Today's Reading
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
— Gandalf
INTRODUCTION
Our feral ways of working and living do not lead to the chosen, cherished lives we long for. This book is about a practice that does. That practice is called timeboxing.
WHY I WROTE IT
I began my career just over 20 years ago. Back then, I was not in control at all: I took orders as they came, and responded to whoever shouted the loudest. I kept a to-do list but had little idea how to prioritize what was on it. I made basic mistakes, left the most pressing work unfinished and frequently faced disapproval and rebuke. After several months of suffering, I devised a simple system (which I called a daily work plan): select priority items from my to-do list, paste them into a spreadsheet, estimate how long they would take (in units of 7.5 minutes, so they would stack up to quarters, halves and whole hours), and check them off as they were done.
This was much better. The important things were getting done, I could adapt the system as I went, I felt more in control and that I was achieving (the spreadsheet would calculate how many productive hours I had worked each day), and I had a searchable, digital record of my daily endeavours.
But it was still far from perfect. I had to force the spreadsheet to dovetail with existing commitments such as meetings. Colleagues didn't have access to the file (this was the early 2000s, before the advent of Dropbox and Google Drive) and I certainly couldn't invite someone to see the detail behind a particular, single item. Most importantly, the tasks in the spreadsheet didn't relate to the time of day without a lot of manipulation and management: at any given moment it wasn't clear what I should be doing; nor was it clear if I was on track or behind.
A little over 10 years ago, I happened upon an article by Daniel Markovitz in Harvard Business Review that suggested that migrating the to- do list to the calendar would have a transformative effect on productivity. Markovitz argued that to-do lists, on their own, are overwhelming, hard to prioritize, lack context and don't commit their owner to them. A shared calendar addressed all of these problems. This resonated. So, in early 2014, I began to adopt the method each and every day and came to know it as timeboxing. First thing every morning, I would spend 15 minutes deciding what to do, and how long I'd do it for and log all this into my Google Calendar.
It changed everything.
I was much more on top of it all. I knew what I was doing and felt confident that these were the right things to be focused on. I was better at predicting when I would complete my tasks and therefore able to say yes or no to new work with justification and confidence. In moments of uncertainty and overwhelm, I had refuge in a mantra I developed, 'Return to calendar', which has been a constant source of light whenever I've needed it. When I started my own business, I wanted to be a transparent and helpful CEO. Timeboxing enabled me to exemplify both with an open, shared record of all I had done and all I was doing for anyone in the team to see.
And I got better at it. When I look back over the past 10 years of calendar entries, I see a reassuring, poignant, instructive evolution of my timeboxing practice: gaps in the working day lessen; the size of the timeboxes becomes more regular; their names become more usefully recognizable; I began to colour code the timeboxes so I could see, at a glance, how much time I was spending in different areas of my life; and as I saw that this systematic approach could be useful outside of work too, more and more of my non-work hours got timeboxed. It really had changed everything.
The method substantially affected what I did and when and how I did it for most of the waking hours of my life. It was indispensable.
Five years on and increasingly enthralled with this new way of life, I wanted others to benefit too. So, I wrote my own article for Harvard Business Review (HBR) on the subject. Having timeboxed for several years by this point, I had observed some additional benefits that made it even more powerful: seeing projects with colour-coded dependencies at a glance; showing others what I was working on and when; keeping a useful log of all I'd done; being and feeling in control; and simply getting through work faster. That article remained on HBR's Most Popular list for several years. Many readers wrote to me directly. Most just to say that the idea resonated and that they would give it a try. Some said that they had been using the method for a while and were glad to discover it had a name. A single dad told me that it had helped him to cope when life had seemed impossible. Markovitz himself got in touch! And lots asked me directly just how to implement the method.
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