How to Stay on Schedule Even When You Go Off Track

Don’t let one distraction keep you from what you intended to spend your time on

Photo by Terrillo Walls on Unsplash

To-do lists are supposed to keep us on task. It turns out they do the opposite. I’ve written about the many reasons why.

To regain focus and be more productive, it’s far better to create a timeboxed schedule. You can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. That is, without knowing how you want to spend your time, there’s no way you’ll spend it intentionally.

However, there’s a common question I get about timeboxing that seems to trip people up: “What should I do if I get off track?”

Everyone gets distracted from time to time. The difference between a distractible person and an indistractable person is that the indistractable person takes steps to make sure they don’t get distracted by the same thing in the future. As Brazilian author Paulo Coelho said, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” If you keep getting distracted again and again by the same thing without taking action to prevent it, you’ve made a decision to be distractible.

Next time you find yourself slipping off track from what you planned to do, take these two steps:

1. Stick with the day’s schedule

Whenever something gets in the way of one of your time blocks, it’s imperative that you get back onto your schedule with the next time block.

Many people instead try to rejigger their entire day right away, shifting everything else around to try to make up for the time lost. This is a problem for two reasons. First, it takes time to reconfigure your schedule, which itself can be a time-wasting distraction. Optimizing your calendar falls awfully close to the kind of pseudo-work people do to try and get out of doing real work. Second, if you rejigger your schedule on the fly, you risk training yourself to think of your timeboxed schedule as something that can be changed. Convincing yourself it’s perfectly fine to adjust your schedule makes it easier to not stick to it in the future, defeating the purpose of timeboxing.