Time Blocking Made Workers Faster and Sloppier. Add a Goal and the Best Ones Pulled Ahead.

Here's something that might surprise you. Chopping your workday into short blocks doesn't automatically make you better. It makes you faster. That's not the same thing.

Four economists, Michalis Drouvelis, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Diego Jorrat and Praveen Kujal, ran an experiment on time blocking and goal setting. It's a working paper posted to SSRN, not a peer-reviewed journal article yet. They split a fixed work period into shorter intervals and tracked four things: output, effort, accuracy and mistakes.

Time blocking pushed people to attempt a lot more of the task. Accuracy dropped at the same time. The net gain in output was modest. Non-binding goals on their own had no significant effect overall.

But here's the thing. For high-ability workers, goals did improve performance, and blocks plus goals together produced the biggest gains. For lower-ability workers, nothing worked. Blocks raised their effort, and the drop in accuracy wiped out the benefit.

Think about what that looks like in a real estate office. A broker tells every agent to block 9 to 11 for prospecting. The skilled agents fly. The newer ones dial faster, fumble the conversation, and burn leads the team paid for.

Speed without skill is just faster mistakes.

So do this. Keep your blocks, but put a specific number on each one. Twenty conversations. Five appointments asked for. Three CMAs finished. Then check quality as hard as you check the count. Listen back to two calls at the end of every prospecting block. If you lead a team, don't hand your newest agent the same block schedule as your top producer. Build the skill first. Then add the clock.

Originally published by Michalis Drouvelis, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Diego Jorrat and Praveen Kujal at SSRN. Read the full piece here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7433958