The Time-Block Planner: A Daily Method for Deep Work in a Distracted World - Hardcover

Newport, Cal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593192052 ISBN 13: 9780593192054

Publisher: Portfolio, 2020

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism comes a daily planner that deploys the power of time blocking to help you focus on what's important in an increasingly distracted world.

Time blocking is a time management method long used by some of the world's most effective people, from Elon Musk to Bill Gates, and promoted by some of the smartest thinkers in productivity, from Peter Drucker to Benjamin Franklin. Its core idea is that a task list is not enough to make the most of your limited time. You should instead partition your working hours into blocks assigned to specific activities. In doing so, you can more easily protect hours for deep work, while batching shallow tasks into efficient sprints. The clarity of these blocks also encourages you to focus intensely on one thing at a time, resisting the distracting allure of inboxes, social media, and idle web surfing.

For fifteen years, author Cal Newport has been extolling the benefits of time blocking. Now for the first time, this system has been captured in a daily planner that makes it easy for anyone to implement these ideas in their own professional life.

The Time-Block Planner opens with an introduction from Newport to guide you through the basics of effective time blocking. Ninety days' worth of time-blocking pages follow, each divided into a grid that simplifies both building daily schedules and easily updating them as circumstances change. Weekly planning pages supplement the daily planning pages, each including a big idea about productivity from Newport, inspiring you to think deeply about the week ahead. A "shutdown" box sits at the top of each page so you can physically and psychologically end your workday with a check of the box--a ritual widely employed by many of Newport's longtime readers.

You already know what work really matters. The Time-Block Planner will help you push aside distractions and other peoples' demands for your time, and focus on accomplishing more of these deep efforts than you ever thought possible.

About this title

About the Author

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and So Good They Can't Ignore You. You won't find him on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, but you can often find him at home with his family in Washington, DC, or writing essays for his popular blog.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from the Introduction: 

The Power of Time Blocking

The Time-Block Planner implements a personal productivity system that I’ve perfected over the past fifteen years. During this period, it helped me earn a PhD in computer science at MIT and then go on to achieve tenure as a professor at Georgetown University, while simultaneously publishing six books for general audiences, including multiple bestsellers. Most importantly—and one of the aspects that I believe sets my system apart from any other—I did all of this while rarely working past 5:30 p.m. I need my evenings free to wrangle my three young kids. My productivity system made all this possible, and the planner you’re currently holding will enable you to implement it in your own professional life.

As you’ll learn in the detailed instructions that follow, the core of my system is a simple but powerful strategy called time blocking. Most people approach their workday by trying to cross things off a task list in the small slivers of time that remain between attending meetings and reacting to emails and instant messages. Time blocking, by contrast, requires you to figure out in advance how you want to spend every minute of your day. Instead of trying to generally “be productive,” you partition your time into blocks and assign specific work to them. This critical shift from managing tasks to managing time can massively increase the amount of useful work you accomplish. It also provides an anxiety-reducing sense of control over your schedule.

I didn’t invent time blocking. As soon as people began thinking seriously about personal productivity, they began preaching the benefits of this strategy. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin explains, “Every part of my business should have its allotted time.” He then provides a sample time-block schedule that divides up his waking hours into blocks, each dedicated to a different productive activity. In his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive, one of the first professional productivity books ever written, Peter Drucker echoes Franklin’s commitment to managing time instead of tasks. “Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks,” he writes. “They start with their time.” A more recent article, appearing on a popular career website, reports that both Bill Gates and Elon Musk deploy variations of time blocking to help fuel their “freakish” levels of accomplishments.

This technique, in other words, is one that serious productivity aficionados have been deploying with great success for many years. This planner will help you follow their lead by providing you the tools needed to design and execute your own effective time-block schedules. What you won’t find in this planner is a substitute for your calendar. I assume you already manage your meetings and appointments elsewhere, such as the shared digital calendars that more and more organizations require their employees to use. Though you will copy events from your calendar into your daily time-block schedules, the planner is not their long-term home.

This planner also doesn’t provide room for you to permanently store all of the various tasks and obligations for which you’re currently responsible. The modern knowledge worker is burdened with many hundreds of these responsibilities at any given time; it’s simply not practical to keep track of them in a paper notebook that’s replaced multiple times a year. When using this planner, you will copy selected tasks from whatever system you use into your daily time-block schedules, but as with meetings and appointments, this will not be the primary place you store them.

The time-block planner instead focuses on a narrower objective: getting the most out of the time and attention you have available to allocate toward work each day. You already know what you need to do. This planner helps you do more of it, and do it more intentionally, than you ever thought possible. But enough with the preamble. Let’s dive into the details of exactly how this planner works . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: Portfolio
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0593192052
• ISBN 13: 9780593192054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240