Francis Wade explains why CEOs, athletes, and entrepreneurs rely on time blocking to manage workloads that exceed 24 hours. As people age, memory fades and task lists overflow. The solution: schedule everything explicitly in a calendar, use AI auto-schedulers, or hire an assistant to do it.
Hi and welcome back to Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle podcast. This is Francis Wade. Here's an article I wrote for the Jamaica Gleaner. It's entitled: Why the most ambitious people time block. Have you ever wondered why a few high performers insist on scheduling i.e., time blocking, their entire day? It's not because they're indulging in an idle pastime. Instead, they're resorting to this little-known technique because they have no other choice. CEOs, Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs, teachers, part-time students, parents of twins, triplets, or more, employees with a side business—these are some of the busiest people you may know. But being busy isn't just a state of mind or a feeling. Research shows they have a practice of creating a huge number of tasks. In other words, the backlog of demands they have set for themselves far exceeds 24 hours per day and 168 hours per week. Furthermore, they face the same challenge we all do of living in Jamaica with its hectic daily surprises that make it so hard to focus. Time blocking is the way. They stay on top of their time commitments. What you may not know is that they actually started using the technique relatively late in life, after progressing through other practices. Here are the steps you could follow if you're looking towards a future of increasing task volume. Number 1: Start off using a new kind of memory. Like most adolescents, you probably had a goal of having a great memory. After all, primary and secondary education is almost all about memorization, recalling facts and figures using what's called retrospective memory. However, there is another— prospective memory. This is the kind of memory used to perform actions in the future, such as your plans for the rest of the day. This type has a short shelf life, unlike retrospective memory. For example, your schedule for yesterday afternoon is of little value today. Furthermore, prospective memory is used to help you reach your goals and intentions. However, the fact that you are taught to use personal memory to track incomplete commitments is a problem. Why? Once you try to remember too many tasks, it fails. Finally, the older you get, the worse this kind of memory performs, as you may have observed with your parents. It's not a long-term solution, even though it's the most popular. Number 2: Solving the problem with lists. If you came of age before 2005, you probably sought to solve the problem by using paper lists. Consequently, you developed the successful practice of carrying around a pad or notebook. Of course, not everyone has learned the habit. Don't worry yourself, mi remember. Is a popular refrain that often leads to problems. My casual observation is that more Jamaican men than women are likely to utter it and less likely to have pen or paper handy. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of tasks a paper list can handle before the practice of continually writing a new one becomes a chore. Plus, it can be lost, stolen, wet, or burned. Thankfully, new technology on our phones can help. 3. Migrating to smartphones. If you came of age after 2010, you may think the idea of using paper instead of a digital task app to be backward. Instead, you jumped straight to using your phone to manage your tasks. Now, your cloud-based app offers perpetual safety plus the ability to stay on top of much more to-dos. But you're still subject to the law which states that whatever you try to manage your tasks with tools which lack the requisite capacity you will experience difficulties. This law applies whether you are using prospective memory, paper, or a digital task app. So if you happen to be using an app and find yourself unable to keep up, there's one more level to consider. Number 4: Adopting a super calendar. Academics in the 1990s discovered that when you specify the time to complete a planned task, it dramatically increases the odds of completion. In other words, you are more effective when you time block a task in your calendar than if you merely add it to a list. While it's possible to use a paper planner, there are two powerful digital solutions: picking up a calendar on Google or Outlook, or switching to an AI-powered auto-scheduler. The former requires you to move tasks around one by one by hand, which can be be painful. The latter uses an intelligent robot you can train to produce a new optimal schedule on demand. And if you don't want to manage your own calendar, a third option is to hire someone like an administrative assistant to do the job of time blocking for you. All three are techniques used by the most ambitious, accomplished people. Unfortunately, given psychological and technological limits, these are your only choices. Until something better is invented, time blocking tasks directly in your calendar is the best choice for dealing with a high volume of time demands with sharp deadlines.
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