hey let me introduce you to the best productivity hack that i have been using for the past five years of my life i use this for two years in my old nine to five job and now three years in my current full-time business in this video i'll show you how you can use time blocking and time boxing to get more done in your day and make sure you stay until the end of the video because i'm going to be sharing a super pro tip you don't want to miss out because it's going to make you
a lot more productive what is time blocking it's separating your schedule into different blocks of time so you can complete certain tasks you might have heard of time boxing too and it is similar to time blocking but there is a little distinction time blocking means that you're setting a certain chunk of time away for completing a task but with no goal of whether the task is completed or not so for example you just working on a project for two hours just working on the project but time boxing on the other hand is when you set
a certain time for you to complete a certain task so for example with that same project time boxing would be you spending two hours on it and finishing the first draft of the thing so with time boxing there is a goal of something that you are going to complete and with time blocking it's more you're just setting the time so it is similar and in this video i'm going to use the terms pretty interchangeably because they're like just super linked and people use them together why does time blocking and time boxing work okay have you
ever had the experience in school where you had like a month to work on a paper or something and you spent like the entire month to work on the paper maybe it took you like 20 hours well let's say the next month you have like a similar project due but you are super busy the entire month and then you actually only have five hours left until the deadline to complete the paper and you actually finish it in five hours versus the 20 hours that you spent the previous month so why does this happen well parkinson's
law if you don't know it says that work will expand to fill the time available for its completion that's why when you set a certain time frame for a certain task you're much more likely to get it done and be more productive than if you didn't have like a time frame at all so time boxing works because you kind of have like a deadline that you made for yourself to complete a certain task and that's also why a lot of successful people like elon musk use time blocking and time boxing because they are so busy
and that's how they manage their time to get things done now let's talk about the logistics first choose whether you want to do it digitally or on paper i prefer paper because i find it satisfying to cross the tasks off and i can also jot down notes on my notebook as i go along if you're doing it digitally google calendar is probably like the best option i do one per day and i make the time block schedule the morning of or i do it the evening before you might see some people time blocking their entire
week which i don't suggest because it can be super stressful if you don't complete something and then you have to like move around your entire schedule so that's why i suggest doing it for max two days so usually just do it for the current day for bigger kind of projects where i know i'll have to spend a long time i will just put it in my calendar so i reserve time for it later so here's how i do it every morning after my morning routine i sit down for five minutes and look at the things
i need to do first i'll write out the hours of the day and then fill in things that i need to be present for like client meetings or driving somewhere i also add lunch in there then i'll look at my to-do list and figure out what my priorities are usually my time blocks are one hour long i wouldn't make your time blocks shorter than 30 minutes because that's just kind of anxiety inducing once i finish a task i'll cross it off okay so what happens then if you don't finish a task well this happens all
the time for me and it's usually because i underestimated how long a task would take or maybe something up so it's taking a bit longer it's totally normal to not be on schedule and do not punish yourself for that what i do is just re-prioritize things depending on what the task is i might move it to tomorrow's to-do list instead or move a later test that's not as important to another time so i can finish the current task for example i wanted to write out this youtube script yesterday but i didn't have time for it
so i did it today instead and i'm also filming on the same day okay now for my pro tip so my pro tip is to batch similar tasks together so you aren't always switching context so if i have a bunch of things to do like admin tasks then i'll batch them all together and put them together as like admin stuff to do for one hour or i'll schedule 30 minutes of replying to emails instagram dms linkedin dms slack messages and personal messages so i don't do them throughout the day and get distracted or i'll make
like five instagram reels in two hours so that i'm not spreading it out throughout the week when you're switching from different tasks all the time your mind gets stuck in the old task and so it needs time to refocus on the new thing this is something i learned from cal newport's book deep work which i've linked below i highly recommend it it is such a good book for learning how to work better and by the way if you're getting value out of this video it would mean a lot to me if you gave it a
thumbs up and then also left a comment below so being productive with your time is super awesome but when you're working and working and working you might feel like you're in a grind and just hustling all the time so if you want to prevent that i would highly recommend looking into journaling if you don't want to be running around all day mindlessly doing your things so make sure you watch this video next to learn more about this
