The Time Delusion

And why it causes us some many problems.

David Sparks of the MacSparky blog wrote a great post about his “hyper-scheduling” experiment. This got me thinking about why so many people struggle with time management.

Hyper-scheduling (or block-scheduling, as it is sometimes known) is where you create blocks on your calendar for different work types. You block out all your calendars, including your rest times. It’s a form of extreme time blocking that, when done correctly, works very well.

The problem is that human nature causes us to delude ourselves about how much work we can do daily.

If you have a very important presentation to prepare and allocate a two-hour block to complete the presentation, you then find you need four hours to complete the presentation; it does not mean time blocking (or hyper-scheduling) doesn’t work. It means you have underestimated how much time you need to complete the task.

I see the same thing when people say they cannot make a to-do list work. When I ask why, I discover they have twenty to thirty things on their list to do in a day and fail to complete all their tasks. They then declare that to-do lists don’t work for them!

No, your to-do list doesn’t work because you are being wildly optimistic about what you can accomplish in a day.

That’s like buying a Lamborghini and complaining it doesn’t go very fast after you attach it to a three-ton trailer! Of course, it isn’t going to go very fast.