The ninety-minute block

Motivation is a poor input because it isn’t available on demand. A block is better because it’s a decision you made earlier, and earlier-you was in a better mood.

Why ninety minutes

It’s long enough to reach the part of a task where it starts going well, and short enough that you can see the end from the beginning. Twenty-five-minute timers are excellent for tasks you’re avoiding and too short for work that requires holding several things in your head at once - you spend a third of every block reloading context.

Two blocks in a day is a good day. Three is an unusually good one. Four is a fiction people report on the internet.

The structure

Five minutes of setup. Close everything not required. Put the phone in another room - not face-down on the desk, in another room. Read your next-action sentence from yesterday. Write nothing yet.

Eighty minutes of work. One task. If something else occurs to you, it goes on a scrap of paper and you carry on. The paper is important: it’s what lets you drop a thought without fearing you’ll lose it.

Five minutes of closing. Write tomorrow’s next action. Note where you stopped and what you were about to do.

The rule that makes it work

You are allowed to work badly. You are not allowed to leave.

This distinction does more than anything else in the course. Most blocks contain fifteen minutes of genuinely poor work at the start, and the people who succeed at this are simply the ones who sat through those fifteen minutes rather than deciding they weren’t in the right frame of mind.

What breaks a block

Anything with a notification. Anything with an inbox. Anyone who can walk up to you. Handle these before you start, because handling them during is the failure.

Where to put the blocks

Whenever you’re sharpest, protected as aggressively as you can manage. For most people that’s the first two hours after they properly wake up, which is exactly when meetings get scheduled. Fighting for that slot is the highest-return calendar negotiation available to you.