The magic of timeblocking Taylor McLoughlin

We discuss timeblocking and how founders can supercharge their productivity with Taskable user and co-founder of twine.nyc, Taylor McLoughlin.

At Taskable, we are super lucky to have users who have given us tons of feedback and ideas for how to improve our product. One of those users is Taylor McLoughin. An early adopter of Taskable, we was instrumental in helping us connect the dots between tasks and calendar, and an advocate for the power of timeblocking. His input is in part one of the reasons we’ve turned our focus to calendar and timeblocking within Taskable.

So, we decided to sit down with Taylor recently for an interview. In it we discuss the power of timeblocking, and how busy early-stage founders like himself can get more out of their time and stay focused on their priorities.

View our user spotlight of Taylor to learn more about his background and twine

Interview with Taylor McLoughlin on timeblocking

Taylor, could you just give us a little bit of your background, what you're working on, and a little bit about your role? 

I'm one of the cofounders and head of product at twine.nyc and our mission is really to focus on building trust and camaraderie in the modern workplace, which we define as the way we work today. Where you work when you work and connection amongst remote teams is a big problem.

And when did you start time blocking as a practice?

This was a practice I came across from Cal Newport, who's a big thought leader in time management, productivity, and deep work. The thesis is if you don't make the time, you're going to find reasons to keep pushing stuff out. And so I started to kind of hack it together with Google Calendar and Tasks until you guys release that time blocking feature.

How much time do you think with the time blocking feature does that say to you, whereas previously you had to do it manually?

It's a hard one to say, but it certainly is more of a flow state. Now I don't even want to think about how much time I spent just doing the management stuff. It's probably saved tens of minutes a day, and that accumulates pretty quickly over the course of a week, a month, a year.

What's one thing you would say to someone who's not time blocking yet about the power of time blocking, or why they should be doing it?

I talk a lot about the proximity of your calendar to your work, and really it comes down to the most finite resource, which is time and that kind of connection, that's very intricately intertwined. It really forces you to think about how you spend your time and not to get too philosophical, but it's an overlooked thing. I think we go through the motions and then Friday hits, and then we don't even know what happened. And that's largely to do with the disconnect with our time. So to me, that's what it's a different frame of mind and different awareness that I would highly recommend people try.

What other benefits beyond just time blocking do you think you get from Taskable?

What I depend on for Taskable is to be a safe haven. Something I can trust is going to capture the things I need to do big and small.

What makes Taskable unique?

It's not just the feature sets and timeblocking is one of those ones that I think is pretty game changing because you guys do it really well and really simply. To me, it's the intangibles. It's about being an early adopter of a company and having a connection to the founders. That feedback loop is so important for someone who is spending a lot of time and it needs to be mindful of their time and to be using tools like Taskable to help manage something so valuable requires a lot of trust and you and Tom and the rest of the team really do a good job of communicating with everyone, listening to feedback, sharing feedback and even having open channels like slack to just drop you some feedback. So I appreciate that aspect.

Being able to interact with our users is the most critical bit for us at this early stage so it's awesome that we have people willing to talk to us. Totally. Those are all the questions I had. Thank you Taylor for spending time and really appreciate it and things for using Taskable.

Watch the full interview:

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