

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Understanding that time can be invested, or it can be wasted.

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No matter what you choose to do, every hour of time will pass.

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You get decide how much return you get on it, though.

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There is not, nor will there ever be, “enough time.” The need to prioritize is simply a fact of life.

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There isn’t time for everything, so ensure that the time you do have is spent on what matters most.

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If you manage it well, there is always enough time to do what counts.

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If you don’t manage it well, you will never have enough of it.

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Time can be a wonderful clarifier; if we make a commitment to do something at 9 a.m., then that’s it-we either do it or we don’t, and we have to face that fact.

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If our alarm goes off after an hour, then that’s it-an hour really has passed and we cannot delude ourselves about what might, should, or could have been.

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Have you ever suddenly found yourself at 6 p.m. wondering, “Where did the day go?”

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The (mildly terrifying) answer to this is: It’s gone.

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You let it go.

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If we fail to structure our time, it dribbles away from us and we find ourselves at the mercy of distraction, disorganization, laziness, forgetfulness, and apathy.

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Instead, here are some ways to use time blocking to reclaim that time and start making it work for you.

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Block Your Recurring Activities First

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When it comes to time blocking, you’re essentially working backwards: you start by blocking off the periods in every day that will be committed to things like sleep, meals, workouts, or routine family obligations.

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These are fixed commitments, and you need to agree with yourself that these are standing appointments that are simply never encroached upon.

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This might explain why ultra-productive people are often obsessed with morning and evening routines.

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Once they have established a workable and productive framework around the flow of their day:

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They refuse to allow any creep or drift.

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They do not overbook themselves.

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They don’t see their bedtimes or wake up times as negotiable.

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These blocks are untouchable and the time they take is spoken for.

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The eight or so hours of sleep you have every night is the biggest recurring activity, but here are some more examples:

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A morning routine

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You might block 7:00-8:00 a.m. for your full morning routine, including grooming, dressing, breakfast, journaling, enjoying a coffee, making your bed, or planning the day.

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A repeat activity

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You might block out every Wednesday evening from 6:00-7:30 p.m. for weekly rehearsal or brand practice.

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Meal habits

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You might block out a half hour for lunch at noon, and an hour and a half for the evening meal at 6:30 PM.

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Other things you might consider recurring non-negotiables:

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Church

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Birthdays, anniversaries, and special holidays like Christmas

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Vacations and holidays, weekend activities

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Weekly or daily meetings

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Your evening routine

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The weekly shopping, planning, and meal prep

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Childcare

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Walking the dog

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This step may seem pretty straightforward, but be honest with yourself-how often have you disregarded your own self-care, thrown away special family time, or neglected things like exercise or house maintenance so you could sacrifice that time to something else?

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Being realistic about the time you actually have at your disposal prevents overcommitment, burnt out, unrealistic expectations, and boundary confusion.

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Theme Your Day to Reduce Switching

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It’s your choice whether you’d like to split your calendar into personal and professional obligations, but the truth is, you only have one life, not two.

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Putting everything on one calendar forces you to acknowledge that, where time is concerned, we are all playing a zero-sum game.

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Once your base schedule is done, you can start to think about the rest.

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At a glance, you should be able to see how much “disposable time” you have on your hands to do all your other tasks, whether that’s creative, administrative, collaborative, or strategic.

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You might be tempted to launch in and start dividing the remaining time up into hour chunks.

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While there’s nothing logically wrong with this, having many broken-up units of time across a single day has some serious disadvantages.

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Imagine that every hour block has a narrow margin around it, the beginning and end:

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The first 5-10 minutes: You’re warming up, settling in, getting yourself physically organized and comfortable, allowing your brain to switch into the right gear, and possibly booting up computers, opening apps, or preparing tools or instruments.

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The last 5-10 minutes: You’re cooling down, losing steam, beginning to lose focus and energy, starting to wonder about the next task, packing things up, summarizing, and winding down.

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It stands to reason that if you have, say, five distinct hour-long blocks in a day, then all together that’s ten periods of warm up and cool down, amounting to a staggering 50-100 minutes of time lost to “context switching.”

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That’s one whole hour.

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It adds up: Over the course of a year this amounts to more than 300 hours of precious time that, once gone, can never be recovered.

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It certainly shines a new light on the “not enough time” claim!

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By batching your tasks and theming your days, you reduce time lost to context switching.

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For example, if you choose instead to do the same task (or the same kind of task) for five combined hours, then the time lost to context switching drops to just 10-20 minutes total.

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It’s not just time you’re saving, you’re also saving energy and focus.

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Every time you switch tasks, your focus and momentum leaks away and you find yourself feeling a little more fractured.

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This explains that feeling that the day is made of a thousand stressful pieces that somehow don’t add up to a single win.

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Batching and theming can help!

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How do you do it?

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First, consider all your tasks and task types

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◦ Make a list of all the activities you tend to do in a week

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◦ Try to categorize all tasks down to a set of themes or types, for example: “admin”, “writing”, or “emails”

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Next, block off time for each theme

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◦ Schedule a time in your day where you can focus on this theme and this theme only

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Finally, factor in your energy levels and deadlines

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◦ Make sure you’re assigning your most important and most demanding activities for when you’re feeling most alert, usually in the mornings

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◦ Plan according to deadlines and around other fixed commitments

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To give an example, you might be an entrepreneur.

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Let’s say you identify several different tasks you need to do in a typical week, like:

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content creation

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marketing and promotion

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networking and relationship building

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research and professional development

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client work

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managing finances and general admin

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You might decide to make Mondays your Networking and Correspondence day.

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You block out this time to catch up on emails and messages, reach out to people, catch up on industry news and maintain your network.

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These are all different tasks, granted, but they fall under the same theme or type, so the switching cost is minimized.

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Then, Tuesdays can be your bookkeeping and finance day, and Wednesdays can be your dedicated client work day, for example.

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You could work on a career development course on Thursday in anticipation of grading and feedback occurring every Friday.

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Within each themed day, you can further organize yourself so that the hardest tasks are done before noon, and the more routine ones later in the day, once your focus and energy levels have dropped a little.

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Block Your Priorities Weekly

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Your time blocks are not made of stone.

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It’s a guide, not a straitjacket.

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At the start of each week, dedicate 15-30 minutes to scheduling your time blocks.

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Instead of just leaving important tasks to float around on a To Do list, be proactive and identify those things that are likely to be most urgent and impactful in the coming days.

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Then block them in.

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Now you’re in control.

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Life happens, and so your system needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the unexpected, without sacrificing your output.

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Observe, assess, and adjust.

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Then observe again.

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Repeat.

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What if a task takes longer than I planned?

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If you’ve reached the end of your time block but not the end of your task, don’t worry.

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If you can, continue to work until the task is complete and reschedule anything coming after.

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If you can’t, stop the task and reschedule the rest for later.

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Either way, take careful note so that you make more realistic allowances next time.

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Make a note to revisit your overall strategy the next time you’re scheduling your week.

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What if I keep running out of time?

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The honest answer?

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You’re likely overcommitting or overestimating how much you can do.

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You’ll need to adjust, but be careful about where the adjustment will come from:

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◦ You can do fewer tasks or less work on a task

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◦ You can find a way to work harder, faster, or quicker

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Here’s the thing though-if you want to do more on a certain task, you’ll almost always have to do less on some other task, or do fewer tasks overall.

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It’s a tradeoff; but you get to choose which direction to take it.

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If you’re not using your time, you’re losing it.

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Time blocking isn’t about cramming in more.

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It’s about using time deliberately and making space for what matters.

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The core insight here is deceptively simple.

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Stop managing tasks and start managing time itself.

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Every hour you leave unassigned gets quietly claimed by something else.

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Here are the primary takeaways from today's episode.

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Allocating specific tasks to specific times saves energy.

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By batching similar tasks, the time lost to switching contexts drops from 50 to 100 minutes to just 10 to 20 minutes.

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Time blocking stops procrastination by setting clear goals.

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Each hour has a purpose, reducing wasted moments and increasing productivity.

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Focus improves when you know what each part of your day is for.

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And for you Stoics out there, we'll leave you this quote from Seneca.

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It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.