Another schedule hack I’m loving from Cal Newport’s Deep Work (affiliate link) is a trick for planning a fully-focused day.

The key is to “block schedule” your day on a single sheet of paper.

  1. Number the paper with your “working” / productive hours of the day every other line, so each line represents a 30-minute increment.
  2. Write down what you will do during each period of the day, drawing a block around each activity. The smallest increment should be 30 minutes.
  3. During your day, move through this schedule, keeping focused on what is on your schedule.
  4. The key is not to be rigid, but to be focused. If an activity that you thought would take 60 minutes takes 90 minutes, just cross out the first block and re-block the rest of the day. Pencil and eraser work too!

A few other additions:

  1. At the top the page, write down something you are looking forward to during the day. It could be an evening out or something as simple as a cup of coffee. I got this idea from Donald Miller’s Storyline Productivity Schedule.
  2. Since I have a million things floating around my mind on any given day, I use the left-hand side of the paper (about an inch) to write down other “to do” items that pop in my mind. That way they are out of my head and on paper, but not on my schedule. I love the layout of these legal pads from Levenger.

I experimented with this for a few days this week. Two days I used this schedule hack and two I just “went with the flow.”

Guess which days I got the things done that I wanted to get done?