Posted on January 6, 2022

"It didn’t take me long to see that I did better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks, separated by non-writing tasks: exercising, meeting someone, making a phone call, tinkering with my blog.”

—Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

Since some time between 2020 and 2021—I confess I’m one of the ones that the memories of those years are blurred together—, I started applying the time-blocking strategy used by many people including Elon Musk and Bill Gates. However, It’s a difficult practice to maintain over time: I found myself plainly forgetting about it when major events were happening (e.g. having to travel abroad in the middle of the pandemic to reunite with my partner after more than a year apart, not knowing if I was going to be able to come back anytime soon). Nonetheless, the idea always intrigued me and kept it on the back of my head.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago when I started seriously considering going back to it after I read the book Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The many—and I mean many as in more that 80—techniques they suggest are concentrated around four pillars: highlight, laser, energize and reflect. In a nutshell—and surely an oversimplified one—the strategy aims for defining what will be your “must work on today, no excuses” task, staying focused while doing that one task, introducing bits of recharging during the day (e.g. healthy eating, exercising, breaks), and finally reflecting on what went right, what went wrong and making any adjustments to the following day’s schedule.

In my case, I decided to give that a shot, with some modifications inspired by the suggestion on The Happiness Project: (yesterday) I worked on rearranging my calendar, implementing the time-blocking technique—yes, I even blocked 15 minutes today to shower and another 15 minutes to play the guitar at 6:30 p.m.—, introducing blocks for highlighting, energizing and reflecting. In reality, however, I cannot afford to have just one highlight a day: I’m in grad school so practically daily I need to work on different research projects, as well as coursework. Thus, I decided to have between 2 or 3 ninety-minute blocks for different highlights each day. I’m not sure if that is the optimal length for me, but hey, I need to start somewhere, gather data, and reiterate… let’s see how that goes!