By overestimating, you are less likely to break your schedule. The schedule is not meant to be a prison, but it is meant to protect you from the creep of less important-but more enticing-tasks stealing time from your important work.Īt first, you will very likely underestimate the time your tasks take. At which time, simply re-build your schedule for the remaining time in your day. The solution is simple: if something more important comes up-like following a creative inspiration-then it’s fine to ignore the schedule until it is played out. “Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs it’s instead to maintain a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward.”Ī common concern is that following a rigid schedule will keep you from being able to follow creative ideas or great opportunities when they strike. But don’t throw away your schedule, just take a few minutes when you can to re-evaluate your priorities and redraw your schedule (either on another page, or cross out the old schedule and write next to it). Your schedule will likely break at some point every dayĮither because your time estimates were off, or you were interrupted with some new urgent tasks. In Deep Work, Cal argues extensively for the need to give our brains a rest.Ģ. Make sure to make blocks for lunch or relaxation breaks. You probably have some objections at this point. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.”

As Cal says, “You have, in effect, given every minute of your day a job. When you’re done, every minute of your day should be blocked. So for small tasks, batch them into a “task block” - just draw a line to the right side of the page where you list the tasks you’ll accomplish in that block. To keep things clean, the minimum time block should be 30 minutes. Do this for the rest of your time in the day.ģ. So you draw a box on the page from 9am to 11am and write “blog post” in the box. For example, you might block out 9am to 11am to write a blog post. Divide the hours of the day into blocks and assign activities to the blocks.

Deep work timer