Two weeks. That’s how long my beautiful color-coded calendar survived before I deleted every block and went back to chaos.
The Setup
Here’s the thing about my job: I write code, review other people’s code, and babysit two servers. Most afternoons around 4 I’d realize the whole day had gone to other people’s priorities. My own stuff, like the backup rotation script that had been “almost done” since July, never moved.
So I read Deep Work and blocked my entire week in colors. Deep work in blue, code review in green, a lunch block, the works. It looked incredible. My calendar has never looked that good before or since.
The Spiral
Day one went great. Day two at 10:40am a payment webhook started throwing 500s and my blue block became an incident. (I’ve written before about how our alerts used to run my life, so this tracks.) Day four, someone booked a meeting over my lunch block and I let it happen. You can guess how the rest of that week went.
By week two I had a new evening ritual: twenty minutes of shuffling blocks that had already slipped. Some days the deep work block moved three times and I never sat down for it. Rearranging the calendar had quietly become most of my job, and the backup script was still “almost done.”
The Discovery
What fixed it was embarrassingly small. I stopped tracking the schedule and started tracking output in a plain text file on my desktop:
2026-08-14 | shipped backup rotation | deep: yes | interrupts: 6
Reading a week of those lines hits different than staring at colors. Five clean deep-work days was always fantasy. I get two, maybe two and a half once you count prod, and that stung way less than a calendar marking me “failed” every evening. I’d planned a perfect week that doesn’t exist at a job with prod.
The Lesson
- Plan for two deep blocks a week, not ten. Two happens even in a bad week. Ten is a fantasy you pay for nightly.
- Track output, not blocks. “Did the backup script ship?” is a real question. “Did I sit in the blue box?” is trivia.
- Keep exactly one block sacred. Friday morning, untouchable unless prod is on fire. It’s the only reason the backup script shipped in week three.
- Announce which block it is. I kept mine secret for two weeks like an idiot, then acted surprised when meetings landed on it.
What I’d Do Different
- Start with the text file, not the colors. The scoreboard was the part that worked.
- Pick the sacred block on day one and say it out loud in Slack.
- Review the file on Fridays only. Nightly review was just a slower way to feel bad.
External Resources
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham. Still the best explanation of why one meeting ruins an afternoon.
- Deep Work by Cal Newport. The book that started this mess. Just skip the part where you block every hour.
- Todoist’s guide to time blocking, where I stole the color idea from.
The Bottom Line
I still block time, badly, two grey blocks a week. The calendar looks worse than it did in August and the backlog moves faster. That trade is fine by me.