Eleven Days In

I started the year with a goal: to squeeze more efficiency out of my day by being more deliberate about my scheduling.

So I moved to block scheduling. In a nutshell: I developed a fortnightly grid, chunking my days – Sunday through Saturday! – into three big morning/afternoon/evening blocks stretching from 9a until 9p. Each block is dedicated to a specific initiative. For example, most mornings are focused on my consulting work. Afternoons for deep work for my other businesses. Evenings rotate between horses, hobbies, karate, writing, and chores. When something pops up that adversely affects my schedule, like a funeral or an emergency vet visit, then I simply roll anything not done in one block to the next block rather than push my entire calendar a day or two down the road.

The last few years have seen "much muchness." This is a good thing, but it's squeezed the margins of my plate in uncomfortable ways that I've been, I think, too slow to correct systematically. Previous to block scheduling, I followed the same management logic that I used at the health plan: I would periodically review my master task list and then allocate the next few days, or the next week, based on the urgency of my deliverables. But that approach – which worked well, then – doesn't cohere when you're involved in the management of five different businesses and are responsible for the care and feeding of a growing menagerie of critters. What's truly urgent when your domains of responsibility don't overlap or rank-order in a clean way?

But these days, my task list has hovered around 500 different items. It's not unusual for me to receive 1,000 emails each day across nearly three dozen different accounts. Plus monitoring social media for myself and nearly a dozen different programs or businesses. Plus a dozen phone lines. Plus personal texting, and Discord, and Teams, and Slack.

This is not a "woe is me" problem; lots of busy professionals are, well, busy. I'm probably more busy than some but less busy than others. But I may well be in a very small minority of people who have accountability for so many different, unrelated domains. Most folks have work and family and maybe a hobby or two. I have five businesses and several non-profit programs, all competing for attention but in a way where prioritizing X means Y gets no love.

This has translated to gaps in communication – some people are pretty good about waiting for asynchronous responses while others panic and feel "ghosted" if it takes a hot second for their thing to bubble up to the top of the master priority list. My hope is that block scheduling means that major project, business, initiative, and activity gets at least five dedicated hours per fortnight. I'm aiming to write blog posts for each of the big areas of responsibility to at least be more periodically transparent about where things are at.

As a plus – I've even left blocks for (a) marketing and comms, (b) unstructured overflow time, and (c) personal downtime. And dare I say it? Also time for reading, writing, hobbies, church, and fostering relationships.

I just completed the first full week of block scheduling. It was a bit jarring insofar as I still had a bit of "cleanup from 2025" stuff to resolve. But I'm seeing that I can take care of my business responsibilities, my family responsibilities, and appropriate self-care without this cycle of entropy punctuated by big bangs of reorganization. So my optimism, so far, remains strong that this approach will make a meaningful difference in my ability to git-r-done.

Recent Developments

The last two weeks have been a flurry of activity – work, meetings, and adjusting to block scheduling. Some highlights:

• Attended a special class for those of us planning to test for karate promotion in February.
• Have been dealing with a very sick cat. Theon – the original office kitty – turns out to have a congenital birth defect. His thoracic cavity is wired completely wrong. The (experienced) vet was so shocked by his X-ray that she re-took it with barium just to make sure that the weird thing going up and over was, in fact, his esophagus. His heart is tilted and squished; his aorta runs way high; his trachea and esophagus are intertwined. He's in a lot of pain thanks to a stricture, but we think we can manage it. Nevertheless, the little dude is living on borrowed time.
• Attended a webinar about dealing with equine separation anxiety, led by Warwick Schiller. Good stuff; we can put it to immediate use with Macey.
• I finished my Books To Read Before I Die list. Nearly 700 titles. I've been working on it off and on since 2016 and the compilation is now complete. Next step: start reading. (Or rather, read with intention, as I've already managed to knock out a non-trivial number of these over my life so far.)
• Worked a funeral at my parish.
• Developed a social calendar that covers all of 2026, which I'll socialize with friends soon.
• Cade rode Macey today (bareback) and I had some very sweet-and-adorable round-pen socializing time with Tyr.
• The Holland Author Fest is moving forward, as are the Midwest Book Awards.