The 3 Types of Time Blocks You Need to Schedule for a Productive Week
Go beyond merely scheduling time for tasks, and build a schedule that helps you guide your days toward achieving your goals
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I’ve known about the importance of time management for a long time. I’ve understood that you need to schedule time to do the work that you know needs to get done. But what I didn’t fully realize until recently is that effective time management means more than just blocking out time to get tasks done. It requires scheduling time to do 3 entirely different — but entirely necessary — kinds of things each week over and above simply getting things checked off your to-do list.
To effectively use the time you have, you need to block out 3 key types of time. In their book The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington spell out 3 basic types of time blocks you need to schedule during your week in order to make the most of it: buffer blocks, strategic blocks, and breakout blocks.
The trick is to both schedule them in the right lengths, total amounts of time per week, and to prioritize them correctly. As I’ve begun doing this, the effect it’s had on my productivity have been significant. Once you understand these blocks of time, and what they can do, it’s hard to go back to any other way of looking at your days and weeks.
Buffer Bocks
Buffer blocks are the blocks of time most of us are familiar with, but usually don’t schedule. They’re meant for low-level activities, like checking email, messaging services like Slack, and other information and communication fees that can tend to be a source of work or vital information for you. It’s the time we spend catching up with what might have gone on while we were doing other work — deeper work.
And while we tend to do these sorts of things quite often, because we don’t schedule them, two things happen. First, we’re fragmented in how we deploy the time. We often revert to checking email while we’re trying to do deep work on a project. When we get stuck on that deep work, we hide away by checking email. But we’re rarely ever checking email in a meaningful way. We’re not processing the email. We’re not putting into our prioritization…
