How Should I Track Deep Work in my Time-Block Planner?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.440 | Hey, Kyle.

00:00:06.520 | I have a question about metric tracking.

00:00:09.160 | I have been tracking deep work metrics day by day

00:00:12.080 | in my time block planner based on the number of hours

00:00:15.400 | I'm working.

00:00:16.240 | And I'm finding that hours is not a granular enough metric.

00:00:20.080 | Some mornings I might work one hour on a project,

00:00:22.160 | and other mornings I might work an hour and a half.

00:00:24.800 | And I'm finding that the 30 minutes really

00:00:26.880 | makes a big difference in how much I accomplish,

00:00:28.880 | but that it's hard to track.

00:00:30.560 | I am using the tallies, and so I can only

00:00:33.880 | track an integral number of hours worked.

00:00:37.120 | Tracking minute by minute seems potentially too granular.

00:00:41.000 | I shouldn't really care whether I work 20 or 21 minutes,

00:00:43.800 | because it might require a stopwatch or something

00:00:46.200 | like that.

00:00:47.200 | And so I'm wondering, how should I

00:00:49.440 | go about tracking deep work time in my time block planner?

00:00:53.840 | What is too granular?

00:00:55.160 | What is not granular enough?

00:00:56.520 | And how should I differentiate between 60 and 90 minutes

00:00:59.680 | of work on a given day?

00:01:02.440 | Well, there's two things at play here.

00:01:05.080 | How to track time, like what granularity to track time at,

00:01:09.240 | and then the bigger question of should you track time?

00:01:11.560 | Should you track how much time specifically you've

00:01:13.760 | spent on different projects?

00:01:15.720 | So if we go to the first question,

00:01:17.200 | let's assume we want to track time on a given project.

00:01:21.160 | Let's say we want to track deep work time,

00:01:24.280 | or whatever it is you're trying to track.

00:01:25.960 | The right granularity is probably 30-minute increments,

00:01:28.680 | because that's the granularity, the smallest granularity

00:01:31.120 | of the time block planner.

00:01:32.760 | You have hour-long blocks that are split

00:01:34.520 | into 30-minute sub-blocks.

00:01:37.280 | And so that would typically be the granularity

00:01:39.600 | on which I would track.

00:01:41.240 | The way I would actually capture that when I was doing deep work

00:01:44.160 | tallies, if it ended up on a 30-minute multiple,

00:01:47.560 | like it ended up on 3 and 1/2 hours,

00:01:50.080 | I would draw a hash mark that was half the height

00:01:53.040 | of the other ones.

00:01:54.080 | So you could actually have a half.

00:01:56.160 | Now, one of the nice things about time block planning

00:01:58.320 | is you should format different blocks different ways.

00:02:04.080 | So let's say what you want to tabulate

00:02:06.200 | is how long you spent on deep work.

00:02:09.680 | You should, like I do, for example,

00:02:11.160 | I color in a deep border, a thick border,

00:02:14.720 | around my deep work block.

00:02:16.040 | So now when I glance at my schedule,

00:02:17.880 | I can actually just see visually how much deep work

00:02:20.000 | did I do that day.

00:02:20.840 | Oh, there was a two-hour block here and a 30-minute block

00:02:23.240 | there.

00:02:23.960 | It almost makes putting the metrics redundant,

00:02:26.240 | though it is nice to kind of have a number up there.

00:02:28.400 | So that's the other thing I would recommend.

00:02:30.480 | The bigger point I want to make, however,

00:02:32.800 | is that I find myself doing less hour tracking of that type,

00:02:38.400 | less so than I used to.

00:02:40.600 | So it used to be one of my main metrics was deep work hours.

00:02:44.160 | I wanted to see how much of it I was doing.

00:02:47.280 | Multiscale planning, when embraced fully,

00:02:50.480 | makes that also a little bit unnecessary.

00:02:53.480 | So if you have a vision that informs a quarterly plan, that

00:02:56.480 | informs your weekly plan, and that weekly plan then

00:02:58.720 | informs your daily plan, you're putting aside

00:03:03.600 | the right amount of time for those things for that week.

00:03:06.200 | You are doing that during the weekly planning process.

00:03:08.840 | It's when you have a book you're working on.

00:03:11.000 | You're looking at your week and figuring out,

00:03:12.480 | when do I actually want to work on that book?

00:03:14.400 | I want to spend all day Tuesday morning because that's free.

00:03:16.920 | And then I'm going to do an hour after work on Thursday,

00:03:19.320 | hour after work on Friday.

00:03:20.320 | Whatever it is, you're making a plan

00:03:21.920 | that makes the most sense for the reality of your schedule

00:03:25.280 | and for what's actually important on your plate.

00:03:27.280 | And then when you get to each day,

00:03:28.700 | you're using that weekly plan to build your actual time block

00:03:31.960 | plan.

00:03:32.480 | I find when I'm really leaning into multiscale planning,

00:03:37.120 | I don't really need to know how many hours of deep work

00:03:40.400 | that I do.

00:03:41.720 | That's an important leading indicator

00:03:43.360 | if you're not giving a lot of thought

00:03:45.600 | to how your week is going to shape up.

00:03:47.240 | So it's a inducement.

00:03:49.040 | Hey, make sure you get deep work hours in if you can,

00:03:51.600 | because you want that number to be not too small.

00:03:54.480 | And I get that.

00:03:56.160 | But the next level of sophistication

00:03:57.960 | I found is that when you really trust yourself to go from vision

00:04:00.680 | to quarter to week to day, you gave a lot of thought

00:04:04.880 | to what the right amount of deep work is.

00:04:07.320 | And if you're actually executing your daily plans,

00:04:10.360 | that work is getting executed.

00:04:11.720 | So you don't also need to track it, because guess what?

00:04:13.760 | Some weeks are going to have much smaller amount of deep

00:04:16.140 | work than others.

00:04:17.120 | Some weeks are going to be really leaning

00:04:18.600 | into something logistical.

00:04:19.760 | Other weeks, the whole thing will

00:04:20.760 | be dedicated to deep work.

00:04:21.760 | And the individual number might not be that important.

00:04:23.960 | So that's the bigger point I want to make here

00:04:25.960 | is I do like tracking deep work hours.

00:04:28.600 | I used to do that, but I don't anymore.

00:04:30.680 | Because if you're doing multi-scale planning properly,

00:04:33.920 | you don't need to be forcing yourself or inducing yourself

00:04:36.400 | or motivating yourself to do work

00:04:37.880 | with those particular metrics.

00:04:40.160 | Really, the only metric that matters is, did I follow my plan?

00:04:43.800 | Did I look at my weekly plan and actually build out and follow

00:04:46.420 | a time block plan?

00:04:47.180 | So maybe that will alleviate some of the concern

00:04:49.680 | you're having about accurately capturing

00:04:51.920 | all the different places you do deep work.

00:04:53.760 | If you trust your plan, you can trust

00:04:56.300 | that you're getting the right amount of work done.

00:04:58.960 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:05:02.320 | (upbeat music)

How Should I Track Deep Work in my Time-Block Planner?

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