3 Ways to Give Focus Blocks Jobs in Your Planning

Name the work they'll do, assign them to projects, and convert them to learning blocks when needed

Once people start doing their Momentum Planning consistently, they discover a new challenge: they get the idea of focus blocks and make space for them, but then they don’t really know what to do with them.

As a quick recap, focus blocks are 90–120 minute blocks of time where you’re especially creative, inspired, and able to do high-level work that requires focus. It’s one of the four blocks of time to use when you’re time blocking.

While it’s frustrating to hit this snag, it’s actually a milestone. The “problem” is that they actually have created space to be proactive and intentional about how to spend their time rather than just being reactive and catch-as-catch-can.

Just as the best way to squander free time is to have too much of it at once, the best way to squander 8-10 available focus blocks is to leave them completely open. Most people are going to fill those open blocks with distractions, bright shiny objects, chores, or unconscious rest that leads to them shaming themselves.¹

The solution at this point is simple in theory, but harder in practice: give your focus blocks discrete jobs.

What follows are three different ways you can give your focus blocks jobs.

1. Name the Specific Work Each Focus Block Will Complete

The most powerful way to make focus blocks work is to be explicit about exactly what you’ll complete during that time. Instead of just blocking off “focus time,” you’ll get better results by naming the specific work you’ll do — whether that’s updating code, drafting policies, finishing slide decks, doing your books, or even tidying your workspace. This approach works especially well for routine or recurring activities that need dedicated attention.

I’ll use this post as an example.

Instead of just having an open focus block, I could make that block more focused by being more specific about what kind of activity I’ll be doing. In this case, it might be “drafting” for one block and “editing” for another block, knowing that “editing” for me means all of the pre-pub work that follows drafting, and I only need a full focus block to edit posts longer than my standard length of 750-1500 words.

Even better, though, would be to add the noun to complete the verb-noun construct that’s the minimum for a coherent action item. “Drafting” or “editing” doesn’t tell me what I’m drafting or editing.

So that would look like: “Draft ‘Give Focus Blocks Jobs’ post.”

There are three major advantages of doing this:

1. You don’t have to do the mental rework of remembering what the focus block was for.

2. You prime your unconscious mind to do some of the work on that action item before you sit down to do it.

3. You let displacement work for you rather than against you. Not doing the work of that focus block has a real cost.

For most of us, it’s usually better to give that focus block a specific default job than to leave it open to whatever comes up. If something more important comes up, you can make a conscious choice to attend to it.

If the reality of your job is such that you need to leave focus blocks open to attend to emergent issues or work, then specify which focus blocks are going to be for that work and name them something like “Emergent Work” so you can give that work a home and make better commitments with yourself and teammates. For instance, I know I need at least two focus blocks per week for sales and business development because there are enough inbound activities per week that I won’t be able to respond to quickly during an admin block.

I also know I need one of my first focus blocks of the week to be a weekly review where I align my schedule, focus blocks, and projects. I don’t do my weekly review because I love planning and reviewing my week; I do it because if I don’t, I won’t like how I’ll feel throughout the week. It’s less about trying to control the flow of the river of the week as much as having a good-ish idea of how best to navigate the river.

While naming specific work is powerful for individual focus blocks, you’ll also want to think about how these blocks serve your larger projects.

2. Allocate Focus Blocks to Projects

Whether people are consciously or intuitively doing it, the reason most people do the work to shape their weeks with focus blocks is because they want more time to focus on projects that matter to them. They want to convert the time they spend distracted, falling into clickholes, or running from task to task into true momentum.

When the general idea of creating more focused time becomes specific and concrete for this week, though, many people have the deer-in-headlights moment.

I’ve seen three general patterns here:

1. They’ve separated the way they think about time from the way they think about projects. The two-hour rule helps them reconnect projects and time because they often can see how to chunk projects down into two-hour blocks and have a better idea of what’s possible to complete during those chunks.

2. They’re frozen because they’re looking for The One Right thing to spend their focus blocks on. What if they choose the wrong projects? What if their boss wants them to work on something different? Should they use their focus blocks to work through the backlog or on current priorities? Is there an adult in the room that can just tell them what to do?

3. They see that they don’t have enough focus blocks to do ALLTheThings that absolutely must happen right now or this week. Something must be wrong with the method or the way they applied it, or maybe it’s just not something that applies to their situation and they need to find a method or productivity system that’s going to make the math math for them. Maybe they’re just not a planning person.

The first pattern is a pretty simple conceptual switch to make. The second two patterns are harder to overcome because they’re deeper emotional tensions, with the first being about perfectionism and decision-making and the latter being an unwillingness to accept the limits of our time and capacity.

As I said in Start Finishing, a working guideline is to allocate at least three focus blocks per project per week. If you have seven open focus blocks this upcoming week, you have enough focus blocks for two projects. You could focus four on one and three on another, or do a 3/3 split and leave yourself a flex focus block or use it for learning as we’ll discuss in the next section.

You could also spend all seven focus blocks on one project and push it to done instead of splitting them. In my experience, people tend to get more momentum and better results by serial completion of projects every week or month rather than juggling a bunch of projects over the same time period, but that approach requires a combination of faith, focus, patience, and permission that most people won’t sink into. And by most people, I also mean that I can fall into the same trap: see launching Momentum (the app) and completing Team Habits as an example.²

Hard truth here: if you continually have 1-2 focus blocks per week, you’re going to struggle to push more than one non-delegatable, month-sized project forward per month. Those focus blocks will get eaten up by emergent projects, tasks, and the stuff of life.

3. Convert Focus Blocks Into Learning Blocks

One of the root causes of the (physical or digital) stack of books, articles, courses, and videos we adults have is that after our education journey, we often don’t consciously make space for focused learning and study. We read and research in 15-30 minute liminal periods or as we’re doing other activities.

That amount of time and method may work for inspiration and reflection, but it’s often not sufficient for deep learning, skill acquisition, and increasing mastery. Those three typically require a mix of learning, application, and feedback from the world.

I often irritate my clients because we make the agreement that before they can buy a new course, join a new program, or go on a book-buying spree, we have to guess how many focus blocks it’s going to require and where they’re going to put those learning blocks. I do this not to throw a wet blanket on their idea, but to make sure that it’s not just another thing seeping their money away and adding to the stack. With some clients, we go as far as creating a savings account that they fund with what they would’ve spent on courses and programs; then they get to use those funds for travel, project support, or whatever else they’d normally tell themselves they can’t pay for.

So here’s the reality: if you’re at a skill, knowledge, or mastery plateau and want to move past the plateau, you’re going to need to allocate some focus blocks to learning and mastery.

For instance, while I can skim a book in 30 minutes well enough to know what it’s about and pull out things to talk about or finish a book by reading for 15 minutes a day for a month, it takes me at least two focus blocks to deep read a full-length book. There are some books that have been on my “to-read” list for quite a while because I did the initial skim of them and realized they were worth a full deep read. I had so few total and leftover focus blocks in 2023 and 2024 that learning (focus) blocks didn’t win the cagematch.

Remembering that learning requires focus blocks is helpful when you’re thinking about allocating focus blocks to projects (#2 above) because important projects often require learning and research to move them forward. That’s part of the justification for the “three focus blocks per project per week” rule, as we don’t live in the ideal world where all of our allocated blocks for project work are spent merely in execution. The more the block is pure execution and button clicking, the more likely it’s actually an admin block.

I know somebody just mentally pleaded with me to tell them how many focus blocks they need for learning and someone else wants to know what’s the maximum amount of focus blocks they get for learning. There’s no general answer to either of those questions, just a general guiding principle: if you’re not learning at the rate you need or crave, you’ll need to convert more focus blocks into learning blocks, at the same time that learning blocks can be a convenient way to hide from the learning that requires feedback from the world. You already know if you need to stop researching/learning and start creating or if there really is a learning/research blocker.

Give Focus Blocks Jobs That Work at Every Scale

These three approaches work at different scales: naming specific work helps you win the day, project allocation helps you win the month, and learning blocks help you win the year. You might start with just naming specific work, but over time you’ll likely find yourself using all three approaches as your planning muscles strengthen.

In Team Habits, I wrote, “Somebody never does anything. Specific people do specific tasks.”

The same principle applies here: “Open” focus blocks rarely fuel best-work projects. By giving your focus blocks specific jobs — whether that’s completing today’s deliverable, advancing this month’s project, or investing in your long-term growth — you’re ensuring that your most valuable time serves your most valuable work.

This isn’t about hyper-planning or time-crunching. It’s about practicing the five keys to doing your best work: using your Awareness (of capacity and priorities) to set Intentions that allow you to practice Boundaries, Courage, and Discipline.

After all, if your focus blocks aren’t fueling your best work, that means you aren’t fueling your best work.

I look forward to seeing how you’ll use these approaches to make your focus blocks work harder for you — day by day, month by month, and year by year.

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For additional guidance on applying your focus blocks to your most important, best-work projects, pick up a copy of Start Finishing today.

1. I am 100% for people converting open focus blocks into intentional recovery blocks, as it’s usually the most healthy and productive thing they can do. Alas, too many people won’t let themselves do what they really need to recover and end up in an in-between space that they later regret or shame themselves for. If you’re tired and/or negotiating burnout, you probably need to convert half of your open focus blocks to recovery for a month or quarter.

2. It wasn’t my plan that I’d need to be the growth driver of Momentum, but that’s how things unfolded.