Timeboxing

There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute.

However, many of us still use the phrase, “I don’t have enough time”.

I decided to research into this issue, to figure out how to improve my productivity and how the more successful people do it, and not to my surprise tracking was the most common way.

When you want to become stronger, you track every workout.
When you want to lose weight, you track every calorie.
And now, if you want to gain time you must track it.

This idea is called “Timeboxing” and many of the most successful people use it. Elon Musk (who is my inspiration) works on many projects, many companies, and spends 80 to 90-hour work weeks.

He manages this all by timeboxing.

Timeboxing is the art of scheduling your day in advance, whether it be a day or a week.

I decided to try timeboxing for the next thirty days, and I’m halfway in and want to share my thoughts on if it is really making me productive or just a crazy trend people are hoping on to.

In 2 weeks, I will come out with a final thoughts post (and hopefully an included video). I’ve always known about timeboxing, but I never really pushed my self to try. A minimalist and youtuber called Matt D’Avella posted a video about tracking every minute of his life for 3 months.

His idea was like timeboxing and I highly recommend the video. In the video Matt had said one of the best parts of tracking his time spent was being able to look back at how he was organizing his days. This idea stuck me as it’s very important to understand your overall goal to later reach that goal.

How I organized my day:

Now many people will split their times into 5-minute intervals, and while that could work, I found that it was very cumbersome and would not work for me. I decided to have separate calendars for each part of my life: personal, transportation, study and work. I would then estimate a amount of time that it would take to complete these tasks. I would overestimate the time just incase I spend a little more than my allocated time, and it played in my favor to make sure I am hitting everything I wanted to do in a day.

Example of two days that were timeboxed. Most importanlty- it has increased my productivity so far. Show in image above.

However, I did notice some points that would mess with my schedule. During the first week I decided to go out with friends and interrupting my sleeping schedule the next day I had missed many events I had wanted to do. This is when I added allocated times (1 to 2 hours) daily where if I needed to do something, I could just use the extra time I had in my calendar. This helped me stick to the goals I wanted to hit.

Overall, I want to keep this blog short, since in the upcoming two weeks I will be talking about my experience fully during these three months, but this journey is a step to my idea of becoming a more productive person, as no one is perfect and you can always improve your life and habits.

Thank you for reading this post, and if you would like to stay in the loop of ways to improve productivity I will be posting on this blog about my journey and my tips in this sector. Please share this with your friends and families and we can all become more structured.

Post Tags Productivty Timeboxing DoBetter