Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

In a post entitled, Hyper-Scheduling, David Sparks (a/k/a MacSparky) writes about his method of time blocking on a granular level. This week, the ProductivityCast team provides their commentary, challenges and methods on this concept of hyper-scheduling, which will hopefully spark ideas on how you can better manage your time-based work.

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In this Cast | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

• Hyper-scheduling – MacSparky 
• Unschedule
• How to Use the Unschedule – Video Tutorial 

Google Assistant Time-Based Actions:

• Events – https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7678386?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
• Reminders – https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9387035?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
• Timers – https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7028899?hl=en

Raw Text Transcript | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode, today, we are going to be talking about the calendar and really how to utilize the calendar to be more effective, really related to David Sparks. And some of you may know him as Mac Sparky at macsparky.com and the Mac Power Users podcast, he has been writing about something that he calls hyper-scheduling since 2018. And I thought we would actually tackle this topic in terms of just covering what he is really talking about in his series of articles around this. And so in 2018, he wrote this article that he said he was experimenting over the last month, in essence doing more deliberate scheduling of his time. And so really, what it looks like is a an explanation of what is time blocking the idea of being able to put blocks of time in your schedule. In his particular case, he’s calling it hyper-scheduling, I believe, because he is identifying more granular times where he’s doing things. So instead of say, large swaths of time for the day, he’s putting smaller and smaller blocks of time in the calendar for particular activities. And he defines various blocks. And he gives you the opportunity to be able to think about your own world in terms of what those smaller, more granular blocks could be, for purposes of having a schedule that you can fall in line with, as you make your way through the day. And the idea here, at least as I understand it, is that he’s giving himself the leeway to change things around. But it’s just a little bit more structure. He does this the night before. So instead of the morning of he does this the night before, and he gives some mechanics and so forth. He’s written five or six articles about this over the last three years. And so I thought it’d be helpful for us to walk through through some of these pieces. And he’s written some clarifying components of this, you know, some of the feedback he’s gotten and his responses to those as well. And so let’s just start off with that explanation kind of under our belt, right? This is kind of like a variant, or his his take on time blocking? What do you think about this take on time blocking? And what parts are good? What parts do you feel like, have an opportunity for improvement,

Francis Wade 2:56
he talks about capturing the schedule, initially on PayPal. And I’ve noticed, the first thing is that I changed my time blocking depending on how busy I am. So I’m in a hyper busy period this week, because I have a conference coming up that I’m in charge of, or hosting. And every minute of every day is valuable. And you know, I’m swapping things in and swapping things out and pushing things to next week. I’m in that mode where you’re trying to conserve as much time as possible before a deadline hits. And I normally would keep my schedule on my calendar, but the ad on my digital calendar. But the idea of going into my calendar and doing it and dragging around and dropping, and then going through all the different steps that it takes. For me to get to the calendar I want seems like a lot of work. So when I’m in this face, I just made a paper calendar, I started to write things down because in a minute, I’m done as opposed to 10 minutes, or 15. And it made me think he’s onto something. First thing he talks about the use of a digital PayPal entry and I forget the name you guys can you guys are experts in that area, you can speak to that. But it struck me that the interface and how easy it is to do time blocking has a lot to do with what kind of time blocking you do. Because I’m probably going to go back to using the computer using Google Calendar or schedule an escape path after this week. But interesting, I think there’s different approaches depending on how busy you are and how much spare time you have. And he may be hinting at that.

Art Gelwicks 4:41
I liked the idea of that level of scheduling. I just don’t think it’s practical, at least not not in my world. I mean, it’s it’s nice to be able to go through and say, you know this will take 15 This will take 25 But I just don’t think that works in most cases you spent So much time monkeying around with your schedule, that you almost get to a point where you’re not getting anything done. I mean, I like the idea, the bigger idea of time blocking where you say, Okay, I’m going to allocate, you know, two hours to work on this today, and set that in your schedule. But as you dig down more granular, you’re getting really to the point of a checklist with times assigned to it in my book. And that’s, I think there’s a law of diminishing returns, that starts to creep into this fairly quickly.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:32
I think this is highly dependent upon the type of work that you do, and the expectations you have of the other people around you. And so if you are delegating work, if you are managing people, and if you’re working in any collaborative environment, many of these things are going to break down if you don’t have a lot of control over your own time. And so in my particular world, where I do have a lot of control over my time, like I have almost exclusive control over my work day. And so the idea that I give control, so to speak to others to schedule, time in my calendar, or those kinds of things, you know, I’ve latitude to reject calendar events, move them around all of those kinds of things. And that does give me the ability to do some variant of time blocking if I wanted to. And so I can see this working for me, if I if I liked the idea of my calendar being filled with things other than meetings. And I think just because as a GTD er, I have a tendency to think about things from a list perspective, and not from a calendar perspective. You know, calendars are for meetings in my world, and then those things that do need to be done in a timeframe. And that means that there’s actually more in the calendar than one might think. But at the same time, I do tend to use those calendar anchors for prompting me to look at my lists for what can be done. So in essence, the,