Plan time blocks in Google Calendar

A task with a fixed place in your calendar gets done more often than one on a list. Here is how to set up blocks you will actually keep.

As of 22 October 2026

In short

A time block is an appointment with yourself. You put it into Google Calendar as a normal event, give it a concrete title and a fixed duration and treat it like a date. People who decide beforehand when and where they will do something follow through much more often (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, 94 studies, d = 0.65). A block in your calendar is exactly such a plan.

1. Create the block as an event

Open Google Calendar, click the time you want and create a new event. Choose start and end. Make the title the first action: not “Biology”, but “Biology: open chapter 3, copy the headings”. That way you know what to start with when the block begins.

2. Keep the duration short

For head work, short blocks of 25 to 45 minutes are a good start. That is the default Fokuno uses for study units, but not a law. More important than the length is that you really begin the block. Better a short block you do than a long one you postpone.

3. Leave a buffer around appointments

Between classes, training and a block you need air: travel, eating, changing. Fokuno leaves 15 minutes free around every appointment. You can do that in Google Calendar yourself by not putting a block right next to an event.

4. Make blocks visible

Create a separate calendar for blocks or give them their own colour. That way you see at a glance what is a date with others and what is time for yourself. In Google Calendar you create a new calendar under “Other calendars” and choose calendar and colour for the event.

5. Habits as a series

What happens every week, say vocabulary three times, you set up as a recurring event. The series takes away the decision of which day it is this week. Better to plan a few habits you keep than many you give up.

6. A weekly planning session of ten minutes

Take ten minutes once a week, for example on Sunday evening: what is coming up, by when, how long? Put the blocks in, the most urgent first. Leave enough free so that one cancelled block doesn’t tip the whole week. By default Fokuno plans no more than about three hours of head work a day; that is a setting, not a rule for everyone.

Where planning by hand reaches its limits

This works as long as little changes. If an event moves, a block falls through or an exam comes up, you have to rearrange, and that is exactly when many people stop. The same goes for deadlines: you have to work out yourself whether everything still fits by Thursday.

This is where Fokuno takes the work off your hands. It reads your Google Calendar, finds free time, puts the blocks in itself and replans when something changes. What you move by hand stays there. Exactly how that works is covered in Fokuno and Google Calendar and How Fokuno plans. How not to get stuck when a block begins is shown in Start instead of procrastinating.