Ah the to do list. If you hear the word productivity, the to do list is probably the first thing that comes to mind. It's a symbol of organizational ambition, and it's at the heart of almost all productivity advice in one way or another. If the goal is to improve the way we work, then the to do list is the most important tool in the get But you know that already, don't you. And you also probably know that even the best to do list doesn't really work on
its own. You can nail down exactly what the most important tasks on your plate are on any given day and still goes up shop at five point thirty feeling like you barely made a dent. Nailing the to do list is one thing, but how do you nail the execution. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. Welcome to your favorite
tips across ten bite size episodes. I'll be sharing tips from some of the world's best thinkers that you, the listeners, have found the most useful. We're covering everything from creating better to do lists to setting more effective boundaries around your time, and you'll be hearing from people like best selling author Sally Hepworth, Corona Cast host and journalist Norman Swan,
and Google's executive productivity advisor Laura may Martin. Today's favorite tip comes from Trudy, and she writes, I loved hearing Callen Newport talk about how he uses time blocking and his weekly system around diary planning. Well, I love this too, Trudy. This excerpt is back from twenty nineteen when I first had cal on the show, where he shared his method for weekly and daily planning.
I'm a big believer in both weekly and daily. I think you need to spend time to understand the contours of your week, what's happening on each day, what day is really crowded, what days have open space, so that you can start moving things around at that scale and recognize, Hey, Monday is pretty open. That's probably going to be a good time to make a lot of progress on this hard thing, even though that hard thing's not due till Friday.
But you're seeing on the calendar that Wednesday and Thursday have a lot of meetings, right, and so looking at the whole week and trying to plan out what's going to happen when I think that's important. Believer in time blocking on a particular day. Give your time a job. Here's the hours i've available. What am I doing with this hour? What am I doing with this thirty minutes? What am I doing with this three hour block? Give
your time a job. As opposed to just approaching your day with a generic to do list, you're much more effective at getting things out of your day if again, you look at the free hours of the day and reconfigure them, move them around, and figure out how can I get the most out of this? And then I often am a believer in ad hoc systems and rituals that match what's going on at the time. So if you have, let's say, a big event coming up, do you have to do a lot of planning for you
might just say, here's what I'm doing. It's thirty minutes after launch every single day, thirty minutes every single day just checking in, moving things, seeing what's going on or whatever.
Right.
But this idea of having temporary systems that you put into place to help you make a lot of progress on important non permanent things in a way that doesn't have you just completely an ad hoc looking at a tasklic type mode. So if you do weekly planning, daily time blocking, build temporary systems and rituals as needed for temporary but large obligations, that usually combines to help you get a pretty effective use of the time available.
And can I ask with time blocking because it's something I've experimented with myself and I feel like the cognitive biases that either cause you to overestimate or underestimate how long something takes, I've found can be my downfall with time blocking, where let's just say I've completely overestimated how long something will take, but I set aside three hour. Is I finished it in an hour and a half, and then like what like how does that work.
In your will? Right? Well, I mean I should say at the bigger point is that one of the nice things about time blocking is that it's practiced to make you better at estimating how long things take because there
is some pain to when you get it wrong. It requires some extra effort and so you have an to try to get it right, and you get a lot of feedback, so you see consistently not giving myself enough time for this type of activity, you get that feedback or I'm always giving myself too much time, so that
gets better. But then what do you do in the moment, Well, if you don't give yourself enough time, then you know if you keep going till you finish what needs to get done, and then you just adjust your schedule for the rest of the day, which is fine. And one of the ways that people get time blocking wrong is they think that it's a game where you win the gold medal if you never have to change your schedule. But there's actually no prize you get for getting your
schedule exactly right and never having to change it. You probably might have to change it three, four or five times. The goal is not to have a perfect schedule. It's to always have some intention about what you're doing with the time that remains of the day. Same thing if you underschedule, so you have a couple options here. You could add something new, or you could take advantage of that time just to relax, or to do something that's going to get you a dogative rest like that's actually
kind of a nice scenario. But the point I always make about time blocking is that regardless of what you do. Having a good understanding of how long things take is crucial because if you don't, regardless you're time blocking or not, you're just going to keep getting yourself in the trouble, and you're going to keep having colliding deadlines, You're going to keep having late nights, You're going to keep having these sort of stressful moments when you realize a lot
still needs to get done and I'm not there. And time blocking trains you to better appreciate how long things take and then otherwise just be comfortable with the fact that you might have to change your schedule several times throughout the day and that that's not negative, that's actually how the system works.
I must say, after all the different productivity tips that I hear is part of my work. Time blocking has got to be one of the most fundamental things that has transformed my work. So if you have not tried time blocking in your life, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go today. As the listener of How I Work, you've hopefully picked up a few tips on this show to help you work better, But do you want more? And maybe in a book form, because let's
face it, books are the most awesome thing on the planet. Well, now you can. In my new book, time Wise, I uncover a wealth of proven strategies that anyone can use to improve their productivity, work, and lifestyle. Time Wise brings together all of the gems that I've learned from conversations with the world's greatest thinkers, including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Mia Friedman, and Turia Pitt and many many others. Time Wise is launching on July five, but you can pre
order it now from Amantha dot com. And if you pre ordered time Wise, I have a couple of bonuses view First, you'll receive an ebook that details my top twenty favorite apps and software for being time wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading,
cooking ideas and more. You will also get a complementary spot in a webinar that I'm running on June twenty nine, where I will be sharing the tactics from time Wise that I use most often, and also some bonus ones that are not in the book that I use and love. Hop onto Amantha dot com to pre order now. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios and thank you to Matt Nimba. Who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything
sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.