What’s up, Vihan here. Welcome back to the channel. Today, I want to ask you to take
a minute to think about how you approach your to-do list. You’ve likely got a bunch of
things on your agenda every day, and you start out each day telling yourself that this is
the day when you’ll make it through your entire list. But somehow, you always seem
to only get to a few of these items and the rest rolls over to the next day. This was
the story of my life for several years until I began using a technique called timeboxing.
Before we get started, don’t forget to hit that thumbs up button if you like this video
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every single week. Alright. Let’s get going.
Timeboxing is a method by which you pre-determine a fixed amount of time to complete a task
and then work to complete that task within the timeframe. The concept was first introduced
by James Martin, the author of the book Rapid Application Development. The essence of this
framework is to limit the time that you spend on any given task, especially if you have
a fairly packed agenda. At the end of the timebox, you declare your
work done, no matter what, and then you assess whether you were able to meet your goals,
either completely or partially.
Perhaps the person best known for using this method is billionaire entrepreneur and evil
genius Elon Musk who is known to work over 80 hours a week splitting his time between
his various companies, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Open AI, to name a few.
He even has time to destress fairly often and tweet his heart out whenever he feels
like. The secret to his legendary productivity is that he plans out his day in increments
and assigns blocks to each activity throughout his day including emails, meetings and even
breaks.
Now, there is such a thing as hard and soft timeboxes which is essentially the way that
we approach a timebox. With a soft timebox, you can continue to work
on a task until you complete it even if the time that you previously allotted for it elapses.
The point of using a soft timebox is to let you know that you should probably wrap up
whatever you’re doing or bring your focus back to the important aspects of your task.
The more common and effective way to do this is with a hard timebox. Once the time that
you set for a task runs out, you drop that task and either take a break or move onto
the next item on your agenda.
Incorporating timeboxing into your life requires a little bit of planning where you think about
how much time you want to allocate to any task. Decide how much time you’re willing
to give to one thing, so that you won’t get caught up in all the other distractions
that get thrown your way. It kind of all just starts with taking a look at your calendar
as well as your to-do list and assigning appropriate amounts of time to each thing.
In my experience, timeboxing has proven most useful when there are a bunch of things that
I don’t have motivation to complete or I don’t want to spend a lot of time on.
If you’ve watched my video on Parkinson’s Law, you’ll know that work expands so as
to fill the time that has been allocated for its completion. For example, cleaning up your
room for 15 minutes can be your sole goal. If you didn’t set a fixed amount of time
to get it done, you’d probably spend a couple minutes putting some stuff away and then the
rest of the time jumping on the bed.
One thing I would highly recommend is making time for breaks throughout your day. Personally,
I find it pretty helpful to get up and walk around for around 15 minutes every hour and
a half. Getting some air or a glass of water can do so much more for your ability to enter
a state of flow, rather than trying to power through your natural limits. It’s also important
to take some time to assess whether each task requires a larger or smaller timebox depending
on the progress that you’ve made and ultimately you’ll improve your performance. This is
called the Feedback Loop - something that Musk himself is a strong advocate for.
Timeboxing utilizes the principles of the Pomodoro Technique to ensure your productivity
for a fixed amount of time. Because sometimes all it takes is a ticking clock to make us
feel a sense of urgency to maximize a short amount of time.
When your time runs out, you have two options: move on to the next item on your agenda or
begin a new timebox for your current item. It’s completely up to you. The important
thing to remember is that you don’t let yourself get caught up in the moment and in
“what seems important to you right now”.
Moving on to the next agenda item even when there is no clear conclusion can actually
help you be more productive. If you begin to feel frustrated by not having any results
when your time runs out, you will quickly adapt and begin to see results sooner in your
timebox as you keep doing it. One of the things I like to do is break up
the big task into a bunch of mini-tasks that take an hour or so to complete and you just
create a timebox for that mini task. This helps me get started working on that big task
and even if I complete that mini task, I end up feeling much better about myself and my
productivity.
The main goal of timeboxing is to have complete control over your schedule. By planning out
the amount of time you spend on each item on your to-do list, you almost guarantee yourself
improved productivity. Speaking for myself, timeboxing has not only allowed me to accomplish
more throughout my day, but it’s given me the ability to feel a lot more satisfied about
the fact that I was no longer a slave to a to-do list.
If you liked this video, I make a lot of them. Subscribe to the channel for more from me
every week or visit Vihan Chelliah.com to stay in touch and get a copy of my free productivity
cheatsheet. That’s it. Thanks for watching.