What is Time Blocking? Why is it Important?

Time blocking is a proactive way of scheduling your day (vs. reacting to the demands coming in).  Time-blocking is the practice of planning out your day and dedicating specific time “blocks” for certain tasks, activities, and responsibilities. For Autists and ADHDers, time blocking is particularly helpful.

It Helps Prioritize!

When we don't intentionally schedule out the activities of the day, we quickly get pulled into the urgency of the now (which may look like responding to emails, DMs, or messages all day). Particularly ADHDers have a tendency to be motivated by the urgent and the thing right in front of us. So if we don't zoom out to get a bird's eye view to evaluate what needs to be done and plot out our day accordingly, we often struggle with carving out time for the big projects.

It Protects Your time!

Many late-in-life diagnosed neurodivergent people are perpetual people-pleasers. So if a request comes in and we don't have a legitimate reason to say no, many of us will say yes. With time-blocking, if you've committed (to yourself!) to study or work on a report from 1-3 and someone asks for help with something, you can simply respond, "no, sorry, I have a prior obligation," or "I am busy during that time."

It Reduces Decision Fatigue!

Decision fatigue is real, even more so for the neurodivergent person who often sees endless possibilities and experiences difficulty committing to one thing. By creating a schedule, you are outsourcing decisions to the schedule. The schedule is telling you what to do. Otherwise, after completing each task, you must make a new decision (what will I do next? Do I want to take a break? Will I go work on the project or email?). The fewer decisions you have to make during the day, the more brain energy you conserve and the less tasked your executive functioning will be.

It Reduces Willpower Fatigue!

People often don't realize that willpower is a non-renewable resource. In fact, willpower runs off of glucose. Every time we use self-control, it depletes relatively large amounts of glucose. When glucose is low or cannot be mobilized effectively, we struggle more with self-control. (i.e., when insulin is low or insensitive) (Source). This is one reason you may notice that willpower becomes more difficult at the end of the day. If you have ever been on a diet, you have likely experienced this--you've likely noticed it is easier to stick to your diet early in the day, and by nighttime, you've already said no to 100s of delicious foods, and you have no more willpower!

How to Time-Block for ADHDers and Autists: 4 steps

Now that we've covered why it's helpful, you may be wondering how exactly to block your time. Time-blocking is simply a way of blocking time and setting blocks of time aside for specific tasks. Typically this is done early in the morning and includes the following steps:

1. Write out the tasks that need to be accomplished for the day

2. Dedicate certain tasks and responsibilities to specific blocks of time (9:00-9:30 email etc.)

3. If your schedule gets off, don't sweat it, you can go back and adjust your schedule for the day.

4. Don't forget to schedule breaks, movement, food, and more!

To learn more about time-blocking, this video by Cal Newport walks through time blocking (the video is connected to a journal available to purchase, however, you can time block without purchasing a fancy journal. Any old piece of paper, planner, or scheduler will do. Or, if you work well with digital tools and are looking for something, you can check out the fillable PDF I created just for time blocking:

Conclusion

For many Autists and ADHDers, managing time can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible sometimes. With the time-blocking technique, it is much easy for neurodivergent people to not ony manage our time, but also to prioritize tasks and mitigate fatigue and burnout.

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