I first learned of the timeboxing technique a few years back. I since have found it a very useful item in my productivity arsenal.
I'll start with a scenario—the naked, unvarnished truth as it happened to me today. I had a report that needed to be worked on, didn't feel like doing it. Why? For no rational reason, just one of those things.
In such a situation it is all too easy to keep busy with other types of "work"—anything I could spend time on that appears useful, so that anyone watching won't think I'm slacking off. (This is true even though I'm working at home and nobody is watching but me.)
So what I did was....
Now that I have you hanging on the edge of your seat, let me digress for a little philosophical discussion. We are used to thinking of Man (and Woman) as the "rational animal," but look up "cognitive bias" and you will see that all too often people behave irrationally, and what's more in well-established ways. Faced with this knowledge, one can castigate oneself for being irrational and resolve to purify one's mind. Good luck with that—you might pull it off.
Or one can accept one's own irrationalities and work around them, even use them at times. Think of your mind as like Biff Tannen's car:
Remember? The one that no one but Biff could get started? In the same way, once you learn the idiosyncracies of your own mind you can learn how to work around them to coax better performance out of the old thing.
Now back to our exciting story. What I did was set my timer for 5 minutes (we'll come back to discuss the timer later), and tell myself to work on the report for just 5 minutes. This much motivation I could muster.
Frequently the hardest part of a task like this is merely getting started. And so it was today. As it turned out, once 5 minutes had gone by I could see I was almost finished and wrapped it up in approximately another 5 minutes. The rest of the day was then better without that report hanging over my head.
If I had required more than 10 minutes of work to finish the report, I would have perhaps done something like this: spend 5 minutes on the report, then spend 5 minutes either working on something else requiring less energy, or just goof off for 5 minutes. Then 5 minutes on the report again, then 5 minutes off, and so on and so on, until the report is finished or I have reached my quota of work for the day. And so I would be working at 50% efficiency. Not ideal, but better than zero.
This is an example of timeboxing, in other words breaking your time into predetermined blocks to be used according to a plan. In this case I used timeboxing to overcome resistance to getting started on a task, but there are other benefits such as time budgeting. You can devise endless alternatives depending on your energy and motivation level, difficulty of the task, other things to be done, etc.:
Plan B (gradual escalation):
5 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
6 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
7 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
8 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
etc.
Plan C (overcoming extreme distaste):
2 minutes on task, 2 minutes rest,
3 minutes on task, 2 minutes rest,
4 minutes on task, 2 minutes rest,
etc.
Plan D (working when fatigued):
2 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
2 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
etc.
Plan E (balancing several tasks):
5 minutes on Task 1, 10 minutes on Task 2,
5 minutes on Task 1, 10 minutes on Task 2,
5 minutes rest,
5 minutes on Task 1, 10 minutes on Task 2,
5 minutes on Task 1, 10 minutes on Task 2,
5 minutes rest,
etc.
(The 5 minutes and 10 minutes to be adjusted depending on the percentage of effort you want to put into each task.)
All of the foregoing use relatively short intervals. Some would advise against such short intervals, saying that even a momentary interruption requires several minutes to recover from. Personally I haven't noticed this.
The timer. Today the "timer" that I used was a little shareware program called NX Free Light Timer. Other times I use a stand-alone electronic timer, which is easier to put out of sight. Or sometimes I use an old-fashioned mechanical kitchen timer (like the picture above).
One drawback to each of these options is I would like a timer that goes off with a simple "ding" or other subtle sound. All of the options I can find are considerably more irritating. In particular, any mechanical timer I have found goes off like the alarm bell in the fire house. Apparently cooks have become quite hard of hearing since the old days.
The Pomodoro Technique. This deserves mention as one of the best-known timeboxing systems, and was also my first introduction to the idea. It's called "Pomodoro" because the inventor used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato. In terms of time intervals it works like this:
The Pomodoro Technique:
25 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
25 minutes on task, 5 minutes rest,
etc.
I would say the primary benefit of this schedule is focusing on a task and controlling distractions. 25 minutes is supposedly the maximum time one can focus on work. I would say this may be too optimistic, depending on the nature of the work. If you read the Pomodoro book you will find several higher-level enhancements to the method, such as distraction tracking.
The Pomodoro technique has gone big-time since I first read about it. I note the Pomodoro site now offers for sale a tomato-shaped timer—for 60 Euros. That had better be one really nice timer.
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