Douglas Adams famously said he loved the whooshing sound deadlines made when they went by.
If you have to meet any kind of regular publishing schedule – like, for example, you have a podcast – you’ll know how time can stretch out into infinity until the night before you have to hit Publish, when suddenly it feels like you have to cram eight hours of work into 30 minutes.
But Benjamin Franklin had a neat little system that helped him keep on top of his commitments, and all it takes is a pen, some paper, and a watch.
The Accordion of Time™
When you were at school or college, did you ever have an essay that wouldn’t be due in for a few weeks?
Ah, that first week is bliss. Time seems to stretch on into infinity, and there’s just so much fun to be had, so much marrow to be sucked from the world.
The second week is similarly sunny, only with just a hint of cloud somewhere off in the horizon. “Ah, but that’s a problem for next week”, you say to yourself. “That’s months away!”
And then suddenly that cloud off in the horizon is directly over you, pissing cold sleet and getting all over your nice shoes. It’s the night before the deadline, and time suddenly seems to have compressed.
I call this the Accordion of Time©️®️™️. It’s like a depth perception problem; we only seem to see the deadline when it’s right up in our grill.
It’s a thing in economics, too, but there they call it something like “dynamic inconsistency”. Basically, it boils down to the fact that we’re really good at chasing short-term rewards, but not so good at the long-term stuff.
That explains why I’m all caught up on Severance but I’m still reading the second Lord of the Rings book and have been for about a decade.
So fine, we’re bad at handling deadlines in the distance. Or at least some of us are. I mean, probably you if you’re listening to this podcast… which you are, so, anyway, let’s go in the time machine!
Meet Benjamin Franklin
Franklin was an absolute unit. He’s credited with inventing bifocals, swim fins, the catheter, the lightning rod, and even a musical instrument called the armonica. As in “Have you seen Gerald?” “Aye, she’s just next door with our Monica”.
We have a lot to thank Mr Franklin for. For one thing, without him, there wouldn’t be a face on the $100 bank note.
Franklin was one of 16 children. His family was so poor that Benjamin was sold to his oldest brother James as an indentured servant, meaning he’d work as a slave until his debt was paid off.
In 1728, finally free of his obligations, Franklin followed in his brother’s footsteps and moved to Philadelphia to setup his own printing business. He used his business to slander and crush the competition, and as Postmaster General, establish his own newspaper monopoly. Yikes.
Despite having only a couple of years of basic education, Franklin built up a reputation as a scientist, and many of the inventions he’s credited with were actually ideas he nicked from other people. But because no other newspapers could be delivered during his reign as Postmaster General, a lot of this stuff went unchallenged for years.
It’s worth bringing this up because a lot of what is in his autobiography is likely false, or can be taken with a generous pinch of salt. But what we do have, from his own pen, is his so-called daily schedule.
Franklin would wake at 5, spend three hours getting ready for the day, which meant showering, having breakfast, and taking on some “personal study”.
He’d work from 8 until 12, take two hours to have lunch and review his projects, work from 2 til 6, have dinner, chill, and tuck himself in around 10. That left 7 hours of sleep before the cycle began again.
This simple scheduled forms the basis of a concept known as timeboxing, which really boils down to figuring out what you want to achieve, and putting time on the calendar to achieve it.
Timeboxing in more detail
Now, as we know from Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time given for its completion. So timeboxing helps us not only make time for the stuff we need to do, but to stop that stuff spilling over and getting itself all over other stuff.
James Martin wrote about this idea in his 1991 book Rapid Application Development. Since then it’s evolved into a more in-depth system, which in 2018 Harvard found to be the most effective method for getting stuff done. So let’s go through it.
It starts with a brain dump. Julia Cameron calls this your “morning pages”, and she’s quite specific about the number of pages you write, and that you do it first thing in the morning. Either way, a brain dump can help you clear out the clutter in your brain and rid yourself of those nagging little thoughts that creep up on you during the night.
You then set out the three things you want to accomplish today; these are the three big things you need to get done for you to consider the day a success. Thinking back to our discussion on checklists, this isn’t a list of everything it’d be really cool if you could accomplish today, but the three things that mean, once done, you can think “Yep, that was a good day’s work”.
Then you set about planning your day. You can do this in pomodoro units if you like, so your workday is cut up into little half-hour slices.
If you use a digital calendar, this works best if you actually put those blocks in. Not in half-hour increments, but on a goal by goal basis.
So, let’s say you have three goals for the day: write this week’s company newsletter, prep for tomorrow’s meeting, and book the dog in for her yearly checkup.
Writing the newsletter might take you two hours, ‘cos you’ve got to gather all the links and resources from various departments, write them up and present them in some kind of order, then put the thing up on Slack for everyone to ignore except for the funny little hobbit guy who runs the Intranet who will invariably find a semicolon where there should’ve been a colon. On second thoughts, best make it three hours.
You can call the vet while you’re at lunch, but you might be on hold for a bit, and you’ve got to fish out their number and then submit a time-off request to the boss. So, call it half-an-hour.
Then the rest of the day is blocked out for working on your notes for tomorrow’s presentation, putting the slides together, circulating the agenda, and… whatever else you have to do to do a meeting; look, I’ve been a freelancer for ages so I have no idea what happens anymore…
But you get it. And you can use this trick in your personal life, too. I mean, probably best not to use it if you live with another person ‘cos they’ll just think you’re insane. Or maybe do it but don’t tell them. Either way, I won’t judge.
But having predefined time boundaries, even if you’re not militant about maintaining them to the second, can help the day feel like it’s in-hand.
Have you ever had that sense of just not being able to leave the house? You know, there’s always some tiny little job you have to do before you leave? Or you’ve spotted an object out-of-place and it’ll only take you a few seconds to put it right? Those sorts of things get a lot easier when you predetermine how your day’s going to go.
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So, timeboxing can help us figure out the shape of our days so we can actually get done the things we say we’re going to. So, when should you do this, and should you box that time off too? And if so, how do you timebox timeboxing if you haven’t yet started timeboxing?
Oh god, that’s giving me a nose bleed.
OK, so yes, the night before is the best time to do this, I think. I know that some proponents say you should start with your morning pages, and you can still do that, but setting up next day the night before is a great way of putting today to bed.
That was a bit confusing so I’ll try it another way.
The night before the day after
If it’s Monday night and you’ve had the mother of all Mondays to deal with, and you know there’s a bunch of stuff that needs doing tomorrow that’s currently living rent-free in your brain, a few minutes just before you clock off for the evening is a great time to write down what you plan to get done the next day, and to reserve that time on your calendar.
And when I say “clock off”, I mean that time of day at which you say “that’s it, no more obligations for today. I’ve cooked and cleaned up and everything’s ready for tomorrow. So the rest of the evening I’m spending with a glass of wine and the new Mick Herron book”… or whatever floats your boat. Your last task before cracking the spine of that book should be to block out your next day.
Now, as Cal Newport covers in his book Slow Productivity, you might not have total control over your calendar, and other people might wanna shove a Teams call right in the middle of your newsletter time. Or a vital piece of the website might just fall off and you and the hobbit from IT will have to gaffer tape it back on.
If that’s the case, just look at the time that’s been hijacked, and set aside an equal amount of time the following day to get your work done.
If you only schedule yourself a day ahead – bar meetings that have been in the calendar for weeks – you give people enough flexibility to book around you. And if the shit does hit the fan and something needs doing same-day, that doesn’t mean everything gets thrown out; you just take that block off time that was stolen from you, and move it to the next day.
Isn’t this all rather restrictive?
Yes… and no. Your schedule is only set for the next day. If, a day later, you find something doesn’t work or it takes longer than you expected – or shorter than expected – you can make adjustments. You could add in some buffer time in-between blocks so you’ve got time to decompress or to let you brain switch gears. Mostly this is about the you from now taking care of the you from tomorrow.
But knowing what to do is one thing; doing it is entirely another. A system like this does require a measure of self-discipline. If you’re someone who finds structure restrictive, then this probably isn’t going to work for you. That said though, you might find the structure oddly freeing, because you’re not having to think about what to do next – you just follow the plan you made the night before.
The human brain only has capacity to make a certain number of decisions, then it kinda shuts down. If you’ve ever had an interminable discussion over what takeaway to get or what film to watch on Netflix, you’re in a situation where one or more of you is suffering from decision fatigue.
This is a real thing, by the way. Barack Obama and Steve Jobs are both said to have worn the same clothes to work each day because it limits the number of decisions they have to make. I mean, not the actual same clothes… that would be stinky, but you get the idea. By making a bigger decision about what tomorrow looks like, you’ll find yourself having to make fewer tiny decisions throughout the day.
“Double it and add a bit”
Another point worth making is that we’re really bad at estimating how long a task will take. In my old marketing jobs we used to talk about the process for deciding how long a job will take. “Double it and add a bit” was always the rule, and it holds true now.
The nice thing about timeboxing on a daily basis is that it gives you that flexibility, so if something took longer than expected on a Monday, you can make adjustments for Tuesday.
And if something took less time than you expected… take the win, my friend. You’ll feel happier and healthier if you give yourself a bit of space around the work, so you’re not completely knackered by the end of the week.
If you sense your boss might want to give you some busy work to fill the gaps, find your own… ideally something that looks visibly productive but doesn’t take a lot of energy. Sure it’s performative, but sadly this podcast isn’t about changing company culture so I can’t help you there.
And on the personal front, don’t be too restrictive about the tasks you assign yourself. As author Nir Eyal says on his YouTube channel, if getting some exercise is a priority for you, just label that time block with the word “Exercise”. What you choose to do on the day will be up to you. Just don’t skip leg day.
OK, so what do you think? Does time boxing work for you? I’d suggest giving it a trial run for a week to see if it helps you get a better handle on time. It might not revolutionise things for you, but you might just find that a little structure here and there can help stop things from going off the rails.
And the next time you’re presented with a looming deadline, cut the thing off at the knees and block it in your calendar. That way, it’ll have no power over you.
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