Why Time Blocking Keeps Failing You

"It was Hercule Poirot’s custom to open his morning mail using a small letter-opener with an ivory handle, making a neat slice along the top edge of each envelope... Each letter was then extracted, unfolded, smoothed flat with the palm of his hand, and read with deliberate, unhurried precision. Only when one piece of correspondence was thoroughly digested and placed in its neat, appointed stack would he permit himself to move on to the next." That’s an extract from Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot’s continuation novel, The Monogram Murders, which captures a part of Hercule Poirot’s morning routine with his letter-opening ritual. Something he did at the same time each day, at the breakfast table.  And it connects nicely with today’s episode. So let’s begin.  Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Learn more about the Productivity Academy Discover my Apple Productivity Programme Use the early-bird discount code caps27eb to get $25.00 off    Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived   The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 434 Hello, and welcome to episode 434 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  Before we begin, with Apple launching their latest operating systems last Monday, I have updated my Apple Productivity Course.  The course is not about tips and tricks; you can get all those on YouTube. This course is about helping you to build a 100% Apple productivity system that will keep you focused on what matters, when it matters and help keep and store important information so you know where to find it when you need it.  No subscriptions to third-party apps, just a simple set of productivity tools that do exactly what they were designed to do. Keep you on time and organised. I will put a link in the show notes to where you can learn more about this; if I may say so, fantastic course. Okay, on with the episode. Something that many people miss about time blocking is that it’s not just another way to organise your calendar. It’s actually a way to reframe how you approach your work. Over the last 26 years or so, certainly since the explosion of digital task managers, many people have become focused on the number of things they have to do.  Yet, that wasn’t always the case. For example, if you had to go into town to buy something, you would also naturally look for other things you may have to do while you were in town. Perhaps drop some dry cleaning off, or buy some stamps at the post office. You would do as many of these chores as you could in the time that you had available. I’ve spoken before about how the likes of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill and CS Lewis had time set aside for dealing with their correspondence. It was never about how many letters they replied to. It was simply spending an hour or so each day writing replies.  If they didn’t get through their pile of letters in the time they had, they would leave what was left until the next day when they replied to their letters. Yet today, I find that so many people are stressed out and worried about the number of things they have on their lists and the size of their backlogs. Yet, it really doesn’t matter how many things you’ve got to do; if you’re like most people, you will have far more things than you will ever have the time to do anyway.  What really matters is how you use the time you have available to do the things that really matter.  That leads me nicely on to this week’s question. Unfortunately, the Mystery Podcast Voice is locked away in a room preparing for an important exam tomorrow, so once again, you’re stuck with me asking the question.  This week’s question comes f