In general, I find myself to be someone who operates best within certain confines - for example, the time blocking from Cal Newport has been highly effective for myself.
That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.
I’ve noticed in my life I really limit my “must-dos”. In fact I may only have one. I have to run the four or so days a week I plan to. Too much structure I think doesn’t leave enough slack time and then too often does the inverse of what it disposed to do which is help you feel grounded. Everything else is sort of “agile structure”. Planning athe beginning of the day or maybe the week, but having a strict routine is almost like trying to plan years ahead of time, you just don’t know enough about what life will bring.
With a simple structure it really does feel like it brings order to chaos, if I have a really bad week and maybe don’t even get my runs in, it’s relatively easy to get my runs in the next week. Six different morning activities all at once? That’s just asking for failure.
Is there a "lite" version of Cal Newport's time-blocking techniques? I'm super interested every time I hear him explain it but I get overwhelmed and never end up implementing anything.
I wouldn’t really say it’s a big implementation. I just use a piece of paper and denote a line to each 30 mins of the work day.
So it might look like:
10: meeting
1030: bug fixing
11: bug fixing
1130: bug fixing
12: run
1230: run
1: lunch
130: feature work
2: feature work
230: meeting
3: feature work
330: feature work
4: plan next week
The above was my entry from last Friday, where I had a late start to the day.
At the start of my day I had kept the 12-2:30 block fairly empty (I knew some form of working out + lunch would show up, and I had wanted to do some feature work that day, but I didn’t know if any other meetings would pop up. They didn’t, so it worked great!)
I basically fill in meetings first, then work around them to put in the work I want to focus on for the day. The main caveat is I don’t focus on anything else for this blocks, and unless I’m in incredible flow and the task is definitely important, I always make sure I stop at the end of the block time (the whole “we will fill up whatever time we allot ourselves” theory).
That said, I caution against too much routine. I used to get really into it but remember many days where I felt like the day was ruined because I couldn’t get a workout in, or someone scheduled an 8am meeting, or any other myriad of things I grew dependent on. Too much structure is basically a fragile crutch, in my experience.
My personal morning “routine” is a quick cup of coffee and a half mile walk, and then straight to work. I time block the day first thing based on whatever my weekly goals for the week were, and try to keep about two hours of buffer time to allow some shifting throughout the day.
I’ve done this about a year now and it’s helped me keep the benefits of structure, without the guilt of when something “optimal” doesn’t happen.