How to use Dilo to actually focus

Focus is not a character trait: it is a situation. It happens when you know what you are doing, how long it lasts, and what happens when it ends. This article explains how to build that situation with blocks, and what to do when it breaks.

One block, one thing

This is the one non-negotiable rule, and the one almost everybody breaks.

A block that says «work» or «study» protects nothing, because inside it you still have to decide what you are doing. And deciding is the exact opposite of focusing: it is opening four tabs, checking email «for a second», and looking up forty minutes later.

The test for whether a block is well written: reading the title, you know whether it is already done or not.

Notice the last one: when a task is too big to fit in a block, the block is not the task — it is deciding what the task is. That is also a concrete thing and it can be scheduled.

How long a block should be

There are two symmetrical mistakes and both kill focus.

Three-hour blocks. You cannot sustain three hours, nobody can, and you know it while you are scheduling it. A block you do not believe in becomes a block where you open your phone after twenty minutes on the excuse that «there's plenty of time left». And when the closure arrives and you have to answer what happened, the answer is uncomfortable.

Ten-minute blocks for everything. The other extreme fails too: some tasks take fifteen minutes just to start — open the document, remember where you left off, pick up the thread — and a ten-minute block spends all of its time starting and produces nothing.

If a task needs three hours, do not make a three-hour block: make two ninety-minute ones with a real gap between them. Closing each gives you a checkpoint, and if the first went wrong you can rethink the second instead of dragging the shipwreck along.

The first-block rule

The first block of the day decides the rest of the day, and not by magic: by what it does to your attention.

If the first block is «check email», you are handing the first hour — the best one — to other people's priorities, and you are also entering reactive mode, which is very hard to leave. By the time you finally sit down to your own work, you have spent forty minutes answering things and your head is in twelve places.

If your job does not allow it because there are real early-morning emergencies, then your block goes right after the first round of emergencies, and it gets scheduled with the same seriousness as a meeting. A block with no time does not survive a busy day.

Notice the order. It is not a cosmetic detail: it is the difference between a day you steer and a day that steers you.

What to do with interruptions

Interruptions cannot be avoided. They can be classified, and there are exactly three kinds.

1. Something occurs to you

You are writing and suddenly: «I need to renew the insurance». That is the most frequent interruption and the most treacherous, because it looks productive. If you chase it, you lose the block; if you ignore it, it comes back every four minutes.

The way out is to get it out of your head by giving it a time, which takes four seconds:

And you go back. What matters is not writing it down: it is that it now has a place, which is why it stops returning. It is explained at length in the tasks that overwhelm you.

2. Somebody interrupts you

If it can wait, it goes to the admin block: «I'm on something right now, I'll look at four». Having an admin block already scheduled makes that sentence far easier to say, because you are not saying «no», you are saying «at four».

If it cannot wait, no problem: when the block ends, reschedule it to the next free gap. One tap, nothing broken.

3. You interrupt yourself

The most common one and the only one that is genuinely a problem. You open your phone for no reason, you drift into a tab, and you are out. Here the only thing that really works is a block that is short and written with a concrete task: it is much harder to escape from «do the odd-numbered exercises of chapter 4 until 10» than from «study».

And if you escape anyway, the block closure will record it. That is not a punishment: it is how you discover, in two weeks, that your escapes run on a fixed timetable.

When you cannot get started

Some days the block arrives, you look at it, and nothing starts. Three tricks that do work, from least to most:

1. Make the block smaller, not bigger If «write the report» has you paralysed, the problem is the size. Reschedule a fifteen-minute one with a ridiculously small goal: «write the title and the four headings». Ridiculous is the key word: if it does not feel ridiculous, it is still too big.
2. Schedule the first physical step Not «study», but «open the book at page 120 and read two paragraphs». Almost all the resistance lives in the start; once you are in, continuing is easy.
3. Cancel it deliberately If today is not the day, cancel it with the button, do not let it die. It sounds the same and it is not: cancelling closes the matter, frees you from the background guilt and — this is the important part — leaves a record. Three cancellations of the same task are not three failures: they are a warning that the task is badly framed, badly sized or badly placed in the day.

The end of the block matters too

Almost everybody looks after the start of their blocks and nobody looks after the end. And the end is where you lose the focus of the next block.

When a block ends, Dilo steps in front of you and asks what happened. That ten-second moment does three things at once:

• It cuts. It takes you out of the task explicitly, instead of letting it bleed into the next block.
• It records. It turns what happened into data while you still remember. A review at eleven at night is already fiction.
• It decides. If you did not finish, you decide right there whether it goes to the next gap or gets cancelled. Nothing is left in limbo, and limbo is what makes planners get abandoned.

One small piece of advice with a big effect: close the block before you look at your phone. If you look first, you will not close it.

Find your good band

Everybody thinks they know what hour they deliver best at, and almost everybody is wrong, because what you remember are the exceptional days, not the average.

Dilo's statistics split your blocks by part of the day and show the completion rate of each. After a couple of weeks of closures, that table says uncomfortable and very useful things: that you keep 80 % first thing and 30 % after lunch, for instance.

What you do with that information is simple: the important thing moves to your best band, and your worst band gets mechanical work. Do not fight your worst band by giving it the hard tasks; you have lost that fight many times already.

There is a whole article on reading those numbers without using them to punish yourself: planned against actual.

Summary in one table