Time Locking Techniques

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where it's always quality over quantity. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Sometimes work can feel like boxing. We weave from task to task. We duck, we jab. And just when we're feeling confident, we get hit with an email or a call and we stagger back into our corner and we reevaluate our strategy for the day.
And at the end of that day, we feel like we might have done a lot of things, and we definitely feel worn out. But we don't always necessarily feel victorious. Quality work requires a deeper focus. And this is true in any field. Important things demand a different kind of attention. And even though we can't give that attention to everything all the time, it's worth noting that many of us don't give that attention to anything any of the time.
But think about this. Therapists don't spend their sessions checking their Instagram. Heart surgeons don't book their Airbnbs between stitching up their patient Fighter pilots don't check the stock market between evasive maneuvers. You would hope that none of these things happen. Of course. Why? Because what they're doing is important and they really need to focus. Otherwise, things could go terribly wrong.
The thing is, we should consider the things that we do in life important also. Maybe you're not a heart surgeon and maybe you're not a fighter pilot, but you do have things you need to get done. And one technique that I think is especially useful for doing that is called time locking. There's a book called Rework by Jason Freed and David Hanson.
And in the book, they talk about time locking as a fixed period of time for work with no interruptions. Now, that might sound like nothing groundbreaking, but they're not talking about 30 minute increments. They're talking about blocks usually of 4 hours. Imagine that for a second. Ask yourself, when was the last time you had a completely uninterrupted block of 4 hours for working on any given project?
Now time locking isn't something you're going to do every single day of the week. That's just not feasible, but it's something that they recommend. You take one day of your week and lock that time a four hour span of time, and really do nothing but work on a project. That means that even important people and other important things do not have the ability to interrupt you during this locked period of time.
But what you can do during this locked period of time is engage in a level of focus that you won't be able to do other times of the week. And this is going to create productivity that just isn't possible if you're doing surface work and constantly switching from one task to the next. I'll give you a personal example of time locking that I utilized recently.
I was working on a personal project and part of it required me having a website up for this thing that I was going to do, and I'd had this on my list for quite some time. However, it wasn't critical and it wasn't time sensitive, and I found that I was constantly allowing other things to usurp the time that I thought I was going to spend working on this one project.
So I would get into the project and then I would see an email or get a call from somebody else with something that seemed more urgent or pressing. And I would just stop working on this thing I was going to do for myself because it didn't seem to be as pressing. And yet I knew that this task was taking me a lot longer than it realistically should if I really were to focus on it.
So I decided one day it was time to take this task off my to do list. So I blocked a segment of time. I got myself a tall drink of iced tea, and I didn't leave the room until I finished the project. I spent between three and 4 hours and I didn't take any emails, any calls, and I didn't talk to anyone.
I just invested the time in doing it. And what was amazing to me was that I was able to get done in that 4 hours. What I wasn't able to get done in two months prior to that, where I would work on and off on this project and really not get very far on it. Those 4 hours allowed me to clear that off my to do list.
I was very happy to have it done. And honestly, I could have had it done way before that if I had disciplined myself and locked that time. So time locking, being a fixed period of time has a couple of purposes. One, of course, you probably already noticed is to banish interruptions. Interruptions cost us a lot of focus. It can be up to 20 minutes for your brain to completely reengage with a task that you've been interrupted from.
So when you time lock, you're preventing people from being able to interrupt you, which means you might have to put your phone or your watch on to airplane mode to make sure that no notifications come through. But besides just banishing interruptions, locking time allows you to create momentum because we're constantly doing one thing and then the next, even if we aren't interrupted, we often don't get momentum on one single project.
And when you create that momentum, you'll find that over time, in that four hour block, you start getting more and more productive because you're more and more engaged and things are coming more naturally. And what you'll probably find at the end of that time is that you will feel tired because it will be like running a race. And a lot of times the way that we do projects would be like if we tried running a race and then every 50 feet or so we stopped to talk to a friend or we stopped to check our phone or something like that.
So this is taking the time to really run the race and finish it. And at the end of that 4 hours, you're going to be fatigued. You're going to be tired. But you will probably find that you've accomplished a lot more, maybe more than you could have done in days otherwise. And that is one of the other main goals of time.
Locking it is to get a thing finished. So often we have all these unfinished things sitting on our to do list, and if we were to really look at those things and ask how long would they take? It's maybe not that they would take so long. It's just that we haven't given that amount of time to it. And if we gave that amount of time to it uninterrupted, we could probably knock that thing off the to do list for good.
And it really benefits us mentally, emotionally to be done. You know that feeling, right? That feeling of being done. You didn't just do work. You finished the work. That is a really good feeling and we need that experience more often. But so many times, those distractions and our lack of momentum prevent us from actually finishing the thing. So you should have dedicated time every week for the things that you're doing, but I suggest you go a step beyond and have locked time.
A long block of multiple hours do not allow interruptions and really focus on getting your work finished. It will change the way you work, I guarantee it, and you will see an increase in your productivity. But it's going to be difficult at first, especially if you're not used to doing that. Your brain will want to interrupt itself, so it will be something that you'll have to practice and try.
And don't be surprised if that first hour is really hard. But I'd love to hear your feedback and comments on your experience with time locking when you try it. So shoot me an email at [email protected] and let me know how you like your time and what you were able to accomplish when you did. And until next time, live like it matters.