Timeboxing The Most Powerful Time Management Technique You’re Probably Not Using - Nir Eyal

This resource first appeared in issue #83 on 17 Jul 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

Timeboxing: The Most Powerful Time Management Technique You’re Probably Not Using - Nir Eyal

I’m a little surprised to see that timeboxing hasn’t come up on the newsletter as often as I would have thought - it was one suggested strategy out of five in one article we covered in #53. It’s a very useful technique for making sure you get things done, and for scoping those things.

Problem with a to-do list include:

• Many of us aren’t great at breaking down the to-do items into discrete-enough chunks, so there’s a lot of open scope
• It doesn’t help deal with distractions
• There’s always more stuff on the todo list, so at the end of the day you feel like you haven’t done enough.

Timeboxing involves actually blocking off time on your calendar to do certain tasks - or classes of tasks, and assigning items to any particular box. It’s great because it actually schedules you to do task X in an hour on Tuesday afternoon, meaning you’ve scoped it better than just a bullet point saying “X”, and by committing to that you’re less likely to be distracted during that hour.

Eyal cautions us to:

• start small,
• iterating to get it right,
• sticking to the schedule - if something came up and you didn’t do X, follow the schedule anyway and do Y next
• learn what works for you.