I Reduced My Whole System to Two Blocks a Day and Got More Done

My calendar in early 2025 had, on a typical Tuesday, eleven coloured blocks including a fifteen-minute one labelled “inbox triage” and a thirty-minute one labelled “review yesterday.” I built that gradually over four years, starting from putting tasks on the calendar, and each addition was justified — which is exactly how a weekly review bloats too. Together they took me about twenty minutes each morning to arrange and produced, as far as I can now tell, no benefit at all over what I do today, which is two blocks.

The two are: ninety minutes in the morning for the one piece of work that matters most this week, and sixty minutes after lunch for whatever is most overdue. That is the entire system. Everything else in my day happens without a block, in the space between and around them.

The reason the elaborate version failed is not that it was too much work to maintain, though it was. It is that granular blocking made every part of the day feel equally decided, and when everything is decided, nothing is protected. A calendar where eleven things are scheduled has eleven negotiable items. A calendar with two things on it has two non-negotiable ones and eight hours of visible space, and people — including me — treat those very differently.

I tested this without meaning to. In the elaborate period, when someone asked for a meeting, I would look at the day, see a gap between blocks, and accept. In the two-block period, the same request looks at a day with a large open afternoon, and the honest answer is usually still yes — but I say yes to the afternoon and never to the morning, and that boundary has held for eleven months where none of my previous boundaries lasted a fortnight — the closest I have come to blocking that survives interruption.

The second effect is on the choosing. When I had eleven blocks, the question each morning was arrangement: what order, how long, what fits. When I have two, the question is selection: of everything I could do today, what is the one thing. That is a harder question and a much more valuable one, and the elaborate calendar had been letting me avoid it for four years by making the morning feel productive before any work had happened.

What I gave up is real and I want to be straight about it. Small recurring things — the inbox, the weekly report, following up on two threads — no longer have a home, and for the first month several of them slipped. What fixed that was not a block. It was attaching each one to an existing event: the inbox happens after the morning block ends, the report happens before the Friday call, and follow-ups happen when I close my laptop. Anchoring to an event rather than a time turned out to be more reliable than a calendar entry, because I never miss the event.

There is a version of this article that says “simplify your system,” and I do not think that is the lesson, because I did not arrive here by simplifying. I arrived here by noticing that I could not remember the last time one of the nine minor blocks had changed what I actually did. That is the test I would offer: for each block on your calendar, when did it last cause you to do something other than what you would have done anyway. Anything that fails the test is decoration, and decoration on a calendar is not neutral — it is what makes the important blocks look like everything else.

Two is not a magic number and I would not defend it. What I would defend is that the number should be small enough that each block is obviously different from ordinary time, because that difference is the only thing doing any work.