Time-Broke

A letter from Time-Broke

Time blocking vs a to-do list: why the list keeps winning, and losing

Short answer: A to-do list tells you what you want to do. A time block tells you whether you have the hours to do it. Lists fail quietly because they never run out of room. A week does: it has 168 hours, and every item on the list has to come out of them. Use the list to capture, and the calendar to decide. Then check, once a week, whether the blocks matched what actually happened.

Why the list feels like it works

A list is easy to add to and satisfying to cross off. It also hides the one question that matters. As Time-Broke puts it about how we plan: “It almost never asks whether you have committed more hours than you have.”

So the list grows. “When the new commitment arrives, we add it to the week.” Nothing comes off. The list doesn’t push back, because it has no edges.

In Life Is Not a List, the author describes a night at the kitchen table, writing down everything he was carrying: “It started as twelve lines in a notebook, and then it ran past twelve, because once you start being honest a list does not stay short.” And then: “For a long time I lived the way I suspect you live, which is by treating my life as a list.”

What time blocking adds

A block puts a cost on every item: this takes Tuesday from 9 to 11, so something else doesn’t. That’s the part a list can’t do. “A list cannot do this, because a list is a thing your mind makes that already agrees with your mind.”

But blocking has its own failure: the calendar becomes a second wish list. Blocks get planned, then overrun, then quietly ignored.

The method that works: plan, then read the receipts

  1. Capture everything on a list. Don’t plan from it.
  2. Put the week’s real commitments into blocks, including travel, prep and recovery. The hour-long call that really takes two belongs in the calendar as two.
  3. At the end of the week, compare the blocks with what happened. That’s a time audit, and it’s the step most systems skip.
  4. Repeat for three or four weeks before redesigning anything. One week is noise.

If the list is long because the life is too full, no system fixes it. Then the question isn’t how to schedule the list. It’s which parts of the life are holding up the rest.

Start here

— Andrew

From the books Life Is Not a List and Time-Broke.

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