12 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] thread
To be honest you can remove in Quarantine from the title.
replace "developer" with "most people"
Replace "calendar blocking" with careful planning:

"Careful planning can boost productivity for most people".

Add life hack back into the title and now it’s perfect clickbait.
I prefer having an unbounded provision of time for anything I'm working on. Ideally I'd minimize the amount of context-switches (ie blocks) in general. I'd rather get to some sort of finish line for what I'm doing rather than leave things half-baked and lose the build up of context / energy
Absolutely! But you’re looking at it from the perspective of “calendar blocking will cause me to end a task early”. The perspective where this is beneficial is “calendar blocking enables me to at least have this much uninterrupted time on a task”.
I have a standing fake meeting "Busy" at around the lunch time every day. It's purpose to show me as busy and deter folks from dropping meetings at inconvenient time.

When I'm pressed for time, I'm changing it to whole-day "Out-of-office" fake (I'm in the office, obviously).

Very effective tool!

I'm starting to get more into this practice and finding it very effective. With the kids home due to school cancelations, I've blocked off recurring time throughout the day for dedicated checkins with them, helps with both my and their productivity.
I’ve tried this and it didn’t work for me. I would always have anxiety about the end time and if I got to where I wanted to be. Without the bounded time I can work till I like where I’m at.