100 Blocks a Day

I don’t believe that’s a fundamental flaw, just an alternative (and quite accurate) viewpoint. Both are true, viewed from a certain perspective.

Yes, time is not fungible. This is demonstrably true, and the blog post you linked gave some quite good examples. The opening line, for goodness’ sake:

“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.”

Clearly, an otherwise productive person sitting down to watch some telly at the end of the day is not being lazy. That is time that could be spent unwinding with the latest episode of a beloved show… or brutally squeezing a few hundred words out of your tired brain that might just need to be junked as soon as you read them with fresh eyes the next day.

On the other hand, one could argue that within the various “levels of quality” of time, time is absolutely fungible.

Downtime (or fun time) is fungible: would you rather watch TV, play a video game, or read some fiction? Whichever, it’s all good.

Focus time is fungible: if you’re feeling up to a big flow task, do you take it from Project A or Project B? Which one excites you more and/or has a more looming deadline?

Busy time is definitely fungible: catch up on emails or dust the house? Start documenting some part of your project, or review your family’s budget for the month?

Swartz even talks a lot about this sort of batching of to-dos in his post.

And this actually ties in just fine with Tim’s idea here. I think at the top level, describing these different categories of time, we all have our own grid. Its makeup is, to a certain extent, fixed: one or more large-ish chunks of focus time, some time that can only be busy or fun depending on how much sleep you got the night before, some time that can really only be fun time. The distribution of those categories of block through the day may vary from person to person and day to day, but it might be common to see all the focus time in the morning before lunch, or fairly late in the evening and into the night, busy time in the afternoon, spots of downtime dotted through the day, and a larger chunk of downtime in the evening.

So the question is not so much, “Do you really want to spend 3 blocks of time on cooking when you could order in and spend them on your side hustle?” but rather “It’s the evening, you need downtime, and cooking dinner is up to 3 blocks. Is cooking a busy-time task for you, making it a dreadful chore right now, so you’d rather spend those 3 blocks on watching TV? Or is it a genuinely enjoyable downtime activity for you, in which case that’s 3 blocks (or even less) well spent?”

See, in reality, time in a human being’s day is like money in the digital age. If I want to buy something that’s $20 on an American site, I can use $20-worth of my British Pounds to buy it, where the definition of “$20-worth” can vary wildly. Time is effectively fungible, it just has a terrible (and terribly one-sided) exchange rate. If an activity is definitely a busy-time task for you, you could spend, say, 2 busy-time blocks on it. It might even take you only one focus-time block, right after your first coffee of the day when you’re feeling good and peppy. But if all you have left are downtime blocks, you might need to spend twice as many of them to achieve the same goal.

Tim doesn’t really go into this, to be fair, and I’m definitely taking two distinct ideas about time and smooshing them together, but he does talk about non-negotiable blocks, flexible blocks and leaving blocks blank. I don’t think he ever believed that time was as fungible as you thought he did.