part0011

Up until now, you’ve been making space in your mind and heart to start doing your best work. While it’s natural to think the next step is to jump right into the project — or, if you’re the “look before you leap” type, to start planning the project — you’re going to very quickly confront the reality that there’s nowhere in your schedule for the project to go. You would only be adding more to an overfull plate, and it would only continue to add to your creative constipation.

You need to make a wedge for your project first. The principle here is that if you make space for one best-work project, you’ll have the satisfaction and momentum to reuse that space for the next project and likely be able to create additional space for an additional project. Over time, you’ll find that more of your days are spent doing your best work. Or at least you’ll be able to see that amid all the work that doesn’t call to you, you’re able to make progress on stuff that matters most to you.

The challenge is that time is surprisingly hard for us to think about, and most of the ways we do think about time don’t work for us. While we’re rethinking work, we’ll also need to rethink time. Throughout this chapter I’ll be using time and space interchangeably because it turns out that we’re better at understanding spatial metaphors, and using these metaphors makes us better at prioritizing the work we’re going to be doing. Along the same vein, I’m going to be tying work to time/space because work only happens through time.

Thinking about time in general terms can be interesting, but it’s not very useful or practical unless you happen to be a philosopher or physicist. To make time relevant, it’s typically better to tie it to a particular context. Since our context is work, we’ll be using that as our anchor to avoid getting swept away in the multiverse.

Recall that we don’t work on ideas; we work on projects. More specifically, we don’t work on projects; we work on chunks of projects linked together in the right sequence. Chunking, linking , and sequencing thus become the simple concepts that will be the Swiss Army knife of this chapter.

Even though the concepts are simple to understand, let’s define these key concepts:

Chunking. Splitting projects into coherent, doable parts.

Linking. Joining chunks together so that they hang together.

Sequencing. Linking chunks together into a logical order in space and time.

The simplest expression of a chunk is a verb-noun construct because it tells you the action that’s being taken on something. So book, closet , and John aren’t chunks because they’re just nouns; read book, clean closet , and email John are chunks. Much like making a non-SMART goal something you can’t abide seeing, I want nouns without verbs on your action lists to be something that you’ll forever be unable to tolerate without fixing.

Let’s use building blocks as a way to illustrate project building. Each individual block is a chunk of a project. The tops and bottoms of standard building blocks are the way we link the chunks. The order we place and link the blocks is the sequence.

To continue with this example, at some point in your life — and I’m not judging if it was earlier today — you’ve started sticking random blocks together with no clear idea of what you were building. That’s analogous to lacking a SMART goal. You may have had an idea of what you wanted to build but hadn’t thought through how you were going to do it — you didn’t have a plan.

If you’ve ever played with any kind of building block system, you already know how to chunk, link, and sequence time and projects. Now would be a particularly good time to thank your parents and teachers. (Okay, wait until you finish this section.)

Time, however, is conceptually slippery; we could divide time up into any number of segments that we wanted to because the endless stream of time has no natural division. This very slipperiness is why humanity made conventions such as seconds, minutes, and months; without those conventions, time is relative to the speaker’s particular use in that moment. We can tie the sizes of our chunks to the standard divisions of time we already use. Thus we end up with year-sized chunks, (annual) quarter-sized chunks, month-sized chunks, week-sized chunks, day-sized chunks, hour-sized chunks, minute-sized chunks, and second-sized chunks.

The reality is, though, that some of those logical chunks are terrible chunks to use to plan (for most of us) because they don’t match our experience and reality. Ironically, it’s the smaller chunks of time that are the slipperiest for us. We can’t mark seconds, minutes, hours, and days very well, yet those are the chunks of time that most time-management systems and many of our practices try to get us to use. Given that we’ve only been measuring in seconds, minutes, and hours for the last few hundred years, that’s understandable. Just because you put an organic being in a factory doesn’t mean that it becomes a machine.

So rather than try to use all the logical chunks, we’re going to focus on year-, quarter-, month-, week-, two-hour-, and fifteen-minute-sized chunks. Before we jump into using the bigger chunks of time, let’s pause to discuss the two-hour- and fifteen-minute-sized chunks, since we’ll be using them the most.

After working with thousands of people, I’ve experienced that most people have a good idea of how many fifteen-minute or two-hour chunks it will take to get a project done, if I ask them to think in terms of such blocks. But if I ask them how many minutes or hours something will take, they have no idea what to say. Two-hour- and fifteen-minute-sized chunks are thus powerful anchors because they better track our natural attentional and habitual cycles. For convention, I’ll call a chunk of work that can be done in fifteen minutes a task and a chunk that can be done in two hours a block.

An important assumption that I’m baking into my chunks is the cost of context- and mental-switching that is often discounted. Many people balk when I suggest assigning a fifteen-minute chunk to composing each email message response, but they’re not counting the three-minute cognitive reset that happens between each email. Ten minutes isn’t long enough to adequately process the email message, but longer than twenty minutes is too long. (This accounts for why so many people are drowned in email and why it takes up so much of their day. Reading, thinking through, responding to, or composing twelve important emails would take the majority of a standard work morning or afternoon.) Fifteen minutes is thus the Goldilocks time assignment for each email.

Similarly, thirty minutes or an hour rarely feels long enough to get into, tussle with, complete, and exit from high-level analytical, synthetic, or creative work. Two hours is a better chunk, as it allows us to do all of the above, walk around, go to the bathroom, refresh our coffee, and so on, all while remaining ostensibly focused.

While the discussion above has been on the minimum size of an engagement threshold, the task and block conventions also help us with the maximum amount of time we can be fruitfully engaged in a chunk. Think about your emotional experience and active engagement on an email or admin call on which you spent longer than fifteen minutes. Think about what happened to your attention, focus, energy, and momentum on high-level work after two hours. In both cases there’s an upper limit to how long we can remain fruitfully engaged before we experience emotional or cognitive deterioration. It’s a cruel irony that most of us want to do more high-level work longer and do as little of the admin work as possible, but the work on our plate is high on admin and seemingly low on high-level work.

A further reflection would yield a similar minimum-maximum engagement period for the other chunk sizes as well. Even though we tend to underestimate how long something will take, we also know when a quarter-sized chunk has dragged into too many quarters and years. We also know when a week-sized chunk has fallen into too many weeks and months.

The project pyramid builds on chunking, linking, and sequencing because it shows how bigger projects contain smaller projects, as well as how smaller chunks tie together to build momentum. It helps us see, at the same time, the wall (best work) and the bricks (smaller chunks) that make up the wall. We’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the project pyramid, but I’m going to be up front that it can be conceptually challenging to understand and emotionally hard to accept. Shifting timescales is hard for all of us to do, but it’s easier than accepting the reality of how much we’ve committed to.

Some projects are really big and will require a lot of time and subprojects (chunks) to complete. Publishing a book, starting a new business, completing a major work initiative, getting a degree, and moving across the country are examples of big projects that will take many years or quarters to complete.

Other projects can be done in a day or a week. Volunteering at the bake sale, getting your kids sorted for the first week of school, completing the weekly quality assurance report, and organizing the Closet of Doom are examples of smaller projects that can be done in a day or a week.

Simple stuff, I know. The challenge is that we often set goals for ourselves that convert into large projects that themselves contain subprojects, without seeing the collective weight of those projects, especially as you go further down in timescale.

Take a simple (but very unrealistic) model in which a yearlong project has four quarter-sized chunks (for the year), every quarter-sized chunk has three month-sized chunks, every month has four week-sized chunks, and every week-sized chunk has five two-hour chunks (for that project), and each work block contains eight fifteen-minute chunks. One annual objective would spawn 1,920 tasks. Those 1,920 tasks convert into three full work months of time (assuming forty hours per week and four weeks per work month) if someone worked on only that project without wait time and interruption.

The unrealistic part of the model is that it’s too uniform and that higher-level chunks usually contain more concurrent lower-level chunks than above. The three-work-months estimate above is thus too low.

So the person that rolls into the year with seven goals that will require year-sized projects has started a game they’re very unlikely to win. You’ve no doubt heard some version of the maxim to have no more than one, three, or five (depending on who’s talking) ambitious goals (objectives) if you actually want to get them done; the project pyramid underpins why doing fewer projects isn’t a nice-to-consider maxim but a necessary practice if you’re serious about doing your best work.

When people really see how an annual goal, chunked down, leads to this much bottom-level work, it can be the emotional equivalent of the Ice Bucket Challenge. It explains the too-full to-do list and the feelings of overwhelm and creative undertow that so many people experience. People have told me that, for years, they’ve just assumed they weren’t productive or couldn’t get it together.

The reality is that they’ve been trying to put twenty-two units of stuff into a ten-unit bag. Time is currently the ultimate constraint — we can’t bend it, expand it, manage it, or alter it. We can only account for it and work within the constraint.

If you’re now feeling the weight of the overfull project load you’ve been carrying, pause and take a breath. Now that you see it, you can start to get real about removing all the excess weight that’s only making it harder for you to thrive and do your best work. At the same time, it will help you make better choices going forward. This is another one of those places where displacement is your friend.

I had a braingasm a decade and a half ago when I synthesized two simple observations: (1) verbs often give an indication to how big a chunk of work is, and (2) certain verbs follow and contain others. It sounds hyperbolic, but my planning world was forever leveled up from that day forward, and I sincerely hope yours will be the same if you’re just coming upon this synthesis. (This braingasm is what led to the pyramid after years of figuring out how to articulate it.)

Some chunks will naturally go with others, and some chunks go in others. When we articulate chunks as verb-noun constructs, we see that the verb gives us an idea of the size of the work and the noun stays constant throughout the project.

Take “Hire Skyler” as a project. Throughout the project, the verb sequence might be Research

Email (to Schedule)

Interview

Evaluate

Decide On

Hire. Bonus points if you see that that sequence of verbs is a repeatable sequence and thus a standard workflow.

Here are some conventional verbs as well as what size of a chunk they relate to:

Quarter- or month-sized project verbs (for work that needs a few week- or month-sized projects to complete):

Rework

Develop

Strategize

Launch/Ship

Build

Publish (books, articles)

Kick off

Move/Relocate

Week-sized project verbs (for work that needs at least one block, but probably not more than five for each coherent segment of work):

Research

Decide on

Collaborate with

Create

Plan

Design

Analyze/evaluate

Coordinate

Promote

Edit

Apply

Task verbs (for work that can be done in fifteen minutes):

Call

Sort

Read

Send

Check

Review

Find

Compile

Schedule

Make

Text

Fax

Mail

The list above isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but it provides a universal list that applies across industries, professions, and contexts and thus serves as the Rosetta stone for chunking and planning. Feel free to add verbs that are specific and common to your context too. (It’s telling that jargon is usually nouns, not verbs.)

Moving to a new city. Research places, decide on places, plan moving schedule, sell or get rid of stuff, pack stuff, move stuff, unpack stuff.

Starting a new business. Research business ideas, decide on model, make a business plan, design product, create product, promote product, deliver product.

Publishing a book. Brainstorm book ideas, decide on book idea, create an outline, draft manuscript, collaborate with editor/readers, edit manuscript, create marketing plan, promote book.

Getting a degree. Evaluate degree options, decide on degree options, research universities to apply to, decide on universities to apply to, apply to universities, evaluate university offers, plan move to university, move to university, collaborate with advisor on course schedule, decide on courses, and take courses. Rinse and repeat the last three chunks for a few years.

Developing a fundraiser. Evaluate fundraising needs, decide on fundraising strategy, plan fundraising campaign, coordinate with fundraisers, promote campaign.

Also notice how each of the chunks I listed actually have parts in them that I didn’t spell out; someone with familiarity with that type of project would know how to do the chunking. This again highlights the power of success packs. When you’re assembling them, you can pick people who have done projects similar to what you’re planning and they can help you with your chunking.

A big missing piece, of course, is how long each chunk will take. We’ll go into more detail about how to figure that out in the next chapter when we discuss how to plan a specific project. Our purpose here is to get you to see how much space a project will need and how to go about creating space for it.

I just pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and you either noticed it or you’re frustrated because something’s missing. What makes the trick work is that I constrained the timescale, which let me not worry too much about the details and specifics that are relevant to the lower timescales.

As we consider bigger timescales, it’s important to alter the level of specificity when it comes to thinking about action. When you’re thinking about the forest (time), focusing on the leaves (action) short-circuits your ability to consider either the forest or leaves. Each shift in timescale is thus a shift in perspective.

People often struggle with visualization, planning, and reviewing because they slip between perspectives too fluidly. For instance, when you’re at the monthly perspective, the quarterly perspective informs the why of the month and the weekly perspective informs the how of the month. That general rule follows for all timescales:

Constraining the timescale is the only real way we can make sense of everything we’re carrying because we can’t process more than one time perspective at a time. It’s the cognitive equivalent of trying to look simultaneously at a piece of paper that’s six inches from you and something that’s a mile away.

Thus enters the “No More Than Five Active Projects Per Timescale” rule, which we’ll shorthand to the Five Projects Rule because the former is too unwieldy. Let’s unpack “no more than five” and “active projects” separately.

Concerning “no more than five,” decades of research, observation, and experimentation have shown me that most people won’t complete more than five total projects per timescale. Since how many projects we finish is more important than how many we start , we do ourselves no favors by committing to more projects than we’ll be able to do. In reality, three projects is a better limit for creative and/or professional projects because it leaves bandwidth to use for life/personal projects and accounts for the work we’re doing but not counting.

“Active projects” makes you commit to projects that you’re actively pushing forward as opposed to those that you’re just thinking about, queued for the future, or are hanging on to but aren’t actually doing anything with. Your active projects are the ones that are on your metaphorical desktop.

The Five Projects Rule is simple to understand but may be incredibly difficult to practice, especially if you limit yourself to three projects to account for personal and undercounted work. But remember the project pyramid: your three or five projects may contain subprojects, depending on the time perspective.

What the Five Projects Rule allows us to do is check our commitments and do routine planning quickly. For instance, if you’re doing your weekly planning, you don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty of each day — you can just focus on the five projects you’re doing this week. If you’ve done your monthly planning and picked your five projects for the month, the week’s projects should be chunks of one or more of those monthly projects. As I said, timescale constraining and the project pyramid do a lot of the work for you.

To give an example of how this works, I’ll share a snapshot of my five projects for the current month, week, and day.

August 2018

1. Draft chapters for Start Finishing

2. Launch the 2019 momentum planners

3. Present at Camp GLP (Good Life Project)

This Week

1. Draft chapter 6 of Start Finishing

2. Prepare workshop for Camp GLP

3. Attend Camp GLP

4. Finish proposal for event in March 2019

Today

1. Draft chapter 6 of Start Finishing

2. Finish proposal for event in March 2019

3. Meet with client at 1:00 p.m.

Given that the deadline for this book is in October and how many of my available blocks it’s taking — which isn’t a complaint, because I love writing — I know not to add anything more than what’s already active. I’m also intentionally not doing a lot of month- and week-sized projects on the personal side.

At the weekly level, I don’t have to specify more than what I’ve done above. Fixed times for events such as flights and meetings are on my calendar and I know when those are, so I don’t need to include them in my weekly planning. But preparing for my workshop and attending Camp GLP are two different projects, and the latter prevents me from doing anything else starting Wednesday — I don’t work well on planes, and when I’m at an event, I try to do nothing more than be fully present and connect with people.

At the daily level, I don’t need to specify when I’m doing the work because that’s driven by my week block schedule. I know I’m going to be writing in the morning, meeting with my client from my office, and, after that, completing the proposal for the event from my office. I also have some admin tasks to do that are batched in that admin block that I don’t need to specify because they’re captured in my work management software.

What’s not included above is the fact that I have a full roster of clients on top of the creative work that I do. I’ve learned to not give myself five project slots at the monthly level when my client schedule is full because, though it’s unlikely that I would be creating during those times, holding all of those worlds, attending meetings, and doing prep work displaces my ability to do another monthly level project. I could just as easily write down “serve clients” as a monthly slot, but I don’t need to at this point because I know it’s there. Simplicity favors removing the slot and not writing it, and, as long as I stick with limiting the number of projects I commit to in the future, it works. (It took me a few years to learn to assume I’d be fully booked in the future too.)

My service work actually falls under the category of recurring projects. Like personal projects, they’re often undercounted. If you’re being truthful about what your days, weeks, and months look like, you may see that 50 to 75 percent of your available time, energy, and attention is already committed to recurring stuff. If that’s the case, you may only be able to give yourself one or two project slots to commit to; this may also mean you need to communicate and negotiate with your boss about the never-ending stream of projects they want to give you every day. Recurring projects and tasks are some of the first things to start delegating to other people. As a general rule, if you can list the steps it takes to do something, you can delegate all or major parts of the work to someone else.

A major upshot of the Five Projects Rule is that it allows you to work from a smaller, more focused list of action items rather than trying to decode and parse the To-Do List of Doom that so many people create for themselves. Capturing and dumping action items is one activity with its own space; the Five Projects Rule is the output of processing those action items. Trying to drive your momentum from your dumping ground is like having to dig through laundry baskets every time you need to dress, without knowing which laundry basket is clean and which is dirty. Sure, you can do it, but you’re setting yourself up for crazy-making and unwelcome surprises.

To return to the air sandwich, linking finished quarter-sized projects is what positively fills the gap between the big stuff and day-to-day stuff. The Five Projects Rule helps us overcome the challenges of having no realistic plan and too few resources because, once we accept the constraint, we’re able to use what we have to create a plan that will actually work.

The last major stop on the space-making bus before you jump into actually planning out your best-work project is to zoom down and constrain your focus to the weekly perspective. Since work happens in blocks, if there are no open blocks in which to put your project — or you don’t use the blocks when you put your project there — you’re not going to get any momentum on your project. When you do use those blocks, you’ll have the satisfaction of making progress on your best work. The weekly perspective is also the longest level of perspective that people feel comfortable shaping and planning.

Another reason the weekly perspective is so powerful is because it’s the level where people really see the standing constraints that are already on their schedule. Between commutes, meetings at work, places the kids need to be, recurring community meetings and events, trash pickup days, and the various logistics of everyday life, most of us can clearly see that we’re not starting a new day from a clean slate. All of that disappears at the monthly perspective, and the daily perspective doesn’t show us the pattern well enough for us to override the magical thinking that the stuff on today’s schedule is a one-off thing.

The weekly perspective is thus the perfect level for us to start rebuilding our schedules such that they go from looking like Swiss cheese, with random holes and chunks, to more coherent and purposeful blocks that support us doing our best work.

At the weekly perspective, there are four basic blocks that we can build into our days:

Focus blocks. 90–120-minute blocks of time when we’re especially creative, inspired, and able to do high-level work that requires focus.

Social blocks. 90–120-minute blocks of time when we’re primed and energetically in the right space to meet other people.

Admin blocks. 30–60-minute lower-energy blocks of time when we’re not in the zone to do the work that requires heavy lifting but there are still other types of work we can do effectively.

Recovery blocks. Variable-length blocks of time that we use for activities that recharge us, such as exercise, meditation, self-care, and intentional idling.

The time ranges above account for transition, bathroom breaks, refilling drinks, and so on. A single-focus block may contain a few breaks for stretching, walking, rumination, bathroom, coffee refills, and so on, as long as we don’t switch our focus and context to something else. It can also include whatever project review, outlining, and work wrap-up that we do while working on that project.

I’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to focus blocks. The bad news is that most people have a hard time creating and using more than three per day because of distractions, interruptions, daily routines, and a lack of intention. The good news is that you can get a lot done with three focus blocks per day, and accepting the constraint will make your life a lot easier and happier.

Okay, there’s another bit of bad news: my experience working with and teaching thousands of people shows that most people don’t have a free focus block to work on the projects they most want to. Their schedules look more like Swiss cheese, and they’re trying to do their creative work after they’ve done other kinds of work either all day long or first thing. This is what leads to the cruel irony I mentioned earlier, wherein they don’t get to do as much of the work they want to do because they have a lot more of the work they don’t want to do.

Focus blocks are 90 to 120 minutes to tap into the way we natively understand segments of time as mentioned above. They become the atomic unit to use for your projects as well. Anything over ten hours starts to become hard for us to deal with because it gets amorphous and hard to visualize; five focus blocks is easier to understand because we can visualize the chunks of the projects we can do in that amount of time.

If you’ve ever put off doing a “bigger” creative project because you simply didn’t know how to get started or how much time it would take, you already know what I’m talking about. Spending twenty creative hours on a project over the course of a month feels overwhelming, but working on that project for a creative block a day doesn’t. Mathematically, it may be the same amount of work, but motivationally it feels different to a lot of people.

Though most people top out at three focus blocks per day, it’s quite common for people to go on creative sprints, retreats, or pushes wherein they push over that limit. The usual result is that they’ll be depleted and sluggish for the next few days and wonder what’s wrong. This would be like working out for four hours when you normally work out for one hour. You would expect to be sore and/or fatigued the next day, even if you really enjoyed the workout. The same is true for going on a focus-block sprint. Consistent progress is better than fits and starts.

The number of focus blocks you have available is the limiting factor to how quickly and steadily you’ll be able to make progress on your best-work projects. Many people misdiagnose their struggles with getting their best work done as procrastination, lack of capability, or lack of creativity, when the root cause is they just don’t have any or enough focus blocks in their schedule to get started and keep going. It’s not a lack of discipline but rather a lack of boundaries and intention.

For many people, focus blocks and admin blocks can be summed up as “the work I want to do” and “the work I don’t want to do,” respectively. A social block is simply a block of time used for interacting with others in real time. We tend to favor social blocks over admin blocks, even for introverts, but their purpose is different than focus blocks. Focus blocks are focused on creating something whereas social blocks are focused on connecting with someone.

Real-time collaboration, brainstorming, and thought partnering with someone else creates a hybrid block, and it requires individual creative and social energy as well as cocreative energy. Most people find it better to group them as a social block, though, because most projects require solo focus blocks to get done, and collaborative social blocks often spawn work that needs to be done during a (solo) focus block.

It’s important to discuss the different purposes of social blocks because people often discount their value by saying they “didn’t get anything done” with them. The time you spend with your friends, family, colleagues, success pack, and tribe is valuable. Sure, it displaces other kinds of work, but that doesn’t mean it’s less valuable than other work, especially when you consider how lonely and disconnected creative people are (as a whole).

If there’s a part of your work that requires you to spend real time with people, that part of your work goes in social blocks. For that reason I sometimes use social blocks and service blocks interchangeably to remind people that real-time service hours are social blocks.

Aside from the intrinsic value of social blocks, they make for great bookends to other blocks because most of us honor commitments to other people more than we honor commitments to ourselves. When we’re in the flow, it’s easy for us to bleed a focus block into the next block of time, sometimes to our own detriment in the following days when we’re creatively winded. Similarly, sandwiching an admin block between two social blocks creates a coherent flow for both because there’s often some type of admin work that follows social blocks.

Your particular context will determine what counts as admin work, but in general, email, phone calls, digital/paper filing, low-level editing, bookkeeping, organizing your projects — whether that’s cleaning up brushes, scrubbing code, reviewing and making to-do lists, formatting documents, or updating your task management system — and anything that supports your best work but isn’t your best work itself, counts as an admin block.

That broad list of work may be exactly the type of stuff you don’t want to do — what I call frogs, from a quip from Mark Twain, and, yes, we’ll come back to frogs later — but it still needs to get done. Not doing the admin work catches up with you somewhere down the road.

That said, many people find that once they start using their focus blocks well, admin blocks are far more tolerable and sometimes even enjoyable for several reasons:

Admin blocks give you time to reflect upon your work, and they create space and context for things to gel.

Knowing that there will be admin blocks allows you to stress less about all the admin work that needs to be attended to. There’s a time and space for everything.

Well-positioned admin blocks make it easier to catch the frogs because those tasks are confined to smaller periods of the day.

Imagine that you’ve already had a day where you’ve “left it all on the field” when it comes to how you spent your focus blocks, and you’re in the sweet spot of both spent and satisfied. And then you get to tackle some of the other important work that’s been building up. It’s a double win.

But all too often the reverse of the double win happens, in that we start and spend our days rolling from admin block to admin block until we don’t have the mojo or time left to fuel a focus block. Sometimes we feel as if we need to attend to the admin work that too often comes swaddled in urgent packaging, and once we’re done with that, we can do our best work. But admin work trickles in as fast as we can get it done and thus we rarely get “done” with it enough for us to do our best work.

If you’re getting further ahead on your admin work but getting further behind on your best work, you’re either going the wrong way or you aren’t honoring that the admin work ties into deeper values and goals that are more important to you than your best work.

You might wonder why admin blocks are thirty to sixty minutes when I’ve previously stated that fifteen minutes is a coherent chunk of time for us. This comes down to motivation, engagement thresholds, and planning. Most people are more motivated from having a few items checked off rather than just one. Regarding engagement thresholds, once you’ve shifted context into doing admin work, it makes sense to stay there for a bit rather than switching to a different context. And for planning, it’s too unwieldy to plan for fifteen minutes at a time.

Thus in admin blocks you batch admin tasks together. Batching work is simply lumping the same kind of work together — for instance, making all your admin calls in a block or processing similar kinds of emails — so that you stay in that context and flow. We’ll come back to batching later because it’s one of the simplest ways to keep momentum and efficiently use your time.

Focus, social, and admin blocks are energy output blocks, and just like a battery that outputs energy, they need to be recharged. While it might seem as if we don’t need to be intentional about our recovery blocks, I’ve learned the hard way that we actually need to be more intentional about them than about any of the other blocks precisely because we’re overfocused on output. Most of us put the other three in the “productive and valuable” bucket, but it’s the recovery blocks that allow us to do that work.

Recovery blocks do more than allow us to be mindful as we do our work. If there’s anything that will keep us from doing our best work, it’s poor health, illness, and pain. Recovery blocks keep those at bay. Anyone who’s worked through health challenges, illness, injuries, and pain has dealt with the frustrating reality that recovery blocks displace everything else. I spent five of the ten months I had to write this book dealing with a painful condition that eventually required minor surgery; five months of losing at least a focus block a day doesn’t help a writer stay on his timeline.

Each of us has different activities that help us recover and recharge. Extroverts might like to go to a party, whereas introverts might want to curl up with their pet and a book. Yoga might do it for some, whereas CrossFit might do it for others. What’s more important than the type of activity is what the activity does for you.

Acknowledging and using recovery blocks allows you to find dead zones in your day that can be repurposed for recovery. For instance, I’m usually spent on the creative, admin, and social fronts around 4:30 p.m. and rarely hit a groove again until 6:30 p.m. Doing anything that requires using my brain during that time amounts to a lot of clicking and mindless grazing, so I’m far better off when I designate that time as a recovery block.

A much as social blocks make for great bookends to focus blocks, recovery blocks can also be a good follow-up to a focus block since focus blocks are often the most taxing. While your mind is recharging and recycling, you can be doing something else.

The four blocks I’ve mentioned are universal templates that account for, well, everything. For instance, sleeping is a recovery block, as is eating, bathing, and so on. Unless you need to be more intentional about your sleeping, it’s not particularly useful to put sleeping on your weekly schedule.

But many people wonder where to put things such as childcare, cooking, chores, commuting, and so on. They’re closest to admin work or social time, so I’d put them in admin or social blocks as appropriate.

Designating chores as admin blocks may not do it for you, and you might balk at the idea of just connecting with your kids rather than doing that and chores at the same time. So maybe you want something like a chore block or a family block.

While there are some downsides to trying to stuff too many kinds of activities into one block of time, watching TV with your roommate while you’re doing laundry and talking to your mom might really work for you. What doesn’t work for a lot of people is having too many kinds of blocks, as it adds too many kinds of things to juggle all over again and that’s precisely what we’re trying to avoid.

I’m also aware that it’s a foreign or anathematic idea to apply work-centric frameworks in our personal lives. There’s a lot of value and clarity that comes from “making it all work” in the sense that there’s no real difference in the way we value, prioritize, plan, and spend our personal time and our work time, especially because people too often underprioritize their personal lives and overprioritize their work lives. But if using blocking categories in your personal life is so dissonant that you’ll reject the whole framework, then don’t use the blocking principles at home. Thus you probably won’t need any more than the four blocks I’ve discussed above. (But you still need recovery blocks at work!)

While each of the blocks that go into the weekly perspective are important and need to be accounted for, we’re focusing mostly on your focus blocks in this book because they’re the fuel for your best work and the anchors in your schedule. Once you start building your weekly schedule around your focus blocks and assert the boundaries, courage, and discipline to honor them, you’ll have an easier time seeing where you can (and can’t) put the two-hour chunks of your projects.

In addition, attending to focus blocks helps you see more clearly what’s going on with your projects, as every project you do pulls against a limited reserve of focus blocks. Just because you coax your schedule to minimize the Swiss-cheese holes doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to put your best-work project in those slots — you likely have other projects you’re behind on that will claim those newly found openings. So before we jump into roadmapping, it’s worth assessing your current projects after you’ve carved out those focus blocks. As a general guideline, you want to make sure you have three free focus blocks that you can allocate to your best-work project, as that’s enough to get and maintain momentum without having to cold-start the project every time you touch it.

If you can’t find or create three focus blocks per week to work on your best-work project — even after you’ve dropped some projects and renegotiated other project timelines — consider whether it’s worth putting it on hold while you finish up another project that’s claiming your focus blocks. It may be better to hold off for a month and knock out a project or two, so you can build some consistent momentum with your best-work project rather than risking the demotivation of fits and starts on it. This is a dangerous proposition, I realize, as it can so easily be a way to avoid doing the work that scares you. But seeing steady progress is motivating enough for it to be worth the gamble. The trick is to avoid filling up the newly found focus blocks with yet another distracting project. Rather than commit to something new, use the snowball method if you have multiple projects that are eating the focus blocks you want to spend elsewhere.

As you use the Five Projects Rule and weekly blocks, you’ll be able to create ever more space if you use the snowball method. The snowball method is a process of finishing a project to free up blocks you then apply on the next project. So if you have three projects each requiring a focus block a week to maintain, finish the project that you can get done the fastest, then apply its focus block on the next fastest-to-finish project. The second project will then be getting two focus blocks per week, which means you’ll finish it at least twice as quickly once you finish the first project. It’s “at least twice” because the slower a project moves now, the slower it tends to move in the future. When you’re done with the second project, apply its two focus blocks to the third project, with the same effect. When you’re done with this snowballing, you’ll have three focus blocks to apply to your chosen project.

The “three focus blocks per week” guideline becomes especially important during the void stage of the project where you’ll be thrashing and frustrated. With fewer blocks than that, you’ll be more easily demotivated about the very conscious lack of real progress for the amount of effort you’re putting into making the project go. Having a bad week with your project is tolerable; having what seems to be a bad month with your project can lead to a thrash crash that kills the project and your willingness to properly revive or eject it.

If you still can’t free up three focus blocks to work on your best-work project, all is not lost. To riff on the Mexican proverb “an ant on the move does more than a dozing ox,” an inchworm who stays on the path makes more progress than a hummingbird who flits from flower to flower. You’ll likely have more head trash to contend with as you compare your rate of progress to others who have more focus blocks to spend on their projects, and you’ll likely feel as if everything you do takes forever to finish. From one perspective, it will take you much longer to finish your project, but it’s not because you’re uniquely defective or doing something wrong — you just have other priorities and constraints to attend to. Stick with it and leave yourself lots of crumb trails (more on this later) to help you make the most use of your time.

When they first hear about the Five Projects Rule and weekly block planning, many people’s first response is “That’s great, but I don’t have time to figure all of that out.” But by now you know you’re not going to find the time somewhere for your best work; you have to make the time for your best work.

When you use the Five Projects Rule and weekly block planning, you end up with defaults and constraints that aid your planning and prioritization. Rather than recreating the wheel for every project, every day, and every week, you can use a process that’s more like the shape sorters you likely started using in preschool or kindergarten. You have a small number of shapes (the Five Projects Rule) and each has parts that fit into a few slots in your week (block planning). Don’t let the simplicity of the framework belie its power, and, remember, simple doesn’t equal easy. But it’s better to be simple and hard than complex and hard.

Two pieces of paper and a pencil are all you need to figure out what your five projects (for this quarter, month, and week) are and how to build your weekly block schedule, but I have some planners and aids ready-made for you on our book resources page . 1 There’s no need for you to re-create something that millions of people have already used.

If you do nothing else, though, decide what your five projects are for the next quarter, month, and week. In the next chapter you’ll learn how to roadmap a project and that project could either be your best-work project (if you have an open slot) or a project that needs to be completed to make space for your best-work project. Either way, you win.

CHAPTER 5 TAKEAWAYS

To start doing your best work, create space for a specific project and build from there.

Chunking, linking, and sequencing are the key skills that will help you create space and build plans that work. The project pyramid shows how bigger projects contain smaller projects and how those smaller projects build momentum.

The thirty-four common project words clearly show how projects are chunked, linked, and sequenced.

The Five Project Rule is shorthand for “no more than five active projects per timescale” and helps prioritize and plan projects.

Use the following kinds of blocks for block planning: focus blocks, social blocks, admin blocks, and recovery blocks.

Three focus blocks per week per best-work project helps you maintain momentum, efficiency, and focus.