Time-boxing

Time-boxing will improve your life.

At the core, it’s simple: assign a fixed period of time to a task, schedule it, and stick to it.

It works because it touches on so many aspects of behaviour:

• Single-tasking and focus to achieve more and feel less stressed.
• Prioritising work to observe deadlines.
• Frequent feelings of accomplishment.
• Transparency so people can see what you’re doing and help.

The tricky bit is chunking the tasks and estimating how long they’ll take, but this skill improves rapidly with practice.

Key to this is time-boxing into a shared calendar and taking commutes, meetings, and other commitments into account.