I was talking with a coworker the other day about methods of productivity. His solution is to block time on his calendar for specific tasks. It’s similar to Tomasz Tunguz’s approach.
The concept seems pretty smart on paper. We’re constantly dealing with overly ambitious task lists, and the effort to add one more item to the list isn’t an equivalent trade for the time required to do the work. There are not enough hours in the day to complete most task lists, and we rarely account for the other big time suck—meetings—in calculating what we can do on a given day or week.
But it’s an idea worth revisiting, because, to quote Tomasz, “To do lists fail because the user’s good intention and optimistic aspirations go unchecked. For the software, the marginal cost to add a new task is zero. For me, it’s a quarter of an hour or more. Managing tasks by calendar is the only productivity hack that recognizes this reality.”
But in practice, I just haven’t quite nailed it yet. Maybe it’s building in more padding for each task than I think I’ll need. Or leaving some buffer room in the day for when things inevitably shift. Or only picking a few choice priorities to give the time block treatment. But I’m going to try all the angles to see what sticks.