Time Will Not
There never are enough hours in the day, how can we maximize our time when time won’t wait for us?
Written By: Tony Sprando
Time management is something we start learning as early as 6 and really never stop learning. It’s something that goes into every area of your life. If you have bad time management in the morning you’ll be late to work. If you have poor time management at work you’ll be late for dinner or you might not get assignments done on time. In school, if you had poor time management you have bad grades. If you have poor time management in the kitchen you’ll have burnt or cold food. Time management truly does affect every single aspect of our life if you really sit down and think about it. Time management is crucial in business and there’s been a lot of time management trends throughout the years. The newest time management trend is called timeboxing.
Timeboxing is a modern theory of time management. Benjamin Franklin wrote over 260 years ago “you may delay but time will not.” His idea still stands true today. There really never are enough hours in the day. I frequently find myself saying “whelp im going to have to push that till tomorrow” or “if I just had another hour.” I, unfortunately, struggle with time management all the…time (no pun intended.) Typical time management oftentimes looks like a to-do list. Walk the dog, write a presentation, send out emails, make phone calls, etc. We accomplish this to-do list by starting on a task and working on it until it’s finished. Timeboxing is actually sort of the opposite. When you make a timeboxing management schedule you schedule a certain time for things but once that time is up you stop doing that task. This means that especially in the beginning you won’t finish all of the tasks. Some things are straightforward, you walk the dog for 30 minutes, but others you may not have enough time for like, working on a presentation for only an hour.
This may seem like a problem at the beginning but the idea is that when you block off a certain scheduled amount of time for tasks your productivity will then learn to meet that time requirement. This helps eliminate distractions and increase your productivity. Maybe checking emails takes you an hour to two hours usually. You might find yourself getting distracted or having to reread emails over and over again. But when you only have 30 minutes to check and respond to emails it becomes something that needs to be done now. Your brain will go into hyper-focus, getting the task done hopefully before the time is up. It’s definitely a learning curve in the beginning and you probably won’t be able to finish tasks in the time that you give yourself. But the goal is the more consistent you are with timeboxing the more you will be able to meet your time limits.
Most professionals recommend having time boxes of 25 to 30 minutes. Timeboxing has become increasingly popular over the last decade and is even used by famous businessman Elon Musk. Elon Musk encourages 5-minute time boxing. He tries to block off every 5 minutes of his day. Scheduling every little thing with the minimum amount of time it takes to do it. This means that he genuinely makes the most out of every day. It’s not meant for everybody but a little bit of timeboxing in our lives, especially, with things that have stricter deadlines or with activities that you might like to be more productive with can make a big improvement in your personal and professional life. Timeboxing encourages increased productivity but also discourages distractions. It makes buckling down and getting the job done a lot easier. If you make time boxing part of your daily schedule it might also feel less overwhelming to fit excess things into your schedule.
Timeboxing is definitely an interesting way of time management. But it’s heavily encouraged by businessmen and professionals and it’s something you should consider trying.
*This article is Tony Sprando of AV Bends intellectual property. To use or reference this article please contact: Tony@avbend.com*
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