Time Boxing

A part of team productivity series!

My to do list is never ending. I know I will fail even before I start. Sigh!

Our 21st century lives are busy. A fraught place where all the mundane activities of our busy lives converge as an infinite scroll is our to-do lists. No wonder it depletes all types of energies (physical, mental, emotional etc).

Here are five ways of managing energies in the 21st century 👇

1. In an ever changing world, anchor yourself to a non-malleable constant like time. The reason being when everything is a variable, it gets hard to focus.
2. Allocate a fixed unit of time for a planned activity in advance and stick to the allocation. This simple technique is referred to as Time-boxing.
3. Unlike time-blocking, time-boxing forces you to put in strict limits to activities which otherwise would end up taking too much time.
4. Time-boxing creates a sense of urgency by focusing all energies on the time and not on the task. Doing the right thing, allocating right time and then integrating results from the time-box to the project gives an exponential ROI.
5. Time-box sits on the calendar which gives a relative positioning of work. It is visual, intuitive and obvious on a calendar. Also, the autonomy of calendar gives happiness at work which is otherwise robbed by constant interruptions and distractions.

Time-boxing improves how we feel (control), how much we achieve as individuals (personal productivity), and how much we achieve in the teams we work in (enhanced collaboration). Give it a try!

🥂 to time-boxing!