How Can I Hold Myself Accountable for My Own Time Boundaries?
Everything I do takes longer than I think it will (and other early takeaways from Cal Newport’s strategy of “time block” planning).
Hey everyone—welcome to another edition of Reframe Your Inbox, a pseudo-semi-weekly(ish) email newsletter in which I share some meandering thoughts on politics, work, and life.
A brief reflection on the passing of Congressman John Lewis
As he was for millions of people, John Lewis was my hero. I was lucky enough to spend some time with him on a couple different occasions, including as a young Hill staffer interviewing him for a graduate school essay. (I remember nothing about that particular grad school class except for my conversation with Lewis.) To this day I’m amazed that John Lewis, a member of Congress, an icon of Civil Rights, a witness to and a shaper of history, would be willing to set aside 30 minutes to speak with a twenty-something graduate student and Capitol Hill staff assistant. Later this week I’ll be publishing an article about these experiences, which I’ll share in the next newsletter. Until then, here’s one of my favorite passages from Lewis’s 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind:
I am not without passion; in fact, I have a very strong sense of passion. But my passion plays itself out in a deep, patient way. When I care about something, when I commit to it, I am prepared to take the long, hard road, knowing it may not happen today or tomorrow, but ultimately, eventually, it will happen. That’s what faith is all about. That’s the definition of commitment—patience and persistence. People who are like fireworks, popping off right and left with lots of sound and sizzle, can capture a crowd, capture a lot of attention for a time, but I always have to ask, where will they be at the end? Some battles are long and hard, and you have to have staying power. Firecrackers go off in a flash, then leave nothing but ashes. I prefer a pilot light—the flame is nothing flashy, but once it is lit, it doesn’t go out. It burns steadily, and it burns forever.
What I’ve learned so far from “time blocking”
Can you gain more control over your time? How do you make sure you’re prioritizing your most important tasks and activities? Is it possible to balance the demands of life with all the other things you want to do? The closest I’ve come to answering these questions is something I’ve talked about here before: recognizing that you can’t “do it all,” and acknowledging that unfortunate reality by setting more realistic expectations for what you can accomplish in a given amount of time.
In other words, taking control of your time isn’t wholly a productivity challenge. It’s a “do less” challenge. As David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried write in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, “rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem. The only way to get more done is to have less to do.”
Even so, I’ve long had the sense that I could be using my time better. Not “better” in the sense of “more efficiently” or “more busily” or even “more productively,” but rather “more deliberately” and “with more focus.” I want to get better at chapter six of Reframe the Day: making more time for what matters.
To that end, over the past few weeks I’ve been re-exploring author Cal Newport’s concept of “time blocking.” Broadly, time blocking is just a technique for using a calendar, but it’s a technique that requires you to be more intentional about assigning specific activities to each hour of your working day, and more proactive (as opposed to reactive) about carving out time for your highest-priority items.
As he explained in a 2013 blog post, Newport sees time blocking as a tool to “make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right pace for the relevant deadlines.” (If you’re interested in learning more about how to time block, there are tons of explainers and how-tos across the World Wide Web. I suggest starting with Newport’s 2013 and 2015 blog posts, or his Deep Questions podcast.)
I first encountered the concept of time blocking in Newport’s 2016 book, Deep Work. At its core, time blocking is a system for prioritizing deep work. Yet despite my longstanding interest in doing more deep work, I’d never made a genuine effort to make time blocking part of my process.
Listening to a few recent episodes of Newport’s podcast convinced me to give it another try, so recently I’ve been scheduling blocks of time for things like writing, journaling, and progressing work projects that require sustained focus. I’ve also been batching the little things—the stuff that has to get done but doesn’t need to take up the whole day—into blocks that fit around those meaningful blocks of time. Here’s what I’ve learned from this exercise so far:
>> I have no idea how long it takes me to do most of my work. I already knew that I didn’t know this, but putting a plan for the day on paper and then comparing that plan to how the day actually went has made it much more clear. That’s a hugely valuable lesson for me in both planning and setting expectations. That means:
>> I underestimate how much time my work requires. Dramatically so. And not just work. Basically anything I do in life, from walking to the store to reading a book to making a phone call, takes longer than I anticipate. In his podcast, Newport suggests that new time blockers should start by assuming we’ll need 50 percent more time than we think for a given task. My inability to predict how long it’ll take me to do things, and my unrealistic expectations for what I can achieve in a given amount of time, are such deeply entrenched traits that I may need to anticipate closer to 100 percent (i.e. twice as much time as I think) until I rewire my working habits. To that end:
>> I need to schedule a buffer at the end of each day. By scheduling time at the end of the day—currently a 30-minute block labeled “wrap up/buffer”—I leave myself time to review the day and reflect on the next one, and I preemptively build in some flexibility in case I need it (which I almost always will). In doing so, I make it much more likely I’ll actually stop working at the time I intended. I’m probably going to take this buffer time, whether or not I’ve scheduled it. Time blocking forces me to account for it.
>> I have to prioritize writing if I want it to happen. At least if at all possible. This is another thing I already knew but of which I need to be reminded constantly: If I want to be sure to make time to write, I have to block off time for it, and I have to make it one of the first—if not the first—things I do every day. Time blocking makes me think ahead to the entire day, not just the next thing on my list, which serves as a useful reminder that if I don’t write first, I might not write at all.
>> I don’t hold myself accountable for my own time boundaries. Unlike a day full of meetings scheduled by or with other people, many—if not all—of the start and end times on a time-blocked calendar are self-imposed. They’re meetings with you and only you, so only you will know if you show up for them when you said you would. I need to train my mind to respect and abide by these solitary commitments, just as I would for a meeting or call with other people.
My high school cross-country coach once told me that when you’re training, you should always try to run as far as you planned—no less, but also no more. If you always make yourself run further than you originally intended, your brain will stop trusting that you mean what you say, which will make it even harder to get motivated to run the next time.
I think time blocking requires a similar type of discipline. If I want to make time blocking successful, I need to start and end work on a particular project when I said I would. I need to respect my own boundaries on my time, not just the boundaries other people’s calls and commitments set for me. I need to trust that I’ll follow my own plans and limitations for the day. It’s about structure, accountability, and respect for my own time.
It’s also about practice. By forcing me to make meaningful, or at least semi-realistic, assessments of what I want to do and how long I think I’ll need to do it, I’m hopeful that time blocking will train me to reconcile my expectations with reality in a way that a to-do list alone does not. It doesn’t replace the to-do list; it enhances the to-do list by channeling it through a reality filter. Time blocking is a daily lesson in accepting that I can’t “do it all.”
Have you tried time blocking, or something like it? I’d love to hear what you learned. Just reply to this email to share your thoughts.
This week in high-quality internet content…
“Fallow time is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and children. To do the work, we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible. … There’s something to be said for the state of quiet dormancy, where little apparently happens. We might have periods of furious output; to get there, we require periods of faithful input. With input, there’s a restoration of fertile, vibrant thinking.” That’s Bonnie Tsui in the New York Times. (I first came across this 2019 piece in Tsui’s interview on the Longform podcast.)
“All of this unfinished business has made the United States semidemocratic, a half-and-half world in which ideals of equality, political accountability, and the rule of law exist alongside practices that make a daily mockery of those ideals. This half-life is ending—either the outward show of democracy is finished and authoritarianism triumphs, or the long-denied substance becomes real. The unconsumed past will either be faced and dealt with, or it will consume the American republic.” That’s Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review of Books.
That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading.
—Adam