Time blocking planner

The board is 32 half-hour slots running 06:00 to 22:00, sixteen hours in all, and every figure on the page is a count of those slots rather than a measurement of anything. Paint six slots of focus, four of meetings, two of admin and one break and the day header reads 6h 30m blocked, 9h 30m open, while the summary below reports 59 percent of the day left open. The figure under each of the four boxes is the raw slot count.

Planned against actual

The second bar is not something you paint. It is the focus minutes the pomodoro timer and Flowtime recorded on that same calendar date, read out of the shared log. Three hours of focus blocks against 1h 50m of recorded sessions comes out at 61 percent, and the sentence underneath picks whichever of three cases you are in: nothing blocked yet, blocked but nothing recorded, or both figures present. Every session finished on that date counts, whatever it was attached to, and sessions from any other day are ignored.

How slots join up

Two neighbouring slots merge into one block only when the colour and the label match exactly. Same colour with a different label stays two blocks with two time stamps, which is useful when an afternoon holds three separate pieces of focus work. Renaming one slot in the middle of a run therefore splits that run in three, and empty slots never merge at all.

Days, copying and storage

Each date holds its own board, kept under cc-timeblocks in this browser, so moving to another day leaves the previous one untouched. Copy yesterday only lights up when the day you are on is empty and the day before it is not, and it copies the previous calendar day rather than the previous working one, so on a Monday it reaches back to Sunday.

Start with deep work, and put it where your attention is best rather than where the calendar happens to be free. For most people that is the first two or three hours after they start, before the inbox has caught up with them. Everything else in the day can move around a fixed morning block. A fixed morning block cannot move around everything else.

Batch the small stuff. Email, code review, Slack, expenses and the rest are cheap individually and expensive when spread across the day, because each one costs you the re-entry into whatever you were doing. One admin block after lunch and one at the end of the day covers almost everything, and anything that genuinely cannot wait an hour was never going to fit in a plan anyway.

Leave at least a fifth of the day unblocked. Work runs long, people interrupt, and a day with no gaps turns the first overrun into a cascade. Slack is not wasted time. It is the reason the rest of the plan still holds at 4pm.

Put breaks in as real blocks with real labels. A break you did not plan gets taken anyway, just later, longer and with more guilt attached. The point of all this is to decide once, in the calm minutes before the day starts, so that you spend the day working instead of choosing. A plan you never look at again was still worth writing. See the guide for developers for how this holds up against on-call and code review.