Blocking Choice

Day 2 of my month off between jobs. The last couple of months have been a big push. Job hunting on top of working a full-time job is exhausting. I’ve earned a bit of a break to relax and do nothing, right?

The problem is… doing nothing feels so unsatisfying. There are so many things I could have done today. I could have learned something amazing on Coursera. I could have read a classic book on Scribd. I could have watched an iconic movie on Netflix. The Internet has given us each access to this incredible wealth of content.

Instead I did nothing very much at all. I sat on the sofa. I read a few articles, including [a short-form article from the Guardian telling me to stop reading short-form articles]. I watched the football. This evening I’ll watch the rugby. This is what I’m supposed to be doing to relax and unwind, right? After one day of doing nothing, I feel so bored and anxious. But there’s nodenying that it was easy. All I had to do was switch off my brain and not think. Time just disappears all by itself.

This is what I’m worried about over the next month. What if I look back in one month and it turns out that I didn’t do anything? I have this great opportunity ahead of me. How often do you get a whole month to work on those little projects, the ones you keep telling yourself you’d do. “Oh, if only I had the time”. This is that time and I should be cracking on.

How do I strike the balance between recharging my batteries while still enjoying what I do? Cal Newport’s Time Block Planning has been working well for me over the last few weeks. Yes, the extra structure and nudge away from checking Slack has been helpful at work, but it has also encouraged me to make the most of my leisure time. On nights when I would previously have curled up and watched nonsense, I’ve instead watched some exceptional movies.

It’s not necessarily the structure that matters. It’s that you make a choice ahead of time and then stick with it. You do one block of decision making and then the rest of your day is left free for execution. You can move smoothly from thing to thing. And sure it won’t always go to plan. There’s a big difference between having a plan and sticking to a plan. Sticking to a plan blocks you in. It can feel restrictive, not at all helpful for the kind of creative work I want to be doing. Having a plan sets the tone for the kind of thing you want to be doing.

Nor is it about cramming so much into each day that you burn yourself out. I don’t want to spend this month slogging away on heroic efforts, scrambling to build some new product or write a whole book. Knowing that the plan is your ideal plan, still pliable enough to deal with the daily surprises, keeps the pressure levels low. A bit of pressure gives you a push, too much pressure can crush you.

Starting tomorrow I’m going back to time-block planning. I’ll block the whole day out, from 10am til 9pm. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do 11 hours of hard labour. It means I have 11 hours worth of things that I’d like to do. I’ll do the ones that feel doable. Some of them will probably take longer than expected. And then I’ll get to the end of the day and a lot of those things will be done. Not all of them, but some of them. And I think that’s where this has real value. Even on a bad day you might get 2 hours worth of useful stuff done. It’s become way too easy to get to the end of day and wonder where the time went, with all the distractions clamouring for our attention. This is the One Weird Trick that lets you fight back.