Time blocking in the Mac Calendar app: a setup that works

Time blocking means giving the parts of your working day a slot on the calendar, not just the meetings. Focused work, email, lunch and breaks all get a start and an end, so you can see at a glance whether the day you have planned actually fits in the day you have.

Calendar on the Mac does this well with no extra tools. Make a separate calendar for your blocks, use colors for the kinds of work, set repeating blocks for the things that happen every day, put breaks and lunch on the plan, and spend five minutes each morning adjusting it. Here is how to set each part up.

Why block time at all

A to-do list tells you what to do. A calendar tells you when, and that is where most plans quietly fail. Twelve tasks can sit comfortably on a list. They can't sit comfortably in six hours, and blocking makes that obvious before lunch rather than at six in the evening.

Blocking also protects work that has no meeting attached. A morning with nothing on the calendar looks free to everyone, including you, and fills up with small things. A block called "Draft the proposal" is harder to give away.

It is not meant to be rigid. The plan will change most days. The point is that when it changes, you move blocks on purpose rather than watching the day dissolve. If your job is mostly reactive, such as support or on-call work, block only the part of the day you can control.

Make a calendar just for blocks

Keep your blocks on their own calendar, separate from meetings.

1. In Calendar, choose File > New Calendar. If you have more than one account, pick the one it should live in, for example iCloud if you want the blocks on your iPhone too.
2. Name it something plain, like "Blocks" or "Plan".
3. If you don't see the list of calendars on the left, choose View > Show Calendar List.

A separate calendar pays off in a few ways. You can hide every block with one checkbox in the calendar list when you want to see only real meetings. Your plans stay apart from commitments to other people. And you can treat its alerts differently from meeting alerts.

Give each kind of block a color

In Calendar, an event takes its color from the calendar it belongs to, so color means "which calendar". If you want blocks colored by kind of work, make a few block calendars instead of one, for example:

To change a calendar's color, Control-click it in the calendar list and pick a color, or choose Custom Color for any shade you like. Three or four kinds are plenty. More than that and the week looks like confetti, and you stop reading the colors at all.

Draw the blocks

Switch to Week view (Command-2) or Day view (Command-1) and drag down through the hours where you want a block. Calendar creates an event of that length, usually on your default calendar, which you can set in Calendar > Settings > General. If a block lands on the wrong calendar, double-click it and choose the right one from the colored square at the top of its details. Drag a block to move it, or drag its bottom edge to make it longer or shorter.

A few habits make blocks more useful:

• Name the task, not the category. "Draft Q4 summary" tells you what to open when the block starts. "Focus" makes you decide all over again.
• Size blocks to the work. Deep work usually goes better in blocks of an hour or more. Admin fits better in shorter blocks, with several small tasks batched into one.
• Leave gaps. Most things take longer than planned. If every slot is full by 9 AM, the first overrun knocks over the whole day. Open space between blocks is part of the plan, not a failure of it.

If you often misjudge how long things take, time blindness at the computer has some ways to get your estimates closer.

Set repeating blocks for the fixed parts of the day

Some blocks are the same every day. Make them once and let them repeat.

1. Create the block as usual, then double-click it.
2. Click the repeat setting and choose Every Day, or choose Custom, set it to weekly and pick the days, such as Monday to Friday.
3. To change one day's copy later, just edit it. Calendar asks whether to change only that event or all future ones.

Good candidates for repeating blocks:

• a short planning block at the start of the day
• email and messages, twice a day rather than all day
• lunch, at the same time each day
• a shutdown block at the end of the day to tidy up and write tomorrow's first task

The repeating blocks become the frame of each day. You fill in the gaps with that week's work.

Put breaks and lunch on the plan

A break that isn't on the plan is the first thing to go. When focus blocks sit end to end, you will skip the gap between them every time, because there isn't one.

• Block lunch as a real event, at least half an hour, away from the desk if you can.
• Add short breaks after long focus blocks. Ten minutes to stand up, refill your water and look out of a window is enough.
• Leave room around meetings. A block that ends exactly when a meeting starts means you walk in mid-thought. Buffers between meetings covers how to build that space in.

You probably don't want an alert on every block. Open the block's details to set an alert just for the few you would otherwise miss, such as lunch and the end of the day.

Review the plan each morning

Blocks set a week ago are a guess. Five minutes each morning turns them into a plan.

1. Open Calendar, press Command-1 for Day view and Command-T to jump to today.
2. Check for meetings that landed overnight, and move blocks out of their way.
3. Pick the one block that matters most today, and make sure it has a good slot, ideally before the afternoon slump.
4. Be honest about what fits. If the day is overfull, move a block to tomorrow now, not at 5 PM.

If the plan breaks in the afternoon, drag the blocks to new times rather than giving up on them. A replanned day still beats an unplanned one.

Where Notchpals fits

Notchpals never writes to your calendar. If you allow calendar access, its Schedule character (Biscuit, Ticky or Honey, whichever is in your crew) checks one thing: when the next event starts. It never reads titles, people or notes, and it shows up in the notch when that start is 3 to 10 minutes off.

One consequence matters for time blocking. Because it never reads titles, it can't tell a block from a meeting. Any timed event on your calendars counts, so expect a visit a few minutes before each block begins, not just before calls. All-day events are skipped, and so are cancelled ones and invitations you have declined. On a well-blocked day that works as a transition warning: a few minutes to finish the sentence, save, and open what the next block needs. If you draw lots of short blocks back to back, the visits come often, so you may want to merge small admin tasks into one block.

A couple of other moments line up with the routine above. With Bolt, the Focus character, in your crew, Plan the day comes once on weekday mornings, a natural cue for the five-minute review. And on weekday evenings between 6 and 7:30, the Schedule character comes by once to say the workday is over, a good moment to drag anything unfinished into tomorrow.

BiscuitWorkday's over! Store the rest for later, like seeds in a cheek.

When you drag blocks to new times during the day, there is nothing to update on the Notchpals side. It looks at the calendar as it stands, so the nudge before each block moves with it.