![]() One of the most frequent concerns about time blocking is how rigid the system can seem. Grouping similar tasks together (for example, social tasks with social tasks, or writing tasks with writing tasks) can help us conserve momentum and make tasks easier to start, work on, and finish! Common mistakes to avoid Mistake #1: Making your schedule a prison. The more we start and stop, the more energy we spend just transitioning between tasks and the harder the tasks seem. Struggles with task initiation (and autistic inertia) feed off transitions between tasks. After all, they can be moved that’s the point! Step 4: Group similar tasks. Don’t be afraid to schedule these right into the calendar. If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to underestimate how long tasks will take, so schedule more time than you think you’ll need… and more time again to transition between this task and the next. Using the brain dump (or to-do list) as a guide, assign time for the highest priority tasks. If you don’t have a good idea of how much travel or transition time you need, a good guideline is doubling or tripling your estimate.Ī note for the future: People who frequently time block often set blocks of time for meetings and appointments to reduce transitions further. Schedule these unmovables first! When you do, include travel and transition time around the event. Whether it’s a dead.line at work or your next appointment with your therapist, some things have to happen at a specific time no question about it. Since time blocking is the practice of assigning an estimated amount of time to upcoming tasks and events and placing them in a calendar, the first step needs to involve knowing what the upcoming tasks and events are! My favourite way to do this is a brain dump, where I write everything swirling around in my head to be sorted later. By comparing these estimations with how long tasks actually took we can learn to be more accurate in our estimates. It serves as a visible record of how long we expect tasks to take. This is part of larger issues with time agnosia (or time blindness), but time blocking provides a support. ADHD’ers are more likely to struggle to estimate how long tasks take to complete. While this isn’t a cure-all for initiation woes, this slight push can make the difference between stagnation and progress. Having a scheduled time to work on a task (and a scheduled end time) provides just a little added encouragement to get the task started in the first place. Grouping like tasks and blocking them into our schedule ahead of time reduces the number of times we need to transition. This is especially true if the tasks we’re transitioning between are wildly different. Transitioning from one task to another takes a lot of time and energy for ADHD’ers (and autistic folks). Having a plan (or at least a default) reduces decision fatigue and provides a clear direction for our energy. In particular, deciding what we want or need to do next can feel next to impossible. This empowers you to set and maintain boundaries or, as René Brooks might say, Guard your yes. Seeing our calendar full of tasks already serves as an added barrier to taking on more. Planning specific blocks of time for specific tasks makes how much time we actually have visible to us. More than that however, time blocking can also support other struggles common to the ADHD experience, including decision paralysis, our troubles transitioning between tasks, and our struggles getting started. The way time blocking makes tasks and time visible, as well as the flexibility that comes from moving the blocks as needed, is what makes the technique such a powerful tool for people with ADHD. ![]() ![]() Most of these blocks can be moved to fit our changing energy levels, need for stimulation, and struggles with executive function. Time blocking is a time management technique that makes our tasks and our time visible by scheduling upcoming tasks into specific blocks of time and placing those in our calendar. While no one ADHD tool or technique can completely fix our relationship with time, the technique that I’ve personally found the most helpful for supporting the struggles with time management I experience due to my ADHD is time blocking. It is the primary reason my clients cite for seeking an ADHD coach in the first place, and these struggles with time management can have some of the most devastating impacts on our career and professional relationships. Most people with ADHD struggle with some aspect of time management-which includes planning, prioritizing, and estimating the length of tasks.
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