Classic time blocking assumes your calendar is yours. If you manage people, that is cute and often false.
I still use blocks. I just stopped pretending a perfect colour-coded day would survive contact with humans. Time blocking for managers means protecting a few kinds of work on purpose, with room for the chaos you signed up for.
Protect a few blocks, not the whole day
You need space for your own deep work. You also need space for other people’s problems. If you only block “focus” and treat every interruption as failure, you will hate the job.
What helps me: block the work only you can do; leave open air for people; put a short buffer between meetings; at the end of the day, move outstanding items into tomorrow’s first clear block.
I work until about six most days. After that I try to be done — colleagues are work, not family, and boundaries matter or work leaks into everything else. A morning that starts clear helps too — I wrote about morning routines that stick.
This may not fit your team. That’s fine. Steal one idea: protect a few real blocks, and stop pretending the rest of the day is under your full control.
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