It’s here, of course, that most people will begin to run into trouble. Two things can (and likely will) go wrong with your schedule once the day progresses. The first is that your estimates will prove wrong. You might put aside two hours for writing a press release, for example, and in reality it takes two and a half hours. The second problem is that you’ll be interrupted and new obligations will unexpectedly appear on your plate. These events will also break your schedule.
This is okay. If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions). On some days, you might rewrite your schedule half a dozen times. Don’t despair if this happens. Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward—even if these decisions are reworked again and again as the day unfolds.
If you find that schedule revisions become overwhelming in their frequency, there are a few tactics that can inject some more stability. First, you should recognize that almost definitely you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things. When people are new to this habit, they tend to use their schedule as an incarnation of wishful thinking—a best-case scenario for their day. Over time, you should make an effort to accurately (if not somewhat conservatively) predict the time tasks will require.
The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it. If you finish the activity on time, however, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block (for example, some nonurgent tasks). This allows unpredictability in your day without requiring you to keep changing your schedule on paper. For example, returning to our press release example, you might schedule two hours for writing the press release, but then follow it by an additional hour block that you can use to keep writing the release, if needed, but otherwise assign to catching up with e-mail.
The third tactic I suggest is to be liberal with your use of task blocks. Deploy many throughout your day and make them longer than required to handle the tasks you plan in the morning. Lots of things come up during the typical knowledge worker’s day: Having regularly occurring blocks of time to address these surprises keeps things running smoothly.
Before leaving you to put this strategy in practice, I should address a common objection. In my experience pitching the values of daily schedules, I’ve found that many people worry that this level of planning will become burdensomely restrictive. Here, for example, is part of a comment from a reader named Joseph on a blog post I wrote on this topic:
I think you far understate the role of uncertainty… I [worry about] readers applying these observations too seriously, to the point of an obsessive (and unhealthy) relationship with one’s schedule that seems to exaggerate the importance of minute-counting over getting-lost-in-activities, which if we’re talking about artists is often the only really sensible course of action.
I understand these concerns, and Joseph is certainly not the first to raise them. Fortunately, however, they’re also easily addressed. In my own daily scheduling discipline, in addition to regularly scheduling significant blocks of time for speculative thinking and discussion, I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped). I can then stick with this unexpected insight until it loses steam. At this point, I’ll step back and rebuild my schedule for any time that remains in the day.
In other words, I not only allow spontaneity in my schedule; I encourage it. Joseph’s critique is driven by the mistaken idea that the goal of a schedule is to force your behavior into a rigid plan. This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint—it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.
I would go so far as to argue that someone following this combination of comprehensive scheduling and a willingness to adapt or modify the plan as needed will likely experience more creative insights than someone who adopts a more traditionally “spontaneous” approach where the day is left open and unstructured. Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow—e-mail, social media, Web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period—the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation. (Recall, for example, the discussion in Rule #1 about the rigid rituals followed by many great creative thinkers.) And because you’re willing to abandon your plan when an innovative idea arises, you’re just as well suited as the distracted creative to follow up when the muse strikes.
To summarize, the motivation for this strategy is the recognition that a deep work habit requires you to treat your time with respect. A good first step toward this respectful handling is the advice outlined here: Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.
Quantify the Depth of Every Activity
An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities. Extracting this insight from your schedules, however, can become tricky in practice, as it’s not always clear exactly how shallow you should consider a given task. To expand on this challenge, let’s start by reminding ourselves of the formal definition of shallow work that I introduced in the introduction:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Some activities clearly satisfy this definition. Checking e-mail, for example, or scheduling a conference call, is unquestionably shallow in nature. But the classification of other activities can be more ambiguous. Consider the following tasks:
? Example #1: Editing a draft of an academic article that you and a collaborator will soon submit to a journal.
? Example #2: Building a PowerPoint presentation about this quarter’s sales figures.
? Example #3: Attending a meeting to discuss the current status of an important project and to agree on the next steps.
It’s not obvious at first how to categorize these examples. The first two describe tasks that can be quite demanding, and the final example seems important to advance a key work objective. The purpose of this strategy is to give you an accurate metric for resolving such ambiguity—providing you with a way to make clear and consistent decisions about where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale. To do so, it asks that you evaluate activities by asking a simple (but surprisingly illuminating) question:
How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
To illustrate this approach, let’s apply this question to our examples of ambiguous tasks.