A sequence, not a schedule.
eudy focuses on sequencing events, not time blocking. Easily sequence your tasks by dragging them in Day View.
The schedule became the job
For me, time blocking has always felt like a puzzle to be solved. I would spend hours planning my day to extract the most possible value out of every minute. Instead of focusing on my work, the schedule itself became my focus. Time blocking means you need to spend the mental energy guessing a specific amount of time that a task will take. That guessing takes up time and mental energy of its own.
The wrong incentives
I would find myself stressed about completing tasks within the time slots. And conversely, I would find myself slacking if I had a large time block: "Well I have 4 hours for this, I can slack off a bit." That's the effect of a static time block – it doesn't constrain you in productive ways but rather creates different forms of stress and ineffectiveness.
Change means time wasted
Did you go over on a task? Now you need to change your entire schedule. Did something interrupt your day? Now you need to change your schedule. A sequence never needs to be changed because you didn't estimate the time correctly or because something interrupted you. Maybe something needs to be rescheduled, and that's just one click with eudy.
People with ADHD are notoriously bad at estimating task length
That isn't only a feeling. When researchers handed college students a real, involved task and asked them to say up front how long it would take, the students with ADHD came out significantly different from the students without on nearly every measure of time estimation. They were not any less confident in their guesses, which is the part worth sitting with: the confidence does not warn you.
But some things really do have a time
But of course, there are real obligations that have to happen at a certain time, which is why eudy lets you set an alarm on any task.
How do I set up my day?
It depends! Some days I have an important task I want to knock off first thing. Other days I have little tasks that need to be done before I can put all my focus into a larger open-ended project. Some days I have to work around an appointment or meeting. My one personal preference is splitting my days up with my health task in the middle, before lunch. You have to find what works for you.
Your day is an order, not a grid. eudy is free, with no time limit, and you can start planning at eudy.app/start.
The study is Prevatt, F., Proctor, B., Baker, L., Garrett, L., & Yelland, S. (2011). Time estimation abilities of college students with ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 15, 531–538. It is a small study, forty students in total. I picked it over the bigger ones because almost all the research on ADHD and time measures how people judge tones and flashes in a lab, and this is the closest I found to the question time blocking actually asks you, which is how long you think a real piece of work will take before you have started it.
Start here: The 1-3-5 method, and a day you can actually finish. What goes in the day before you order it.