A 30-Second Exercise for a Full Day of Productivity

Tetris is the best puzzle game of all time. Period.

(I thought of ending the post here, but you’d have no f*cking clue how that statement relates to this picture, and I have a point to make...)

The satisfaction of slipping a multicolored shape into the perfect opening to clear the entire board in one epic moment can’t be explained, it must be played.

When you get good at Tetris, you automatically get good at similar games like Dr. Mario, Bejeweled, or Luminex.

That’s because they all have a similar flow.

Colored shapes move in, you set them down, points add up, and personal satisfaction falls out.

One gets the same feeling from being productive.

You wake up, you start working, you complete a project, and you happily receive your dopamine hit.

Rinse and repeat.

The problem is, unlike Tetris, You can’t really “see” your day. Your day isn’t a visible game board. Your tasks aren’t colored shapes. Your time isn’t open space. As such, it becomes difficult to know what to do when.

If you could visualize your day, you’d know where to place your pieces. It would be easier to fit tasks of a certain type into the right sized time slot.

Hence the picture above.

What you’re looking at is two horizontal lines, 15 vertical lines (making 16 boxes), and labels representing every working hour of your day. It takes 30 seconds to draw.

When done, you’ll see a time-track; a visual representation of your day broken into half-hour segments. For every meeting, appointment, or other commitment, fill in the time box on the track with a dot. Any remaining open boxes constitute your free time.

How you fill in this free time is up to you. I like to visit my backlog of action items, pluck out important ones, and draw them into my time-track (like you see here). Regardless, you now know when you can work on what tasks and how long you’ll have to do so.

It’s the equivalent of putting the exact right Tetris piece into the exact right space. No more wondering what to work on. No more IG during free time. Just a day of productivity.

That’s all. Go crush it, and play some Tetris when you’re done.

It’s the best puzzle game of all time. Period.


About the Author

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Michael Mehlberg

HUSBAND, FATHER, ENTREPRENEUR, BUSINESS STRATEGIST, AUTHOR, FITNESS NUT, ORGANIZATION FREAK, PRODUCTIVITY JUNKIE

I help high-achieving entrepreneurs organize their brain and schedule so they can organize their life and business.

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