Block Scheduling Quotes

Through living in a space that we do not understand, everything may become meaningless, incoherent, and forcefully scary. If fear rules our lives, we lose the core of our being, since 'fear' disrupts the schedule of our existence and blocks the soothing waves of the sound vibrations. (“Because the world has corona”)

A world without dialogue is a universe of darkness. If people don't get together and share views and exchange ideas, they remain unaware, ignorant, and unconscious. As they live in a space that they don't understand, everything becomes meaningless, incoherent, and forcefully scary. If fear rules our lives, we lose the core of our being, since 'fear' is disrupting the schedule of our existence, and blocks the waves of the good vibrations. ("Beware of the neighbor")

i miss the days my friends knew every mundane detail about my life and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs adulthood has starved me of that consistency that us the walks around the block the long conversations when we were too lost in the moment to care what time it was when we won and celebrated when we failed and celebrated harder when we were just kids now we have our very important jobs that fill up our very busy schedules we compare calendars just to plan coffee dates that one of us eventually cancels cause adulthood is being too exhausted to leave our apartment most days i miss knowing i once belonged to a group of people bigger than myself that belonging made life easier to live - friendship nostalgia

When you’re doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out—this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it’s time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break. Zig Ziglar taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my e-mail for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain will soon be trained to use that escape hatch again and again.

In week two, build an optimal schedule. Lock everything into place in fifteen- to thirty-minute blocks. Some tasks will take multiple blocks or entire days. Fine. When you work, only work on one thing at a time, think about the task in front of you and pursue it relentlessly. When it comes time for the next task on your schedule, place that first one aside, and apply the same focus.

Schedule blocks of time for different modes of thinking.

What were they thinking when they scheduled this movie for December?" Troy said. "They weren't thinking of us, I can tell you. May," he said, shaking his head. "May is when you release a Star Wars movie. If this movie were a May movie, the line would already be around the block.

Checking his schedule, Brandon remembered he had planning period during his next block, before the last class. ... He glanced up to see Drake and Aaron flinging frog guts at each other and sighed. Some days he could just feel his brain dribbling out of his ears.

... In a ROWE* people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at certain time, or anytime. They just have to get their work done. How they do it ? When they do it ? Where they do it ? It's totally up to them. Meetings & this kind of environments are Optional. What happens ... ? Almost across the board ! - Productivity goes up - Worker Engagement goes up - Worker Satisfaction goes up - Turnovers goes down - Autonomy .. Mastery .. Purpose - these are the building blocks of new way of doing things." ______________________________________________________________ *ROWE: results-only work environment

A great option for the night owls among us is to use the late-night hours for solitude and distraction-free space. If you work best at night, you can find solitude by scheduling a block of time to work alone after dark.

To maximize productivity, schedule 3–5 hour blocks or half-days of singularly focused attention on ONE single activity or project, rather than trying to switch tasks every 60 minutes.

to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy. Work

... you will transform your ability to produce consistent and spectacular entrepreneurial results. You must create a foundational schedule that adds structure and intentionality to your days and weeks. A foundational schedule is a pre-determined, recurring schedule that is made up of focused time blocks dedicated to your highest priority activities.

Organize your life, get a calendar, and make lists. Block out time for relaxation, for fun, for productivity. There are always spaces in time that you can work on yourself. I have my days scheduled down to the minute.

friendship nostalgia i miss the days when my friends knew every mundane detail about my life and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs adulthood has starved me of that consistency​ ​that us those walks around the block those long conversations when we were too lost in the moment to care what time it was when we won-and celebrated when we failed and celebrated even harder when we were just kids now we have our very important jobs that fill up our very busy schedules we have to compare calendars just to plan coffee dates that one of us will eventually cancel because adulthood is being too exhausted to leave our apartments most days i miss belonging to a group of people bigger than myself it was that belonging that made life easier to live how come no one warned us about how we'd graduate and grow apart after everything we'd been through how come no one said one of life's biggest challenges would be trying to stay connected to the people that make us feel alive no one talks about the hole a friend can leave inside you when they go off to make their dreams come true in college we used to stay up till 4 in the morning dreaming of what we'd do the moment we started earning real paychecks now we finally have the money to cross everything off our bucket lists but those lists are collecting dust in some lost corridor of our minds sometimes when i get lonely ​i​ still search for them i'd give anything to go back and do the foolish things we used to do i feel the most present in your presence when we're laughing so hard the past slides off our shoulders and worries of the future slip away the truth is​ ​i couldn't survive without my friends they know exactly what i need before i even know that i need the way we hold each other is just different so forget grabbing coffee i don't want to have another dinner where we sit across from each other at a table reminiscing about old times when we have so much time left to make new memories with how about you go pack your bags and i'll pack mine you take a week off work i'll grab my keys and let's go for ride we've got years of catching up to do

I would not call it a writer's block. A writer's block to me is a temporary thing. A month, you know, six weeks. This was more a writer's blockade. To me, this was very much like the Vietnam War. It was the same timetable, it was on the same schedule as the Vietnam War. I don't know how I got into it and I couldn't get out of it.

We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.

In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching.

It’s up to you to find ways to eviscerate your bullshit. How much time do you spend at the dinner table talking about nothing after the meal is done? How many calls and texts do you send for no reason at all? Look at your whole life, list your obligations and tasks. Put a time stamp on them. How many hours are required to shop, eat, and clean? How much sleep do you need? What’s your commute like? Can you make it there under your own power? Block everything into windows of time, and once your day is scheduled out, you’ll know how much flexibility you have to exercise on a given day and how to maximize it.

We're all so happy you're feeling better, Miss McIntosh. Looks like you still have a good bump on your noggin, though," she says in her childlike voice. Since there is no bump on my noggin, I take a little offense but decide to drop it. "Thanks, Mrs. Poindexter. It looks worse than it feels. Just a little tender." "Yeah, I'd say the door got the worst of it," he says beside me. Galen signs himself in on the unexcused tardy sheet below my name. When his arm brushes against mine, it feels like my blood's turned into boiling water. I turn to face him. My dreams really do not do him justice. Long black lashes, flawless olive skin, cut jaw like an Italian model, lips like-for the love of God, have some dignity, nitwit. He just made fun of you. I cross my arms and lift my chin. "You would know," I say. He grins, yanks my backpack from me, and walks out. Trying to ignore the waft of his scent as the door shuts, I look to Mrs. Poindexter, who giggles, shrugs, and pretends to sort some papers. The message is clear: He's your problem, but what a great problem to have. Has he charmed he sense out of the staff here, too? If he started stealing kids' lunch money, would they also giggle at that? I growl through clenched teeth and stomp out of the office. Galen is waiting for me right outside the door, and I almost barrel into him. He chuckles and catches my arm. "This is becoming a habit for you, I think." After I'm steady-after Galen steadies me, that is-I poke my finger into his chest and back him against the wall, which only makes him grin wider. "You...are...irritating...me," I tell him. "I noticed. I'll work on it." "You can start by giving me my backpack." "Nope." "Nope?" "Right-nope. I'm carrying it for you. It's the least I can do." "Well, can't argue with that, can I?" I reach around for it, but he moves to block me. "Galen, I don't want you to carry it. Now knock it off. I'm late for class." "I'm late for it too, remember?" Oh, that's right. I've let him distract me from my agenda. "Actually, I need to go back to the office." "No problem. I'll wait for you here, then I'll walk you to class." I pinch the bridge of my nose. "That's the thing. I'm changing my schedule. I won't be in your class anymore, so you really should just go. You're seriously violating Rule Numero Uno." He crosses his arms. "Why are you changing your schedule? Is it because of me?" "No." "Liar." "Sort of." "Emma-" "Look, I don't want you to take this personally. It's just that...well, something bad happens every time I'm around you." He raises a brow. "Are you sure it's me? I mean, from where I stood, it looked like your flip-flops-" "What were we arguing about anyway? We were arguing, right?" "You...you don't remember?" I shake my head. "Dr. Morton said I might have some short-term memory loss. I do remember being mad at you, though." He looks at me like I'm a criminal. "You're saying you don't remember anything I said. Anything you said." The way I cross my arms reminds me of my mother. "That's what I'm saying, yes." "You swear?" "If you're not going to tell me, then give me my backpack. I have a concussion, not broken arms. I'm not helpless." His smile could land him a cover shoot for any magazine in the country. "We were arguing about which beach you wanted me to take you to. We were going swimming after school." "Liar." With a capital L. Swimming-drowning-falls on my to-do list somewhere below giving birth to porcupines. "Oh, wait. You're right. We were arguing about when the Titanic actually sank. We had already agreed to go to my house to swim.

Bernard is caring, helpful, and enjoyable to be with. Everybody loves him. And he really loves people. But Bernard is a relational sprinter, not a marathoner. He’s there for you if you’re there. But it’s hard for Bernard to keep you in mind when he’s off helping another person. This trait has caused Bernard to be unsafe with his friends and family. They have learned the hard way that you cannot depend on him. He commits and commits and commits—but he does not come through. If you ask him to return the lawnmower he borrowed last week, don’t block out your mowing hours on your schedule anytime soon. Bernard isn’t a bad person, nor is he insincere. But he loves the intense warmth of being close to a person in the here-and-now. It gets somewhat addictive to him, and he can’t delay gratification to help a person who isn’t around, when another, in-the-flesh person is available. And so he routinely disappoints himself and his friends. He flunks the time test. For example, when Bernard and I would plan dinners or nights out, he was often late, and sometimes he wouldn’t show up at all. Of course he’d always have a great excuse about some emergency or crisis. Finally, I realized I wasn’t a “crisis,” so I didn’t make the cut. I learned that, over time, I shouldn’t depend on Bernard.

SCHEDULING. Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them. For example, if your goal is to produce the first draft of your personal mission statement, you may want to set aside a two-hour block of time on Sunday to work on it. Sunday (or some other day of the week that is special to you, your faith, or your circumstances) is often the ideal time to plan your more personally uplifting activities, including weekly organizing. It’s a good time to draw back, to seek inspiration, to look at your life in the context of principles and values. If you set a goal to become physically fit through exercise, you may want to set aside an hour three or four days during the week, or possibly every day during the week, to accomplish that goal. There are some goals that you may only be able to accomplish

the three-hour block meeting schedule

Value-Added message: Have own transportation and able to work a flexible work schedule (Provides a great degree of dependability and flexibility compared with others who may be dependent on the bus or others unable to work a flexible work schedule)

The Pomodoro Technique helps with procrastination because it breaks down every task in a 25-minute block. After 25 minutes, you get a 5-minute break. Scheduling such breaks helps you get to work – the promise of a break produces a burst of dopamine and reduces distractions.

An effective breakout block is at least three-hours long and spent on things other than work. It is time scheduled away from your business during normal business hours that you will use to refresh and reinvigorate your mind, so that when you return to work, you can engage with more focus and energy.

The Psychopathology of CCD What am I doing tomorrow? Don’t ask me. Just follow the dance of my double helix, its sinuous spiral twisting like an impetuous nursery of stars on a collision course with the child care nebula. Maybe you can read my palm pilot for my schedule -- I’m just a drone serving the queen bee, serving some other queen, in some master plan unknown to me, possibly unknown even to the Omniscient Beeing, no longer smug in Her certainty, her kids rooting for the teat of extinction, thirsty, hungry, wet and gone clubbing all night. I can’t handle the stress anymore, pesticides, cell phone radiation, genetically modified crops, a Starbucks on every other block, global warming, gay marriage and now this economic crisis. Fuck it! I’m not going back to the hive. I’ve flying to Bali and opening up a yoga/dance studio with an organic café. “Wait! I’m coming with you.” “Me too!

I block in days / nights for writing where I don't touch emails or social media.

According to the schedule, the entire block from 8:00 to 8:30 has been labeled BRUSH YOUR TEETH. Earl laughs again and walks over to the bathroom. [...] 'Who needs half an hour to brush their teeth?'

So training smart, training effectively, involves cycling through the three zones in any given week or training block: 75 percent easy running, 5 to 10 percent running at target race paces, and 15 to 20 percent fast running or hill training in the third zone to spike the heart and breathing rates. In my 5-days-a-week running schedule, that cycle looks like this: On Monday, I cross-train. Tuesday, I do an easy run in zone one, then speed up to a target race pace for a mile or two of zone-two work. On Wednesday, it’s an easy zone-one run. Thursday is an intense third-zone workout with hills, speed intervals, or a combination of the two. Friday is a recovery day to give my body time to adapt. On Saturday, I do a relaxed run with perhaps another mile or two of zone-two race pace or zone-three speed. Sunday is a long, slow run. That constant cycling through the three zones—a hard day followed by an easy or rest day—gradually improves my performance in each zone and my overall fitness. But today is not about training. It’s about cranking up that treadmill yet again, pushing me to run ever faster in the third zone, so Vescovi can measure my max HR and my max VO2, the greatest amount of oxygen my heart and lungs can pump to muscles working at their peak. When I pass into this third zone, Vescovi and his team start cheering: “Great job!” “Awesome!” “Nice work.” They sound impressed. And when I am in the moment of running rather than watching myself later on film, I really think I am impressing them, that I am lighting up the computer screen with numbers they have rarely seen from a middle-aged marathoner, maybe even from an Olympian in her prime. It’s not impossible: A test of male endurance athletes in Sweden, all over the age of 80 and having 50 years of consistent training for cross-country skiing, found they had relative max VO2 values (“relative” because the person’s weight was included in the calculation) comparable to those of men half their age and 80 percent higher than their sedentary cohorts. And I am going for a high max VO2. I am hauling in air. I am running well over what should be my max HR of 170 (according to that oft-used mathematical formula, 220 − age) and way over the 162 calculated using the Gulati formula, which is considered to be more accurate for women (0.88 × age, the result of which is then subtracted from 206). Those mathematical formulas simply can’t account for individual variables and fitness levels. A more accurate way to measure max HR, other than the test I’m in the middle of, is to strap on a heart rate monitor and run four laps at a 400-meter track, starting out at a moderate pace and running faster on each lap, then running the last one full out. That should spike your heart into its maximum range. My high max HR is not surprising, since endurance runners usually develop both a higher maximum rate at peak effort and a lower rate at rest than unconditioned people. What is surprising is that as the treadmill

The scheduling process that Pete stumbled upon is very common among Multipliers and is something that we at Southwestern Consulting refer to as creating a “categorical schedule.” It allows you to feel more in control by blocking a certain amount of time each day or week for types of activities without locking yourself into hard specifics of what might feel “rigid” and “constricting,” as with traditional schedules.

If your schedule is disrupted, you should, at the next available moment, take a few minutes to create a revised schedule for the time that remains in the day. You can turn to a new page. You can erase and redraw blocks. Or do as I do: Cross out the blocks for the remainder of the day and create new blocks to the right of the old ones on the page (I draw my blocks skinny so I have room for several revisions).

Within each project, what are the three tasks that must be completed? What is fixed on my schedule? This would be a weekly review session, weekly planning session, exercise, and regular breaks. Structure is critical to success. I worked for years without a proven structure and my productivity suffered as a result. When identifying blocks or obstacles in your weekly schedule, consider these questions: What distractions regularly pull me away from my work? What is the #1 habit that delivers 80% of my results?

You can't rush crazy, crazy has its own schedule.

Simple Fast Funnels may be the new kid on the block when it comes to a complete bumper to bumper CRM system, but it’s a force to be reckoned with! Business owners are switching over right and left and I’m going to outline 10 of the best features of Simple Fast Funnels so you can see what all the buzz is about! Funnel builder: Simple Fast Funnels has easy intuitive software so you can build your own landing pages, funnels, websites, sales pages etc. No developer needed, everything included and simple to use Email Software: Instead of paying hundreds or thousands per month to send emails, this software does it for you! You can have your entire email list automated or send emails on the fly, whatever fits the bill for you, they’ve got you covered and it’s so easy to track your email results so you can modify and make improvements as you go. Online Membership Area: Now, for no additional fees that lot’s of CRM software likes to charge, you can build glorious membership areas for your clients. You can control timing on video releases, give access for certain time periods upset packages… whatever your business looks like, if you can dream it, you can build it in the membership area. Survey and quiz generator: Ramp up your lead capture game to grow your customer list! One of the best ways to get leads is to get your customers talking about themselves. Not only do people love to take surveys and quizzes, but it can help you gather information about your clients to serve them better and grow your sales! SMS Marketing Software: If you’re not messaging your customers, you’re missing out, and if you are messaging your customers you’re probably over paying. Amazing automated intuitive SMS marketing can make your life much easier and allow you to reach your customers in more ways. Being where your customers are more present is always good for business. Simple Fast Funnels helps you get the cheapest SMS rates around and it automatically integrates into the system for your unified messages. Appointment booking: Another expensive thing you used to have to pay for and try to get to work properly with your website AND look decent is also built right in. Now, without leaving Simple Fast Funnels, you’re able to capture the lead, follow up with the lead all over the place, engage with them, build trust, book appointments, schedule calls and even send them automated text reminders. E com Purchases: Directly on your website, you’ll be able to take payments. No more invoices sent from other platforms, everything buttoned up nice and clean. Unified messaging: From now on, whether a client emails, texts, calls etc, it all shows up in one place at your end. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a HUGE pain to have to follow customers about and keep track of conversations. Now you see all your communication with customers in a neat little area. Blogs: Blogs these days can really help your marketing efforts across the board, and of course your blogs will be a perfect fit in your simple fast funnel account. Analytics: Data tracking when you’re dealing with features on various platforms is a nightmare. If you capture a lead on a Word press landing page, send it an email software like Keep, mail chimp or whatever, send them to a new website to schedule calls and another to make purchases… How could you possibly expect to get good customer data? Hosting all of your “business” in one location makes tracking flawless. The more customers you have the more data you need to be efficient. Cheers to making it easy. All that software and that’s just the top 10, guys there’s more. Simplefastfunnels.com also lets you have a 2 week free trial. Don’t take anyone word for anything. Go try it for yourself.

sixteen-hour days are more than twice as productive as eight-hour days. Brian, for his part, thinks of writing as a kind of blacksmithing, where it takes a while just to heat up the metal before it’s malleable. He finds it somewhat useless to block out anything less than ninety minutes for writing, as nothing much happens in the first half hour except loading a giant block of “Now, where was I?” into his head. Scheduling expert Kirk Pruhs, of the University of Pittsburgh, has had the same experience. “If it’s less than an hour I’ll just do errands instead, because it’ll take me the first thirty-five minutes to really figure out what I want to do and then I might not have time to do

Novices are sometimes tempted to use buffered channels within a single goroutine as a queue, lured by their pleasingly simple syntax, but this is a mistake. Channels are deeply connected to goroutine scheduling, and without another goroutine receiving from the channel, a sender—and perhaps the whole program—risks becoming blocked forever. If all you need is a simple queue, make one using a slice.

Some, like [Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, favour a greater overhaul of the political system, restricting sitting days to normal business hours, and compressing sitting weeks iinto longer blocks of time, allowing parliamentarians and their staff longer uninterrupted periods back in the electorate and at home with family. 'I think it would be better to have four or five full days a week and hav ethe evenings off - all of them,' Brown says. 'If peopel want to, they can have their party-room meetings and inevitable discussions after, but earlier, and have more sleep time at night.'

One of my most important values is to be a caring, involved, and fun dad. While I aspire to live out this value, being a fully present dad is not always “convenient.” An email from a client informs me that my website is down; the plumber texts to tell me that his train is stalled and he needs to reschedule; my bank notifies me of an unexpected charge on my card. Meanwhile, my daughter sits there, waiting for me to play my next card in our game of gin rummy. To combat this problem, I’ve intentionally scheduled time with my daughter every week. Much like I schedule time for a business meeting or time for myself, I block out time on my schedule to be with her. To make sure we always have something fun to do, we spent one afternoon writing down over a hundred things to do

Instead of looking at a schedule as blocks of time to fill, behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan suggests we look at our schedule like artwork on a wall. Start with the largest pieces, the tasks that require the majority of your mental or physical energy for the day, and then arrange smaller, easier tasks around them. Then fill the rest of the spaces with moderately taxing responsibilities.

Paul Graham’s 2009 essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” underscores the need for large time blocks. Graham, one of the founders of the innovative venture capital firm Y Combinator, argues that normal business culture gets in the way of the very productivity it seeks because of the way people traditionally schedule their time (or are allowed to). Graham divides all work into two buckets: maker (do or create) and manager (oversee or direct). “Maker” time requires large blocks of the clock to write code, develop ideas, generate leads, recruit people, produce products, or execute on projects and plans. This time tends to be viewed in half-day increments. “Manager time,” on the other hand, gets divided into hours. This time typically has one moving from meeting to meeting, and because those who oversee or direct tend to have power and authority, “they are in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency.” This can create a huge conflict if those needing maker time are pulled into meetings at odd hours, destroying the very time blocks they need to move themselves and the company forward. Graham embraced this insight and created a company culture at Y Combinator that now runs completely on a maker’s schedule. All meetings get clustered at the end of the day. To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. Your goal is “ONE and done.” But if you don’t time block each day to do your ONE Thing, your ONE Thing won’t become a done thing.

Step Four: Ideal-Week Planning Now you need to take your “only I can do” list and actually plot out how you will get all these things done. I hope your to-do list is shorter than when you picked up this book. If so, that reduction is a massive win in itself. The goal is to schedule all these things out. Literally, go through the list, plot each item into your calendar, and create an automated repeating appointment so it shows up in your calendar on a weekly basis. For example, if only you can write a weekly blog post and you know you need about three hours to write and publish a post, create a three-hour appointment in your calendar from ten to one o’clock on Mondays, for example, and then make it a recurring appointment. The same process can be followed for child-related activities. If you are the person who primarily picks up your kids from school, put an appointment in your calendar for the amount of time it takes to drive or walk to the school, pick them up, and return home. Repeat this task for all the activities you have on the only-you list. Once you’ve entered these activities, you may be thinking, Okay, Lisa, that’s great, but I have now run out of time. So what happens if you actually block everything in and you run out of hours in the week? If I were sitting across from you in a private coaching session, this is what I would ask: •Are all the activities in your calendar truly things only you can do? Is there anything that could be delegated to someone else? •Can any of these activities be batched with something else? For example, could you do research for a blog post on your phone while you run on the treadmill? Can you do phone calls on your commute home or while grocery shopping for your family? •Is everything in your calendar actually aligned with your ideal life plan? Is there anything on the list that is no longer supporting this plan? Be honest with yourself about things that need to go—even if you are having a hard time letting go. •Can you reduce the amount of time it takes to do an activity? This might seem like an incredibly overwhelming exercise, but trust me, it is an incredibly worthwhile exercise. It might seem rigid to schedule everything in your life, but scheduling brings the freedom not to worry about how you are spending your time. You have thought it through, and you know that every worthwhile activity has been accounted for. This system, my friend, is the cure to mom guilt. When you know you have appropriately scheduled dedicated time for your children, your spouse, yourself, and your work, what do you have to feel guilty about?

Fill in your 168 hours with blocks of core-competency time. Broadly, figure out what hours you would like to be working, sleeping, nurturing your family and friends, and nurturing yourself—for example, engaging in structured leisure activities such as exercise, volunteering, or participating in religious activities. For longer-term projects on your “List of 100 Dreams,” schedule in the blocks of time associated with each actionable step.

The second tactic that helps is the use of overflow conditional blocks. If you’re not sure how long a given activity might take, block off the expected time, then follow this with an additional block that has a split purpose. If you need more time for the preceding activity, use this additional block to keep working on it. If you finish the activity on time, however, have an alternate use already assigned for the extra block (for example, some nonurgent tasks). This allows unpredictability in your day without requiring you to keep changing your schedule on paper.

This means, for example, that instead of having a unique small box for each small task on your plate for the day—respond to boss’s e-mail, submit reimbursement form, ask Carl about report—you can batch similar things into more generic task blocks. You might find it useful, in this case, to draw a line from a task block to the open right-hand side of the page where you can list out the full set of small tasks you plan to accomplish in that block. When you’re done scheduling your day, every minute should be part of a block. You have, in effect, given every minute of your workday a job. Now as you go through your day, use this schedule to guide you.

Moon and his team were able to sound one battleship during each fourteen-hour day. When they returned at night they were exhausted from the grueling schedule. Moon said it was the only time that the tenders had to work harder than the diver. Holding a diver suspended at twenty feet for three hours at a time strained the muscles of even the strongest among us. We all worked together on the last two ships to give them some relief. The last ship sounded was the West Virginia. We worked the portside first, because the starboard side was partially blocked. The portside hull suffered a gasping torpedo wound three hundred feet long.

It would have been easier if Biden were dealing with just Manchin, but he wasn’t. He needed to bring Kyrsten Sinema along, and dealing with both of them was a maddening exercise. It was as if they were strategically out of sync. They kept pushing in opposite directions. Sinema didn’t want to raise taxes but was less skittish about spending money; Manchin was happy to raise taxes but didn’t want to spend too much. Pleasing one of the holdouts made it harder to cut a deal with the other. On September 22, Biden decided to confront the problem head on. Rather than conduct separate negotiations with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and six centrist House Democrats, he pulled them together for a meeting in the Oval Office. When senators entered the Oval Office to negotiate with Biden, they were surprised by his collegiality. He treated them as his equal. It was as if he were still Joe Biden (D-Del.), a legislative dealmaker, not a president imposing his will on them. Meetings with legislators were sometimes scheduled for two-and-a-half-hour blocks. And they were endless. Sinema came to the White House ten times over the summer and early fall. He was solicitous and patient, trying to edge them to consensus, for the most part. But Biden

Knowing what you're going to write, making sure you're rested and ready to go, having enough time blocked off to do the writing, and having everything you need at hand to get things done. If you've taken care of these things ahead of time, you are far more likely to be productive than if you have to make up a plan on the spot for that day's writing session. If you're feeling that your writing sessions aren't as productive as they could be, my strong guess is that one of the four planning factors is the issue. To put yourself in a position to have a great writing session requires four steps: Make sure that your Model Week and Weekly Plan create a writing schedule that allows you to be productive. This requires that you know when you are alert and creative enough to write well, but also to understand how long a session needs to be so that you have enough time to get into a rhythm while not going so long that your focus and productivity fall off a cliff. Identify a clear set of tactics to work on during each writing session. This starts with your 12 Week Plan when you identify your 12 Week goals and associated tactics, and it takes concrete form in your Weekly

Point #2: Regardless of how you schedule your Internet blocks, you must keep the time outside these blocks absolutely free from Internet use.

To summarize, to succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy.

Long-term planning. At the beginning of a semester, online course, or research project, block out your schedule to set up a studying regimen. You can do this easily with a free online calendar program from virtually all Internet providers or with a paper calendar or whiteboard.

Learning blocks. You can adapt the 30–50-minute study session as dictated by the LSU study for your own purposes. Remember that 30 minutes is enough to make the study session substantial and that going over 50 puts undue pressure on your brain. So within your weekly time block, make sure to schedule an attendant break after your core learning time.

Allocate time blocks in your schedule for each task,

Strategic Blocks: A strategic block is a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, no visitors, no anything. Instead, you focus all of your energy on preplanned tasks—your strategic and money-making activities. Strategic blocks concentrate your intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results. You will likely be astounded by the quantity and quality of the work you produce. For most people, one strategic block per week is sufficient.

3 times a week—Block out parts of your schedule during your workday so you have time to think and reflect. Meditate. Read the news on some subject you don’t work on. Whatever. It can even be tangential to your work, but it should not be actual work. Give your brain a second to catch up. Learn, stay curious, don’t just react to the never-ending stream of fires to put out or meetings to attend.

Personally, I type the left-hand side of my calendar on Microsoft Outlook, then print out the pages and write the right-hand side in longhand. That way I can easily revise my goals throughout the day using a pen, instead of tapping on my BlackBerry’s keyboard. Other people manage their calendar exclusively on their computer or smartphone, through Outlook or products such as Google Calendar. It doesn’t matter—do whichever works best for you. The Left-Hand Side: Meetings, Phone Calls, and Other Assignments Take a look at my schedule for the day. Note that I have not filled up every hour—there are several blocks of “free time” in my schedule.

Lack mentality” directed toward time is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Constant worries and fears concerning lack of time are energy draining and creativity blocking! Remind yourself often, “There is plenty of time!” Say it over and over again, and your tension will dissipate. Our schedules feel freer once we release the concern that there isn’t enough time.

Pinned to the left-hand wall opposite the construction schedule was another butcher-block-size sheet almost identical in form, except this one, O’Sullivan said, was called a “submittal schedule.” It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.

Schedule blocks of time in your calendar for your D-I-A Desires, and then fit in other to-dos around those blocks.

Time management is an important skill. Living by clockwork, we can manage our hectic schedules. We can fulfil all our life's responsibilities and still carve out key blocks of time which we need for training. We should focus on what is important now and the rest will fall in place.

The same thing happens with emails. Most people open their inbox and see ten new unread messages. Almost everyone will click each message open, read it, and then move on to the next message. If an email requires some action, they’ll get back to it later—in which case they’ll have to re-read the message! Remember, touching something once doesn’t mean you have to-do everything yourself. Delegating an item is almost always the most time efficient thing to-do, so if you touch it once and delegate to somebody, do it. Also, not every task should be touched immediately. A large project or something that is going to run into a previously scheduled time block should be scheduled for later. Most people will have a rule of thumb about when to action something immediately. Most people I know will take immediate action on something if it takes less than five or ten minutes.

Increase Your Productivity We live in a demanding and distracting world. Being productive can sometimes feel like an impossible feat. Here are three ways to get more done without burning out: Keep one to-do list. Include everything you want or need to do in one place. Writing it down helps get it off your mind and leaves you free to focus on the task at hand. Do the most important thing first. Before you leave work in the evening, decide what one thing you need to accomplish the next day. Do it first thing in the morning, when you’re likely to have the most energy and fewest distractions. Schedule time for non-urgent things. It’s easy to get caught up in the pressing issues of the day. Block off time in your calendar to do things that would otherwise get squeezed out, like writing, thinking creatively, or building relationships.

Time blocking, as it’s called, helps ensure that you don’t schedule other things on the days—or part of a day—you’ve set aside to work on this task.

I take time blocking seriously, dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building my schedule for the next day. During this planning process I consult my task lists and calendars, as well as my weekly and quarterly planning notes. My goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right pace for the relevant deadlines.

During: ●   Meals: Fundraising in the time of Zoom is an even more intense experience. It can be difficult to carve out enough time to get out of your house, or even away from your computer, for a proper meal. I suggest doing meal prep or planning every Sunday. Meals should be light and calorically restricted to keep your mind and body active — you shouldn’t bring any afternoon grogginess to a pitch because you ate a burger for lunch. ●    Exercise: Add blocks to your calendar to carve out exercise time. Getting your blood pumping and providing an alternative to staring at your own face on Zoom is key to providing context and awareness. Exercise helps reset the body and the mind. ●    Emotional support: A great fundraise is still an experience in rejection (seriously, most meetings result in a “no”). Make sure you have a weekly check-in with someone (not your cofounder) who can help rationalize and normalize this crazy process. ●        Breaks: Schedule time to take breaks. Watch a movie. Take a hike. Go swimming. Do something to get your mind off the fundraise for at least 30 minutes every day. ●      Meditating: There is nothing in this world that I believe in more than meditation. I started meditating twelve months ago, and since then have nearly 10X’d our business. It’s never too late to start!

The hall was blocked by a young patrol officer from the first shift who was bent in half, butt sticking up in the air, her flashlight swinging precariously close to her head as she dug green-colored photocopied paper out of a box. She straightened, shuffled the pages of announcements, meeting schedules, calendars—the normal office detritus.

That should come in the form of at least ten approaches per week. This means you have to schedule at least a two-hour block of time every week just for day gaming. Like any other hobby, you need to put in time to improve.

#Slot_Drains: Commercial kitchens are speedy and demanding environments that require operating to a strict time schedule. It is therefore important that you install the correct drainage solution. This will prevent headaches further down the line with blocked or broken drainage. Duratrench offer high-quality Slot drains well-suited to a hysterical and disorganized kitchen environment. It will effectively intercept oils, greases, etc. before they go through the wastewater drainage system.

A Phillips serial (in contrast to the jerky, obvious, and corny melodramas of the Hummerts) usually contained just one main scene in each installment, peopled by only two characters. Her scenes were sparse, the settings lean, the people clear without the endless repetition of names that filled a Hummert soap. Phillips was the first serial writer to effectively blend her soaps. Her popular Today’s Children was phased out of its first run in 1938 by having its characters sit around the radio and listen to The Woman in White, which replaced it. When three of her soaps were scheduled consecutively and sponsored by General Mills in 1944, Phillips expanded this idea of integrated storylines. The major characters of the resurrected Today’s Children drifted through The Guiding Light, and mutual visits with The Woman in White were also common. Ed Prentiss, who was then playing Ned Holden of The Guiding Light, was used as a “master of ceremonies” for the hour, a guide through the intricate framework of the three soaps. The fourth quarter-hour was filled with nondenominational religious music, Hymns of All Churches. At one time during this period, Phillips was considering breaking the traditional lengths, running stories of ten to 20 minutes each rather than the precise quarter-hours. After a season of this experimenting, the block was dismantled, and The Guiding Light went into its postwar phase. In the earliest phase, it followed the Ruthledge family. The Rev. John Ruthledge had come to Five Points two decades before, establishing himself and his church as the driving force in the community. This had not been easy. Five Points was a “melting pot of humanity,” as Phillips described it, with Poles, Slavs, Swedes, Germans, Irish, and Jews living in uneasy proximity. As one character described it, it was a neighborhood of “poverty, gossipy neighbors, sordid surroundings,” with “no chance to get ahead.” Ruthledge had run into stiff neighborhood opposition, but now he was accepted and even beloved. His Little Church of Five Points had become popularly known as the Church of the Good Samaritan:

In our busy, busy culture in which even teens have incredibly complicated schedules, "wasting" time seems to mean, "having a block of time that's not booked." That's not it at all, because, believe it or not, busy, busy time can be wasted time, too. And, to make it even more complicated, an hour spent sitting outside doing "nothing" can actually be the opposite of wasted time. That hour just might be the best and most moral use of time you've had today.

ACTION ITEMS TO INCREASE YOUR EHR Install time management software on your computer. Monitor how you’re spending your time. Adjust your workflow based on the report. Turn off all social media notifications (both emails and push notifications on your phone). Switch your phone to silent. Unsubscribe from any email newsletter that isn’t taking your business forward. Get support emails out of your inbox by using dedicated help desk software. Block ‘deep work’ time into your calendar (at whatever time suits you) so you have uninterrupted work time. Make portions of your time available to others using a scheduler tool. (The rest of the week is yours.) Purge unwanted things and people from your life. Set a 12-week goal and stick to it. Hint: Actioning items in this book will change your life. Commit 12 weeks to actioning the key elements at the end of each chapter. Prioritise sleep. Get eight hours a night for a week (even if it means not getting as much ‘work’ done) and see how it feels. Clean up your diet. Eat food that’s as close to the source as possible (i.e. not out of packets). Find a type of exercise or daily movement you enjoy, and carve out time to do it every day.

ACTION ITEMS TO INCREASE YOUR EHR Clear your brain. Purge everything from your mind, delete anything that won’t have an impact, score the highest impact ones, and transfer the top three. File the rest away somewhere safe. Then forget about them. Figure out your destination: identify your ideal future reality. Lay down the tracks: figure out the steps that will take you to your destination. Create stations along the way at 12-week intervals. These milestones will provide the momentum to keep going. Block out time in your schedule to execute the plan. Set an alert to check your progress weekly. Create a 12-weekly review point.

Cloak and Dagger was lost in the summertime NBC schedule, lumped into a mystery block with several other shows of far inferior quality. It never attracted a sponsor and got almost no critical attention, but the recent discovery of the entire run reveals a gripping show with every story an unpredictable departure from formula. It was the story of the wartime activities of the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services—“this country’s first all-out effort in black warfare … dropping undercover operators behind enemy lines, organizing local partisans to blow bridges and dynamite tunnels, operating the best spy systems of Europe and Asia.” It was a tense half-hour of patriots and traitors, of love affairs doomed by war, of triumph, tragedy, and failure. The stories did not always end with the lovers embraced and the mad-dog Germans reeling in defeat: the hero-agent, in accomplishing his mission, sometimes gave up his life. It opened with a question by actor Raymond Edward Johnson: Are you willing to undertake a dangerous mission for the United States, knowing in advance you may never return alive? It was transcribed and had a definite “canned” sound, which may also have helped turn listeners away.

Don’t cave in. It’s easy to get distracted. It’s easy to let influences pull you away from your structured weekly schedule in pursuit of your goals. Discipline and resolve will lead to your next job. Don’t cave in on the high expectations you establish for yourself when you set the bar high (above in Principle #1).

CHAPTER 4 SUMMARY: BEST WAYS 71–80 71. When it comes to ensuring your family’s financial well-being, and securing a meaningful and rewarding job, you need to create a written action plan or a MAP (Meticulous Action Plan). 72. When you create a MAP, you are actually programming your own “employment GPS” so you can go from where you are to where you want to be. 73. When you’re done developing your action plan, you’ll have a highly structured schedule of activities for each day of the week. This includes your job transition campaign as well as your personal, social, and fitness activities. 74. If you are unemployed, you should invest 50, 60, or 70 hours a week on your job campaign. If you have a full-time job, you need to set aside a defined number of hours every week as your investment in your future. 75. Whether you are employed and looking for a better job or out of work seeking a new one, you must hold yourself fully accountable for putting in as many hours as possible and getting the most out of every hour you put in. 76. The first question you will need to address is, how many hours a week will you commit to your job transition campaign? Then, based on the number of weekly hours you’ll invest in getting a new job, your next step is to break weekly hours down into daily hours. 77. There are 13 primary job transition strategies for landing a job in troubled economic times. Your job is to determine which 4 to 6 strategies will be most effective for you. a. Networking and contact development b. Target marketing (identifying companies you want to work for) c. Internet searches and postings d. Federal jobs e. Search firms and employment agencies f. Blogs with job listings g. Classified advertisements in newspapers and trade journals h. Job fairs i. College placement departments and alumni associations j. Workforce System and One-Stops k. Volunteer work l. Job transition strategists m. Creative self-marketing 78. Once you have identified which job transition strategies will work best for your campaign, determine when, during the week, you will work on each. You want to create a structured weekly schedule. When you create a structured weekly schedule, you will have a detailed plan with specific daily tasks both for your job campaign and for personal and social activities. 79. Once you have a structured weekly schedule, you must set goals that you want to achieve from your weekly activities. A MAP without specific goals is not an effective plan. You will want to set specific goals for each strategy so you can track your success or modify the MAP if you are not achieving your weekly goals. 80. Prepare for the worst-case scenario. It is vitally important to remain in a positive, optimistic, and enthusiastic state of mind. But sometimes your plan won’t come to fruition as quickly as you’d like. So expect the best, but plan for the worst. This would include looking at your long- and short-term finances and health and other issues that need to be addressed to free you up to concentrate on getting your next job.

Train schedules are a matter of pride and of apprehension to nearly everyone. When, far up the track, the block signal snapped from red to green and the long, stabbing probe of the headlight sheered the bend and blared on the station, men looked at their watches and said, “On time.” There was pride in it, and relief too. The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

Decide when you want to leave work and you’ll know how many hours you have. Slot in what you need to get done by priority. Cal calls this “fixed schedule productivity.” You need boundaries if you want work–life balance. This forces you to be efficient. By setting a deadline of six p.m. and then scheduling tasks, you can get control over that hurricane of duties, and you can be realistic instead of shocked by what is never going to happen. Most of us use our calendars all wrong: we don’t schedule work; we schedule interruptions. Meetings get scheduled. Phone calls get scheduled. Doctor appointments get scheduled. You know what often doesn’t get scheduled? Real work. All those other things are distractions. Often, they’re other people’s work. But they get dedicated blocks of time and your real work becomes an orphan. If real work is the stuff that affects the bottom line, the stuff that gets you noticed, the thing that earns you raises and gets you singled out for promotion, well, let me utter blasphemy and suggest that maybe it deserves a little dedicated time too. Also, at least an hour a day, preferably in the morning, needs to be “protected time.” This is an hour every day when you get real work done without interruption. Approach this concept as if it were a religious ritual. This hour is inviolate.