Timeboxing

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to implement timeboxing, an agile technique, wherever possible. I’ve started to find myself becoming much more productive.

Timeboxing is where you set yourself a time limit on a specific activity. For example, you decide to spend an hour on adding twitter to your blog using an API, when the hour is up you must stop and do something else. If you didn’t finish the task it might be because it will take much longer, and you need to reconsider wether its worth doing or allocate more time to the task. You might have been close to finishing, thats fine - allocate more time at a later date.

Timeboxing is especially useful when applied to programming, where you can end up wasting an hour or two trying so solve a problem that would be better off left for a few hours. It forces you to focus on the most important stuff first, and ensures you get ‘something’ done in that period.

Timeboxing in software development also cuts down on the amount of time spent ‘polishing’, this very blog shows that off well - I allocated myself 3 hours to do the template, no time left for any polish, but the blog is live and works. Perhaps I will allocate myself time to polish at a later date.

Timeboxing can also be applied to other areas of your life, its amazing how much tidying and cleaning can get done if you only have 20 mins to do it in.

I’ve only just started timeboxing, so I’ll give an update in a few months once its become one of my core lifehacks.

Jul 07, 2008