Ever felt all your time is swept away?Ever wondered where do all your time disappear? Lack control over time?

““The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” -Michael Altshuler

Let me introduce the concept of Slots. A slot is a chunk of time ( say an hour). Slots is all about being mindful of time. Slots is all about having control over your time.

You start up by slotting your weeks to chunks. I like defining my slots as an hour’s chunk. Then I have 168 slots in a week. You should look at slots as currency. You can spend it as you wish.

Spending a slot is equivalent to assigning a task to a slot. So you can assign tasks to different slots at the beginning of your week. This can be done by creating a table or spreadsheet with 168 cells.

But remember that your Slots are limited, and there is no way you can get more until next week. Would you rather spend 2 slots in watching random youtube videos or spend it in reading half a book?

You would need to spend 3 slots to watch a movie. You might need 5 slots to watch a movie in the cinema hall. Five slots to read a 30 -page book.

With time, you start mapping actions to the number of slots you would need to spend. This is similar to how you associate price to different things. This mapping gives you a mental model for looking at tasks. You would know how to basketise different tasks.

Thinking of time as Slots (read currency) would make you being conscious on how you spent time. You become wiser in spending the most limited resource of which you have possession of.

But, it’s not always easy to fit tasks into slots. Often it’s very difficult to measure the time taken for a task in advance and Slots might overflow. But with time, you’ll have better judgement of how much time each task would take and can take better decisions.

Also, tasks can be assigned to different non-continuous slots. Say you need to read a 300-page week by end of the week.if you have free slots on four different days of the week, you can assign this task to these four slots. Understanding the flexibility of the slots is important.

WildCard Slots: A nice thing about Slots is you can move them around. You can have a canvas of a week and move slots anywhere in that canvas (when the task is to be done before the week ). You can introduce few wildcard slots too which can be used when something pops up impromptu.

Slots often better than the to-do list. Although the to-do list is great in helping a mental model of tasks to be done, we often end up procrastinating and keeping the tasks for the end of the week. With slots, you assign tasks to slots at the beginning of the week, and can’t procrastinate.

Do you think this would work? Or is time-blocking not that easy? Share your thoughts in the comments.