How I use time blocking

If you have ever tried planning your day in fifteen-minute chunks, you probably know the feeling of total collapse by 11:00 in the morning. One unexpected phone call or urgent email arrives, the schedule derails, and the rest of the day becomes an exercise in guilt. During my peak "productivity phase", I treated my calendar like a game of Tetris. Every minute had a specific task assigned to it. It looked neat on paper, but real life rarely cares about colour-coded lines. The breakthrough for me came from Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing: stop scheduling individual tasks, and start scheduling blocks of energy. Instead of asking, "What exact task should I do at 14:15?", you build your day out of four basic containers. You pick the container first, and choose the specific task once you step inside it. Here are the four blocks I use to organise my week: 1. Focus blocks (25 to 90 minutes)These are uninterrupted stretches reserved for work that truly matters. Think of Eisenhower's…