How to Manage Your Time
Manage your time with a daily routine. Pick three important tasks each morning, block time for them on your calendar, protect your best 2 hours, batch the small tasks, and review the day in 5 minutes.
You will end up with a daily routine: three important tasks chosen each morning, a time block on your calendar for each one, 2 protected hours for the hardest of them, and a 5-minute review before you stop work. The routine settles what gets your time before the day's requests arrive, and it accepts that some things will not get done.
The evidence that this kind of structure helps is real, and moderate in size. A 2021 meta-analysis of 158 studies covering 53,957 participants found time management moderately related to job performance, academic achievement, and wellbeing. The link to wellbeing, life satisfaction in particular, was stronger than the link to performance. Most of those studies measured people at a single point in time, so for the most part they show that the two go together, not that one causes the other.
Some of the steps rest on research, which we link where it applies. The rest are rules of thumb, and each step says which it is.
Identify your top three tasks every morning
Before you open your email or check your phone, write down the three most important things you need to accomplish today. Choose by importance, not by urgency. Urgent tasks demand your attention right now (a ringing phone, a Slack notification, a meeting in 10 minutes). Important tasks move your goals forward (finishing a report, starting a project, having a difficult conversation). The distinction goes back at least to Dwight Eisenhower's 1954 address to the World Council of Churches, given on the campus of Northwestern University, where he quoted a former college president: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Urgent tasks can fill a whole day if you let them, and the important ones get pushed to tomorrow again. Your top three should be tasks that, if they were the only things you did today, you would still feel good about the day. Make each one something you can finish today. If a task is a multi-day project, write down today's piece of it. Three is a rule of thumb, and step 6 tells you when to shrink it. Write the list on paper or in a plain note, not in a task manager with categories and tags (FAQ 3 below).
Time block your calendar
Assign a specific time slot to each of your top three tasks. If your most important task is writing a proposal, block 9 AM to 11 AM for it on your calendar. Treat it like a meeting you cannot cancel. The method is called time blocking, and the author Cal Newport describes how he plans his own workday with it. Time blocking as a whole is a practice, not a research finding. The part with evidence behind it is the specific plan. In lab studies of unfinished goals, people with an unfinished goal had intrusive thoughts about it during an unrelated task, and letting them make a specific plan for the goal removed that effect. A block is that kind of plan, because it says when you will work on the task. Block your most demanding tasks during your peak energy hours. If you are not sure when those are, note how alert you feel at a few set times each day for a week, then look for the pattern. You are done when each of the three tasks has a start time and an end time on today's calendar.
Good to know: Leave buffer time between blocks. When blocks sit back to back, one task that runs late pushes every block after it. A 15-minute gap gives you room to finish, take a short break, and handle small items that come up. The 15 minutes is our rule of thumb.
Protect your best 2 hours
Take the peak hours you found in step 2 and guard 2 of them for your most important task. For one person that window is the start of the day, before meetings begin and messages pile up. For another it is mid-morning or late afternoon. Before the window starts, close your email, put your phone face down, close the browser tabs you do not need, and tell colleagues when you will be available again. Leave email, meetings, and administrative tasks for the rest of the day. The 2 hours is a rule of thumb. If your workplace requires availability during your peak hours, protect the best uninterrupted block you can get instead. FAQ 2 below covers how to arrange one.
Batch similar tasks together
Context switching costs time. In lab experiments on task switching, people were slower whenever they had to switch between tasks than when they repeated the same one, and the cost grew as the tasks got more complex. Those experiments used short tasks, classifying geometric objects and solving arithmetic problems, so they show that the cost exists and do not measure its size in office work. To pay it less often, group similar activities into blocks. Check and respond to all emails at 11 AM and 3 PM instead of throughout the day. Make all your phone calls back to back. Do all your administrative tasks in one afternoon block. Each block then holds one kind of work, so the switches happen between blocks and not inside them. Batching is our application of the lab finding, not something those experiments tested.
Say no or not now to new requests
Every yes takes time from something already on your calendar. A new meeting takes the place of a time block, and an urgent favor pushes your priority task to tomorrow. Before you agree to a request, compare it with what you planned for that time. If the request is more important, take it, and move the block it replaces to another slot today or into tomorrow's top three. If it is not, answer with a time instead of an immediate yes. Say "I cannot do that right now, but I can get to it by Thursday." Or "Let me finish what I am working on first and I will follow up this afternoon." A specific time keeps your block intact and tells the other person when to expect you. Saying no to time-consuming requests is one of the behaviors the meta-analysis in the introduction counts as protecting your time. The two scripts are ours.
Do a 5-minute review at the end of each day
Before you leave work, spend 5 minutes reviewing the day. Check whether you finished your top three tasks. For each one you did not finish, decide whether it was too big for one day or whether something urgent took its place. Move unfinished important tasks to tomorrow's top three, and write down when you will work on each. The daily review is a rule of thumb. The part with research behind it is that written plan, which is the same move the studies in step 2 tested, and there it stopped the unfinished task from intruding on other work. Clear your desk or close your browser tabs so tomorrow starts clean. Use the review to size tomorrow's list as well. If you finish fewer than three on most days, plan two, or make each task smaller.
Run the routine for 2 weeks before you judge it. That length is our suggestion, and at 5 workdays a week it gives you 10 end-of-day reviews to compare. If you rarely finish the top three, plan two, or cut each one down to the piece you can finish today (step 6). If your blocks keep running over, lengthen the buffer between them (step 2). If requests keep taking over a block, answer them with a time instead of a yes (step 5). If the same few sites keep eating your focus blocks, our guide on how to block websites on Chrome shows how to block them for those 2 hours. To make the morning list automatic, tie it to something you already do every day. Our guide on how to build a habit shows how to set that cue. FAQ 1 below covers reactive jobs, FAQ 2 interruptions, FAQ 3 apps, and FAQ 4 procrastination.
Questions we get asked about this
Answers from experience, not a textbook.
Plan the pockets you do control. Even in reactive jobs like customer support, healthcare, or management, part of the day is yours, such as early morning before others arrive, lunch, or the end of the day. Pick one important task each day and block 30 minutes for it in one of those pockets. One focused task per day adds up to five per week and 250 over 50 working weeks. Block the reactive work too. In the post linked in step 2, Cal Newport's answer to this question is that periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other obligation.
Deal with the people first, then the devices. Tell colleagues when your focus block starts and when you will be free again. In a private office, close the door. In an open plan, wear headphones and block the time on your shared calendar so people see you are unavailable. For digital interruptions, close email and messaging apps for the length of the block (step 3), and ask the people who must be able to reach you to phone instead. If your role requires constant availability, ask your manager for a fixed daily window of focus time. A 60-minute window is enough for one time block.
Use the simplest tools that hold two things, today's three tasks and your time blocks. A paper note or a plain notes app holds the list, and the calendar you already use holds the blocks. The meta-analysis linked in the introduction treats time management as behavior, meaning how people structure, protect, and adapt their time, and not as any tool. Move to a task manager with categories, tags, and dependencies only when the plain list fails you in a specific way, such as losing track of tasks that are due weeks out. If you spend longer organizing the system than doing the work in it, go back to the plain list.
Procrastination has several causes, and a 2007 review of the research found that two strong and consistent predictors were how unpleasant a task feels and how confident you are that you can do it. A big, vague task hits the second one, and a boring one hits the first. For big tasks, break them into the smallest possible first step. Instead of "write the report," start with "open a blank document and write the first heading." A first step that small is hard to doubt you can do. For unpleasant tasks, pair them with something you enjoy. Listen to a favorite podcast while doing data entry, or take the dreaded spreadsheet to a coffee shop. Use a timer for either kind of task. Commit to working on the task for 10 minutes, and let yourself stop when the timer ends. If you want to keep going, keep going. If not, you have still started. The review supports the two causes. The three tactics are rules of thumb matched to those causes, not methods the review tested.
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