Time blocking template.
Your calendar is a budget. Spend it on purpose.
A to-do list says what; only a calendar says when. Time blocking closes that gap by giving every important task an appointment with you. Two templates below: a daily structure to copy today, and a weekly anchor plan that makes the daily one sustainable.
The daily template
Adjust the hours to your energy, not someone else's routine. The three rules at the bottom are the actual system; the times are just an example of them.
Time blocking: [Date] 08:30 - 09:00 Startup: inbox scan, pick today's ONE priority 09:00 - 11:00 Deep work: [The one priority. Phone elsewhere] 11:00 - 11:15 Break, actually away from the screen 11:15 - 12:00 Meetings / calls 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch 13:00 - 14:30 Focused work: [Second priority] 14:30 - 15:30 Shallow block: email, Slack, small tasks, batched 15:30 - 16:30 Meetings / collaboration 16:30 - 17:00 Shutdown: notes to tomorrow, plan next day's blocks Rules for today: - The deep work block moves for nothing except real emergencies - Slack and email live ONLY in the shallow block - If a block overruns, cut its scope, not the next block
The weekly anchor plan
Daily blocking fails when every morning starts from a blank calendar. Anchors fix that: recurring blocks that give each week the same skeleton, so daily planning shrinks to deciding what goes inside them. The Friday review is where the system learns.
Weekly block plan: week of [Date] Anchors (same every week): - Deep work: [Mon/Tue/Thu 9:00-11:00] - Meetings clustered: [Tue/Thu afternoons] - Admin batch: [Fri 14:00-15:00] - Weekly review: [Fri 16:00-16:30] This week's big blocks: 1. [Project/outcome] -> [Which deep work slots it gets] 2. [Project/outcome] -> [Which slots] Protected: [The one personal block that doesn't move: gym, pickup, dinner] Friday review questions: - Which blocks did reality delete, and why? - What got done outside any block? (That's your real schedule talking) - One change for next week's anchors: [.]
Where the template stops working
A text template can't defend itself: tasks stay in one app while the calendar sits in another, and every block is a manual copy-paste between them. That gap is the reason Amie puts todos and calendar in one place. A todo drags onto the timeline and becomes a block; unfinished blocks carry forward instead of silently dying; and via MCP you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to lay out tomorrow's blocks from your actual task list.
Questions, answered
Related templates: weekly planner, habit tracker, meeting notes. Or browse all templates.