100 blocks
Life is long if you know how to live it, says Seneca in his seminal work ironically titled On the Shortness of Life. Like most others, I have struggled with my fair share of time management issues. Because it turns out, I didn’t know how to live it … until recently.
There has always been the feeling of not having spent enough time with a loved one or not spending enough time on growing myself intellectually. A missed workout here, an unkept promise of a date night there, an unreturned phone call somewhere — the stress adds up.
It kept nagging at me — how is it that really successful and extremely busy people I know seem to manage their time so effectively? What is the secret to the ever elusive work-life balance that seems so critical to long term mental wellness?
I discovered the answers to these lay in blocks. Given how much this has helped me, I felt it’d be criminal not to share it with others. It is a framework, alright — but by no means something novel I invented. It’s a mishmash of 3 or 4 well-known techniques that have been used for long. What follows is my custom framework that has helped me run a company and stay happily married and my hope is it helps you too.
I vaguely remembered reading that chunking time down into bite-sized blocks helps you schedule better. The smaller the block is, the better. This is why people recommend meetings be scheduled for 50 minutes, instead of an hour. This is also why Pomodoro, a technique I love and use to get through a day’s tasks, is super efficient.
I also read up on Deep Work and I realized that a strict routine helps — just ask Pablo Picasso or Benjamin Franklin. I decided to mix all these together. My goal was work-life balance and to achieve this, I decided to sculpt my days into well-defined blocks of time with a routine.
Everyone has 24 hours a day. That’s precisely 1,440 minutes. I need 7 hours of sleep every night to stay fresh — that’s 420 minutes there. Take away another 20 minutes for a buffer, and you are left with 1,000 minutes. Let’s now divide these 1,000 minutes into 10 minute blocks. You now have 100 blocks. A work-life balance must be exactly that. A balance.
So, 50 blocks of time for work and 50 blocks of time for life. This is how I split it.
I now think in terms of blocks instead of minutes or hours. This Medium post was a 5-block task. That’s two Pomodoro sessions. Once I distil time into smaller chunks, large tasks seem less humongous and it’s possible to accomplish them, because, in my mind 5 blocks seems smaller and far more precise than about an hour. This shift in thinking about time helps me organize my day better, accomplish more, and stay happier.
A number of wonderful tools help me accomplish this, but the biggest shoutout has to be to Notion. Notion has become my life’s dashboard (and for work related stuff, it’s Asana). If you do not have Notion yet, I strongly recommend you signup. You can use my referral link: https://www.notion.so/?r=327295408e874926984ae9995a50b6f7
If you’re adopting this, do let me know how it goes!
