Timeboxing

Selecting what to do, before the day’s distractions arise; specifying each task in a calendar, including when it will start and finish; focusing on one thing at a time; doing each to an acceptable (rather than perfect) standard. This definition accommodates the most important elements of the practice: intentionality, focus, achievement, order, comp

Several scientific papers (largely led by Peter Gollwitzer10 in the 1990s) indicate that setting out intentions formally ahead of time significantly increases the likelihood of attaining a goal.

Aim to share what you’ve done as you finish each timebox. This brings a useful pressure to get it done and make it good enough to share — you’ll see that this is an important standard to meet.

features are the characteristics of the method — what it is. Benefits, on the other hand, are the ways in which the method will improve your life. In commercial business parlance: features tell, benefits sell.

Though not quite a definition, an alternative and also useful way of thinking about timeboxing is as a synthesis of your to-do list and your calendar. The to-do list 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.

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 n

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, first thing in the morning (or last thing the night before). Make the appointment recur so you won’t

It’s also worth distinguishing timeboxing from time-blocking. Time-blocking is the blocking off 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 + specified outcome.

Gollwitzer introduced the concept of the implementation intention, commitments of the form ‘when situation X arises, I will perform response Y’. They are more granular and tangible than the loftier notion of a goal intention (‘I intend to achieve X’)