(upbeat music) - We got ourselves some questions here. First one comes from Agnes McGyver, awesome name. McGyver, do you watch McGyver? We're the generation. - I've seen it in the past, yeah, for sure. - Guy was awesome. So Agnes McGyver, which is I believe McGyver's aunt. I just said the name, like the aunt that sends him a birthday card.

All right, Agnes McGyver says, I've been applying deep work concepts and time blocking to both my personal and professional life. I'm ambitious in both. Do you recommend creating a clearly defined separation between the two? Do I use two time block planners? I catch myself wanting to open a time block planner and plan out my personal life.

Agnes, I usually recommend do not fully time block your personal life if you're also time blocking your professional life because it's too much structure. You will eventually burn out. Time blocking is very artificial. All right, so when you're time blocking, it's not like you are rolling with our natural instincts of humans about how we approach our time.

It is an artificial solution to the artificial load of diverse work tasks that we get poured on our plate. So it's not easy to do, but it works. It gets a lot done. It keeps things in control. It allows us to survive the deluge of tasks that's thrown at us in the modern work situation.

In a perfect, slow productivity enriched world, you might not need time blocking at all, but we need it today. But you don't wanna do something so difficult and so unnatural in every waking hour you are gonna burn out. So go lighter in your personal time. I often just recommend sketching a plan.

End of the day, it's the evening. What's going on? Well, is there any time specific things we need to remember? Let me jot that down. We're going to dinner. I have to pick something up from the store. And then you sketch out other things you wanna get done. Here's my plan for tonight.

I wanna get some reading in later. I wanna watch this show. You kind of figure out a reasonable plan. You kind of jot it down. It's not planning out every minute. Here's the things that have to happen. Here's some things I wanna get done. Rough plan, do your best.

Same thing for weekends. Well, I'm gonna go, we're going on this trip for most of Saturday, but I wanna get a walk in before. You're just sketching out a plan. So it's not a full-time block plan, but it's not just winging it. It's somewhere in between. I think that's probably the right balance between the two.

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