LIFESTYLE The art of timeboxing

It’s a weekday afternoon and you find yourself staring at your to-do list for the day. The tab stays open on your laptop all morning. In your mind, you’re trying to calculate the perfect formula: picking the most important task that will take the shortest amount of time. Despite your hard work, the day flies by without any progress. And as the work piles up, the choice will get even harder. If this feels familiar, let us help you by saying that there is no perfect formula. But we might just have what you need to improve your time management. Ever heard of timeboxing? Well, whether you’ve heard about it before or you’re a complete newcomer, we’ve curated the best bits of this technique for you.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the world today is teeming with distractions. Social media, push notifications, streaming services, countless open tabs – it’s so hard to focus on one thing. And when it comes to tasks that require more concentration we tend to fail at keeping our minds on track. Timeboxing is here to change that. 

The best way to understand timeboxing is to shift your focus from the content of your work, to the time spent on that work. How is this different? Instead of choosing a task and sticking to it until it is completed, you allocate it a fixed amount of time, before moving on to the next one. Predictability, variation of work, and clear break times are some of the key elements that make timeboxing an attractive alternative to never ending to-do lists and endless procrastination. 

You might not have heard of Parkinson’s law, but you’ve most probably experienced it. In short: the more time you have to do something, the more that piece of work is going to take. Thus, preparing ourselves for a limited window to complete a task will trick our mind into using the time more productively. 

And if prioritizing your activities is a daunting task in itself, there’s more good news. Diving into each piece of work at a time means that you can constantly reassess their importance and adjust expectations.

It’s time to throw your to-do list away and start fresh. Timeboxing has only three main steps: creating the timeboxes and their duration, setting a timer, and, once you’re done, assessing and reviewing the experience. Most importantly, don’t worry about not getting the timing right at first. Once you’ve gone through it a few times, you’ll start to find that you are much more in touch with yourself and your working pace. 

If you need more time to warm up to timeboxing, then we suggest an easier sub-method: the Pomodoro Technique (named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that inspired it). Here you skip the first step and only work in 25-minute time slots, cutting down on the extra preparation and experiencing the best bits of timeboxing.