I have used time blocking for one straight year — and I have abandoned the method recently.

Why would anyone abandon a productivity method often cherished and used by Elon Musk and other high-flying entrepreneurs?

Let me be very direct. As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I have used time blocking for one straight year — and I have abandoned the method recently. I feel that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, especially when you are trying to establish a company culture.

Advantages of Time Blocking

Time blocking is often cherished as a productivity technique to get lots of stuff done. This is true — time blocking helped me cope with an extremely intense period of growth in our company. During the past 12 months, we more than doubled our team to almost 30 people, and at the same time dealt with seismic shifts in our industry due to COVID-19.

As a CEO in rough times, I was still involved in a very broad range of activities, resulting in a schedule like this:

Schedule
A typical 2021 schedule — blue for meetings, purple for blocked time to work, green for private, yellow for travel (source: author)

Or like this:

Schedule
Another typical 2021 schedule — blue for meetings, purple for blocked time to work, green for private, yellow for travel (source: author)

In 2021, I was booked pretty much from getting out of bed until bedtime — including the weekends. Although time blocking helped me get tons of stuff done, my days rather resembled a crisis manager’s schedule than a leader’s agenda.

Disadvantages of Time Blocking

I have found that in a growing organization, company culture is essential for the company to thrive. When you’re a team of around 10 people, the team is typically like-minded and team culture is just there naturally. When you’re growing beyond 20 people, different people join the company. That’s a good thing because new people bring new skills to the table. However, culture building now needs much more attention, and that’s typically the CEO’s role.

So where and why do time blocking and culture building clash?

1. You are inaccessible to your team

In our company, all calendars have been visible by default since we incorporated the company. My co-founders and our first employees know me well enough to overbook my calendar when I blocked some time to get stuff done, so using time blocking didn’t encourage them to interact with me whenever it was necessary.

However, with our company approaching 30 people recently, not everyone knows me well enough to feel comfortable overbooking my calendar. This was quite problematic when I had a packed schedule all the time — some people would then never get the opportunity to speak to me. How could I ever shape a culture if I am inaccessible to my team? How should people bring up issues and problems, if I only have time to speak in two weeks from now?

2. Discussions end on schedule, instead of when a solution is found

When people finally secured a slot with me to discuss an issue or a problem, I would typically get quite nervous and impatient towards the end of the meeting — the next meeting or task was waiting. So I would often wrap up a discussion before a real solution was found, just because I had to rush off. Solving issues and problems for our customers is part of our company culture, so meetings should support issues and problem resolution.

3. Creativity suffers

Our best ideas all appeared during creative discussions with my coworkers, either in impromptu discussions or on a walk in the mountains. This is true for technical, commercial, and organizational topics. How would you possibly find time for impromptu discussions or walks in the mountains when time blocking defines your day?

4. You lose the macro-view

As the CEO, the big and urgent problems typically land on my desk. Whenever a problem appeared that required my immediate attention, my first task was to update my calendar, shifting all those time blocks (I don’t have a personal assistant, and even if I had one, a time-blocking schedule is hard to delegate). This directed time and energy away from the actual problem and typically locked me in a micro-view instead of a macro-view that would be required to solve the big problems.

Getting Out of The Trap

Even after I decided to abandon time blocking, I still manage to get lots of stuff done. However, I have made two key changes to my work technique:

First, I hired people who directly relieve me. This includes an additional C-level position to which I could delegate most customer service activities that regularly filled my schedule. As a result, my standard schedule looks much leaner now:

Schedule
The new 2022 standard schedule — blue for meetings, green for private, yellow for travel (source: author)

Second, I switched to a Kanban-style personal sprint board to keep track of all the tasks I need to get done. I typically plan my tasks seven days ahead, making sure that not more than 50 tasks are in the sprint board at any time. In this way, I always have more than enough tasks to work on if I have time available — and if there is an urgency at hand, people can still get hold of me.

Conclusion

Unless you work completely independently of others, I would strongly suggest you abandon time blocking. Of course, I am not suggesting abandoning living by a schedule — a personal schedule is very important to align multiple roles and allow for downtime and rest. But I am a strong advocate of separating the to-do list from the schedule. My to-do list is my personal sprint board, and my schedule just holds the fixed appointments of my roles as an entrepreneur and a parent.

Finally, I still think that time blocking is useful in a situation of crisis— but crises need to be confined to a short period. If a crisis endures for longer than a few days, you need to find a new normal work rhythm to deal with this situation — I think COVID-19 has taught us all a welcome lesson.