In today’s high-tech society, employees are often distracted by emails, meetings, and endless notifications, resulting in reduced productivity, ineffective time management, and lower attention spans. It makes it harder to focus on the important tasks and what truly matters. The traditional to-do lists often fall short because they don’t account for the time each task actually requires, leading to exhaustion and unfinished priorities.
However, you can overcome the following challenge through time blocking. It is a productivity technique that empowers you to take control of your day by allocating specific time slots to individual tasks or groups of tasks, ensuring that your most important work gets the attention it needs.
Unlike multitasking, time blocking encourages deep focus by dedicating uninterrupted chunks of time to one activity at a particular time. Whether you’re balancing personal commitments, managing a busy work schedule, or striving for a better work-life balance, it helps you to effectively manage your time. By intentionally organizing your day, you can reduce stress, improve efficiency, and foster a space to pursue long-term goals without compromising on daily responsibilities.
According to UK-based research, office workers spend just under 3 hours per day working productively. From procrastination to workload-related stress and mental blocks, there are plenty of reasons why your team might be underperforming. At Brasstacks, we value the importance of time management and convenience. We believe that your time should be prioritized and structured in an impactful way. Download our time blocking toolkit now for effective time management.
Time blocking is a management technique that involves scheduling blocks of time for your tasks throughout the day. Blocking time in your calendar for your to-dos helps you give your workday structure, making it easier to focus and prioritize the important tasks.
It encourages you to accomplish your KPIs. For instance, you might decide to carve out four hours on Tuesday morning to prepare for an important deck on Wednesday. You will give this your full attention and deal with Slack messages, administrative tasks, and everything else later. It ensures full commitment to the task at hand and empowers you to achieve your goals promptly.
Managers use the time blocking technique to prioritize tasks and increase their efficiency. A full, time-blocked day in your calendar might look like this:
The time blocking method ensures your day is well-planned so you can transition smoothly from one task to the next. It helps you to:
Get Started: Initiating the big tasks can be daunting, and a seemingly endless list of to-dos can cause stress and inhibit your ability to focus. A study suggested that organizing and allocating a specific time to start or complete your tasks reduces task-related anxiety, which makes your workload feel more manageable. When you’re able to reduce overwhelm for yourself and your team, it’s easier to get the ball rolling and meet those deadlines.
Set Realistic Priorities: Time blocking encourages you to really think about the duration of the task and to reevaluate your estimations as you go along. The more you use time blocking and tracking, the more accurate your planning gets. When your employees track their time and share how long tasks typically take, you can use this information to create realistic roadmaps and set deadlines collaboratively.
Prioritize your tasks: The key to productivity is approaching the right things at the right time. Time blocking helps you allocate enough time to high-priority tasks, so you don’t end up rushing to complete important tasks or wasting time on unimportant tasks. Prioritization improves with experience, requiring careful consideration and allocation of resources. Time blocking can help junior employees quickly develop their prioritization skills.
Manage your workload: Time blocking helps you prevent your workload from spiralling out of control. With your tasks planned out in your calendar, it’s easier to spot when deadlines aren’t realistic and when priorities need to be updated. It can also help team members identify prioritization conflicts and reach out for managerial support.
Overcome Procrastination: Are you like 20% of the US population, a chronic procrastinator? An MIT study shows that self-imposed deadlines (rather than postponing tasks to the last minute) have a positive correlation with performance. It’s easy to procrastinate when the whole day is planned ahead of you, but when you are aware that you have only two hours to write a report, you’re more likely to focus and accomplish the task.
Reduce Context Switching: Regularly juggling between different tasks, i.e., context switching, increases stress and operational cost as much as 40% of your productive time. Time blocking channels your attention in the right direction. When you intentionally decide that “for the next hour, I am going to work solely on training development”, you mindfully commit to ignoring distractions and fully engaging with the task at hand, leading to better quality work and enhanced productivity.
These benefits apply as much to your team as they do to you, so why not download the Brasstacks time blocking toolkit and encourage everyone to try the time blocking method? Even if your team members are already excelling at their work and meeting deadlines, it could alleviate some pressure and streamline the process to ensure incredible results.
You can block out time in your calendar on a daily or weekly basis. If you have adequate control over your schedule to plan a week, you can do it on Friday afternoon or Monday morning. It will help you organize your tasks and set achievable and realistic deadlines. Follow these steps to plan your week through time blocking:
Essentially, this guide will help you in organizing and prioritizing your tasks. It will create opportunities to offer undivided attention to a specific task and complete it in the given time. Many managers across the world are using time blocking techniques to accomplish their tasks and thrive in their organizations by overcoming the planning fallacy.
You probably already use a task management tool to manage your team’s operations and a calendar app for scheduling and joining meetings. Some task management tools, such as MeisterTask, integrate calendar apps such as iCal and Google Calendar so you can create calendar events from tasks and vice versa. As such, you can see which deadline is approaching and plan your blocks around those tasks.
Moreover, you can also use the Brasstacks time blocking toolkit to effectively organize your work week. It helps you sync your calendar:
Your team can also use our time blocking toolkit to organize their workflows and perform deep work to increase their efficiency. The toolkits will provide visibility of everyone’s schedule to ensure enhanced collaboration. Plus, as a manager, you can simply check your team’s calendars for an overview of their workload or availability.
When it comes to actually completing the work you’ve scheduled, your task management system features trackable tasks with context on what needs to be prioritized, saving you time when you’re ready to begin. Likewise, the toolkit increases collaboration opportunities, which is essential for more complex tasks or those that require input from stakeholders.
Time blocking involves allocating time for a set of tasks, whereas time boxing allocates a specific amount of time to individual tasks at the grassroots level. If you were taking a time boxing approach to your work, your calendar would include more tasks, but those tasks would take up less time individually. Moreover, they would be more specific. For instance, a time-blocked calendar might have tasks like “Prepare for presentation with training team from 9:00 am-11:00 am.
Time boxing is helpful if you have many small tasks to complete within a specific time frame. It seems to add extra pressure, causing you to rush through your work unnecessarily. If you get anxious with multiple deadlines, the method probably isn’t for you, and you should opt for time blocking.
Time batching is a subset of time blocking. It involves grouping similar tasks and working on them in batches, rather than moving between them sporadically throughout the day. You can group tasks by task type or the amount of concentration required for the task.
Rather than juggling between emails, contracts, and task creation, you structure your time to work on the same type of tasks within a set timeframe. As a result, your calendar looks organized and your efforts are invested in an impactful way.
You can start with emails because you know some of them are urgent and require an immediate response. You leave setting up project tasks until later, as you know, this requires more concentration, and you can focus better after the coffee break. Task batching helps you optimize your time and work more efficiently, as you’re not constantly switching between contexts.
Time blocking has many benefits, but the following pitfalls could hinder your plans for a productive week. Here’s how you can avoid them and stay on track for a successful week:
The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time and resources required to complete a task, despite knowing that similar tasks have generally taken longer than planned. It is due to a miscalculation of our abilities and a tendency towards wishful thinking.
However, you can avoid the planning fallacy by tracking how long your tasks actually take, rather than guessing. Additionally, you must employ a data-informed strategy to inform your planning. The more you track the time spent on a particular type of task, the better you’ll be able to plan for it next time.
Studies reveal that the planning fallacy doesn’t apply when you’re forecasting how long someone else will take to complete a task because we’re overly optimistic with our own abilities and more realistic with others. So, when initiating a new task, instead of thinking about how long this will take, ask yourself how long my colleague would take to complete it. It can help in calibrating how long the task will actually take.
Discipline is critical for time blocking; however, being too rigid can often be counterproductive. Here’s how you can strike a balance and overcome the issue:
It can be challenging if new tasks are coming in or priorities are always shifting. However, this is a broader organizational problem and should be addressed with your leadership team.
When planning your blocks, it’s essential to factor in time to transition between tasks. If you overlook this, you can easily find yourself behind schedule. Of course, when you have lots to do, it can be tempting to cram your calendar full of tasks and meetings. However, regular breaks can actually improve focus and help you to work more productively. Be realistic about what you can achieve in a day, without sacrificing your health to avoid burnout.
You’re only human, which means your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day. Aligning demanding tasks with your peak energy levels will help you to do your best work. For instance, if you have an important task to complete by the end of the day, and you know you always have a post-lunch slump around 3 pm, don’t put it off until the afternoon. In fact, that task should probably be the first thing you do.
Like any strategy, how you implement time blocking should be reassessed regularly. If a particular block consistently gets pushed to another, or some tasks more longer than expected, adapt your schedule accordingly. Remember, daily time blocking is meant to enhance your productivity and organization, not cause additional fatigue. Use it flexibly and adjust as needed to make it work for you.
Time management is essential for organizational and personal growth. It helps you take control of your workday, replace chaos with structure, so you can productively complete your tasks. Therefore, you must use the time blocking technique for deep work and prioritize the urgent and important tasks.
A Frontier study concluded that it is a proven time management strategy that reduces distractions and focuses on what truly matters. By scheduling dedicated blocks of time for your most important tasks, you create opportunities for creativity and even well-deserved breaks. To effectively use the time blocking technique, you must stay flexible and adapt as your priorities shift, build in buffer time to avoid burnout, and periodically review your schedule to see what’s working and needs to be changed.
With consistent practice, time blocking can transform your routine, boost productivity, and give you greater autonomy over your workday. Start small, experiment with different approaches, and refine your system until it fits your schedule. Resultantly, you will have more clarity and a schedule that works for you.
Time blocking is an effective time management method where you schedule specific blocks of time for particular tasks or activities. Instead of working from an open-ended to-do list, you allocate each task a start and end time on your calendar. It helps you focus on one priority at a time, overcome distractions, and create a structured workflow to optimize your schedule.
Yes, time blocking is highly effective for improving productivity and focus. It dedicates uninterrupted time to important tasks, avoids multitasking, and reduces decision fatigue. Many professionals, from CEOs to creatives, use time blocking to manage demanding schedules and achieve better results.
All three are time management techniques; however, there’s a subtle difference between them:
While all three are efficient, time blocking gives you the most structured daily plan.
Here’s how you can start time blocking as a beginner:
It requires thorough practice to develop a rhythm that balances structure with flexibility.