Timeboxing is the answer
How to deal with short attention spans, making decisions and allocate your energy and live a mindful life
Disclaimer: This column is merely a guiding voice and provides advice and suggestions on education and careers.
What is timeboxing? Timeboxing is often conated and confused with similar-sounding approaches to time management: time-blocking, scheduling, daily planning, single-tasking, calendar management and timetabling ...
They are collectively and individually unsatisfactory. I propose that timeboxing is the method and mindset of: Selecting what to do, before the day’s distractions arise; specifying each task in a calendar, including when it will start and nish; focusing on one thing at a time; doing each to an acceptable (rather than perfect) standard.
This denition accommodates the most important elements of the practice: intentionality, focus, achievement, order, completion and the creation of the timebox itself. It also makes the important point that we should box the time when, and only when, we have the wherewithal to do so. All the rules we make (the law, coding conventions, household policies) as a civilized society are examples of making a set of decisions at the outset, in a moment of cerebral calm and consideration (often by a carefully appointed committee), to help make life smoother in the long run. Timeboxing applies that principle to a special and specic circumstance: you.
Though not quite a denition, an alternative and also useful way of thinking about timeboxing is as a synthesis of your to-do list and your calendar. The todo
Wlist tells us what to do. The calendar tells us when to do it. The combination is much more readily actionable and useful than either on its own.
It’s also worth distinguishing timeboxing from time-blocking. Time-blocking is the blocking o¤ of time to do something. Timeboxing is time-blocking + committing to getting the task done in time, within the box. In other words, time-blocking is about exclusive focus; timeboxing is exclusive focus + specied outcome.
Timeboxing basics
... Here are the very basics, beyond the denition, for you to familiarize yourself and experiment with, from tomorrow, or even today. You’ll need the right mindset. You’ll need a positive attitude and a belief that this may work ... As for the method, there are two activities that together constitute timeboxing — planning and doing. Here’s what you need to do for each.
Plan (before the day). Set a period of time (15 or 30 minutes), before the busyness of the day clouds your mind and impairs your judgement, to decide what’s most important and needs to get done.
Set a daily (ideally digital) calendar appointment for this planning session, rst thing in the morning (or last thing the night before). Make the appointment recur so you won’t ever miss it.
Review your to-do list. If you don’t keep one, start! To-do lists feed timeboxing; the better your to-do list, the better your timeboxing.
Select some of the most important and urgent items from that list and add them to your calendar. Make the best estimate you can about how long each task will take. Don’t worry, yet, about the ordering — just get them in.
Start, make mistakes and learn quickly. To begin with, you will frequently under- or overestimate how long tasks take — this is normal.
Do (during the day)
Start on time. Remove distractions, the most dangerous of which by far is your smartphone.
Stick to the plan. Don’t second-guess yourself and undermine your earlier decision. Barring an emergency, what you thought earlier in the planning process, when you were calm and clear, is better than what you think to do reactively in the maelstrom of the day.
Finish on time. Get the job done. Do not permit the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Good is usually good enough.
Aim to share what you’ve done as you nish each timebox. This brings a useful pressure to get it done and make it good enough to share.
You’ll get distracted and derailed. Expect this. When it happens, practise coming back to the timebox (return to the calendar), to your original task. With experience, your distractions will become fewer and shorter-lived.
Timeboxing, is unusually perfect for experimentation as you go. Every morning you wake and have a brand-new chance to try out what you’ve learnt, tweak it, experiment with it, question it, make it your own. Do not pass up this opportunity! To ease into it, you might like to try timeboxing every other day (Mondays — Wednesdays — Fridays or Tuesdays and Thursdays, say). This sort of arrangement will enable you to contrast a life with timeboxing against a life without.
So, you should now be clear on what timeboxing is and the features it comes with, out of the box, as it were. And you have had multiple strong encouragements to timebox as you go.