Devil makes work for idle hands
The constraint of time
I’ve realised that when I’m struggling with staying disciplined it’s usually a time management issue.
A previous edition, A System for Showing Up, stressed the importance of a system for accountability. But what about a system for actually doing what you said you were going to do?
I’ve often said ‘there just isn’t enough time in the day’, as I’m sure you have to. But that’s nonsense isn’t it.
If all of a sudden there were 26 hours in a day, you wouldn’t necessarily become more productive. In fact, the tasks you complete in 24 hours would just stretch to fill the allocated time.
That’s called Parkinson’s Law. If you give yourself 7 days to do something it will take you 7 days. If you give yourself 48 hours, it will take 48 hours.
Control your time or it will control you
Time-blocking is the art of allocating blocks of time to 1 specific task.
When you have a meeting at work scheduled for 10-11am, everybody shows up, you talk about the issue and everybody leave at 11am. That hour was blocked and allocated for that meeting.
We can extend the utility of time-blocking from our professional lives to our personal lives.
Not only can we time-block our calendars to get stuff done at work, we can use the same method for staying productively disciplined in our personal lives.
Let’s say we clock out at 5.30pm for arguments sake. A time-blocked calendar might look like this.
How is this different from a to-do list?
Well, we might have ‘Workout’, ‘Learn skill’, ‘Put flat pack together’ on our to-do list for the week, but there isn’t any structure. Or in other words, there isn’t a system for getting them done.
A to-do list is an arbitrary list of things. Time-blocking is a system using the constraint of time to commit to one of those tasks at a specific time.
Rather than wishing for more time in the day, we become more effective at using the time we have available.
How does that lead to greater self-discipline?
As somebody who has spent many years being totally undisciplined, wandering through life unorganised and just letting each day pass while the to-do list piles up with sky high procrastination, I’ve come to understand that I’ve not been in control of my time. I’ve left many things to inspiration or motivation. But I’m rarely inspired to workout.
What I’ve actually been lacking is a system for task commitment.
With time-blocking, I’m saying ‘this is what I’m doing tomorrow and this is when I’m doing it’.
I’ve slowly introduced this method in my professional life and have began to extend this to my personal life which has led to longer states of self-discipline.
It’s also helped me avoid habits that waste my time. Rather than mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and Reddit for a couple of hours, I’m busy doing more important things.
Give it a try. It’s Sunday today, a perfect day to plan out your week.
What do you want to do next week that you know you need to do?
Set a specific hour on a specific day and use the constraint of time to your advantage.
If you missed the last edition, you can read that here - Creatures of habit
