5 Benefits of Time Blocking

Time blocking is a powerful productivity strategy that offers benefits to anyone. It is especially effective for people with ADHD.

In its most simple form, time blocking involves scheduling your tasks and activities into your day as appointments, in multiple “time blocks.”

Although you might initially resist the idea of working within a structure like time blocks, if you experiment with it you’re likely to realize the benefits of working within this structure.

5 Benefits of Time Blocking

Time blocking has numerous benefits. Here are my top 5.

(1) Get More Done in a Day

Think back to middle school and high-school: throughout your day you took classes on several different subjects. You also had a lunch break, and a phys ed or gym class. After school, you probably did one or more extra-curricular activities, then you came home for dinner. You also did your homework.

How did you do all of this in one day?

You had a structure for it.

While school may have felt confining in terms of its rules or subjects that didn’t interest you, you can’t deny that the structure of it helped you cover a lot of areas in a given day.

When you apply that concept to topics and work that interests you, you can see the freedom offered by the structure. Rather than confining you, time blocking gives you freedom to do a lot of different things in each day.

This is a major boost for people with ADHD, who tend to have a lot of interests and often want to do all the things. Time blocking gives you time for everything.

(2) It Helps You Prioritize

We may want to do all the things, but we can’t do them all at once.

Despite common perception, multi-tasking is a myth.

Just like you can only be in one place at a time, you can only actually do one thing at a time.

That said, in the abstract it can be hard to prioritize. We like to think that we can fit everything in. The refusal to prioritize or decide what is most important often leads to spinning wheels and not getting anything done.

That illusion shatters when we sit down to block our time.

When you schedule things into your calendar, you come up against the hard limits of your available time. This forces you to be realistic about what you can do in a day, and to prioritize accordingly.

(3) It Helps You Focus

How many times has this happened to you:

You’re in the middle of working on something when you suddenly remember that you need to respond to an email, or you are wondering what’s waiting in your inbox. So you open your email for “just a minute” to fire off a quick message. 45 minutes later you’re still in your inbox, or you’ve moved on to scrolling social media, wondering where the time went.

Or, someone knocks on your door, pokes their head in and asks if you have just a minute for a quick question.

Half hour later, you’re trying to get back on track.

We tend to act on those impulses or allow those interruptions is because we think they’ll be brief, and they don’t seem like a big deal.

But studies show that it takes at least 20 minutes to return to what you were doing after an interruption.

Scheduling your day with time blocks can help you stave off those interruptions and maintain focus on your task.

When you schedule dedicated time blocks for email, social media, or “office hours” you know that you have a time to act on that impulse or be present for the person who needs your help.

This allows you to set expectations with others who might want your attention, and to corral your own impulses to turn away from your work.

In addition, having a defined time limit for completing your task can create an adrenaline spike that helps you hone your focus and complete your work faster.

(4) Helps You Complete Tasks More Efficiently

Consider how you organize in your home.

In my 17 years as a real estate broker, I’ve been in hundreds of homes. Even the least organized people have some measure of organization. For example, you don’t put your socks in your silverware drawer, and you don’t put your utensils in your sock drawer.

Those things have their own distinct places.

This creates greater efficiency. You know where to go for the socks and utensils. When cooking, you don’t waste time rummaging through socks to find the mixing spoon.

That metaphor may seem too obvious, but your work follows the same pattern.

Time blocks are like your drawers: they create a structure for task organization.

Time blocks create a structure to help you with task organization, which create efficiencies when you do your work.

(We’ll cover this in more detail when we get to the “how to” part of this series.)

(5) It Can Help You Prevent Burnout

Constantly switching between tasks — which is what some people call “multi-tasking” — or running from one task to the next without breaks — keeps our nervous system in sympathetic mode, which is the stress response.

Living in a constant “fight-or-flight” mode like this can contribute to burnout.

Our bodies and minds operate in cycles and rhythms; they are not designed to be always on at full speed. Instead, they require periods of rest and recharging.

When we enter a day without time blocking, it’s easy to get sucked in to stress mode, in which one activity bleeds into the next and you don’t have adequate time to rest.

By time blocking your day, you can build in buffer time and transition time. This will allow you to approach your day with more ease and keep your nervous system regulated throughout the day.

Explore More

These are just some of the many benefits of time blocking. I’ll be covering more benefits in my forthcoming e-book on time blocking. To get a copy of the e-book when it’s ready, make sure you sign up for my newsletter list!