Productivity

A Guide to Productive time management (feat. Time Blocking)

Ted Lee

Feb 8, 2024 • 5 min read

When you run projects, you often have to manage not only your own tasks but also the overall timeline and the work of teammates. If you spend too much time on management inside limited hours, you lose time for the work that actually needs your judgment and creativity. Now imagine juggling several projects across multiple tools like Notion, Slack, Jira, Figma, and Asana. This setting raises switching costs and communication overhead, which makes it harder to focus on the essential work.

As work gets busier, people start searching for scheduling methods or tools. If you only handle a narrow set of tasks inside one project, you may not need a special method or tool. In that case, the method or tool can even slow you down because it consumes time. But if you are spending too much of your day on schedule management, it is time to apply a productive scheduling method at work.

What productive scheduling means

Productivity is performance per unit of time. If time were infinite, productivity would not matter. In an unlimited day, you could do unlimited tasks. In reality, we have only twenty four hours and hard deadlines. Finishing work quickly and accurately within that constraint is what productivity means in the real world.

Scheduling methods help with the time side of productivity. Have you ever delayed a whole project because you missed one task you owned. Have you ever wasted too much time just gathering scattered follow ups into one place. The time lost when you miss tasks, the time you spend consolidating them, and the time spent following up on teammates all add up to unproductive hours.

Productive scheduling reduces those wasted pockets of time so you can pour more energy into essential work. Schedule management itself should not consume much time. Use the smallest possible effort to organize and scan your schedule, then invest the rest in real work.

a simple diagram that shows productive time rising as wasted time drops

Types of scheduling methods

There are many ways to manage time. The methods below aim for the highest productivity with the least time investment. They are especially powerful in combination.

1. GTD (Getting Things Done)

GTD is a method proposed by David Allen in 2001. It recommends a five step flow for managing work. Collect tasks, decide whether each is actionable, organize by project, review deadlines and priorities, then execute. GTD adds more structure than a basic to do list, such as grouping by project and reviewing priorities. It can feel heavy if you run a single project, but it becomes productive when you run several projects and manage many channels because it helps you keep work organized by project.

2. Time Blocking

Time Blocking means dividing your day into time blocks and assigning specific work to each block. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Elon Musk at Tesla, and Jack Dorsey at Twitter are often cited as using this approach to maximize their time. Time Blocking runs on the calendar you already use every day, so you can assign and execute without extra study. If GTD helps you organize work, Time Blocking helps you execute it with force.

3. Pomodoro

Pomodoro is a time management method from Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. The name comes from a tomato shaped kitchen timer. The basic pattern is simple.

Set a goal or task from your list
Focus for twenty five minutes
Rest for five minutes
Repeat the focus and rest cycle four times, then take a thirty minute long break
Reset and repeat

Use Pomodoro in a way that fits you. You do not have to lock it at twenty five minutes or repeat exactly four times. Adjust to your attention span and environment. The core idea is to protect execution time from growing without a limit by deciding a time box in advance.

One calendar workflow with GTD, Time Blocking, and Pomodoro

Using all three may sound complex, but if you already live in your calendar you may be doing parts of this unconsciously. You only need a bit of structure. You do not need lots of time. You can use the same calendar more productively.

Use GTD to organize tasks
Use Time Blocking to assign them to time
Use Pomodoro to execute inside each block

1. Organize tasks in your calendar with GTD

Capturing tasks inside the calendar is the most important starting point for productive scheduling. If you adopt another tool for task management, you split task management from calendar management. That adds another place to maintain, which creates unproductive time. Since we already open the calendar daily for company work and meetings, organizing tasks there maximizes productivity.

If you run several projects, classify tasks by project. Switching between projects is hard. According to research from the University of California, Irvine, it takes an average of twenty three minutes and fifteen seconds to return to a task after an interruption. Processing related tasks together while you are in a given project saves the time lost to switching.

2. Assign tasks on your calendar with Time Blocking

Once you have tasks organized by project, plan when to do them. When you run several projects, it is easy to miss tasks and damage the overall timeline. Missed tasks delay the project and create unproductive time.

Along with Time Blocking, the idea of Day Theming also helps. Day Theming means grouping similar tasks into a category and processing one category without interference from others. Inside the hours you can control, Time Block tasks by project so you can batch similar categories and minimize switching. This reduces wasted time.

3. Execute on your calendar with Pomodoro

Pomodoro lets you experience the benefit of single tasking, which is finishing work by immersing in one task at a time. When you go deep, you often shorten total time and reduce stress because you see real progress. You do not even need a separate timer. The calendar shows you elapsed time. Focus inside the assigned Time Block and you will shorten task time and use your day more productively.

Collaboration matters more than any method

Even if you apply GTD, Time Blocking, and Pomodoro for personal productivity, use them in a way that does not block collaboration. If you Time Block every personal task on the calendar, teammates may hesitate to request meetings when they see a fully booked week. It can also be hard to handle issues that pop up during the day. Balance personal productivity with team work by setting simple rules for your personal Time Blocks.

Simple rules for Time Blocking at work

For meetings and shared work, set Visibility to Public so everyone can see who you are working with and on what.
For deep focus work that must be free from interruption, set Visibility to Private and label it as Deep work so others know you are focusing. Keep deep work within limits agreed by the team so it does not block collaboration.
When you are focusing but willing to be interrupted for meetings or requests, use an Invisible mode if your calendar supports it. It will appear open to others while you still see your own block. In this case you can Time Block freely without blocking collaboration.

The paradox of productive scheduling

The most productive scheduling method is, paradoxically, not doing schedule management. In principle, we should spend most of our time on essential work. Scheduling itself can be unproductive if it consumes the day. We still manage the schedule because not managing it would hurt productivity even more. Therefore we should manage with the minimum effort that gives us a clear view and then return to real work.

Instead of adopting a brand new tool, manage projects, meetings, and personal tasks in the calendar you already open every day. That way you can focus on what matters.

Time-Management Methods That Work Even Better Together