Introduction

Our feral ways of working and living do not lead to the chosen, cherished lives we long for. This book is about a practice that does. That practice is called timeboxing.

Why I wrote it

I began my career just over 20 years ago. Back then, I was not in control at all: I took orders as they came, and responded to whoever shouted the loudest. I kept a to-do list but had little idea how to prioritize what was on it. I made basic mistakes, left the most pressing work unfinished and frequently faced disapproval and rebuke. After several months of suffering, I devised a simple system (which I called a daily work plan): select priority items from my to-do list, paste them into a spreadsheet, estimate how long they would take (in units of 7.5 minutes, so they would stack up to quarters, halves and whole hours), and check them off as they were done.

This was much better. The important things were getting done, I could adapt the system as I went, I felt more in control and that I was achieving (the spreadsheet would calculate how many productive hours I had worked each day), and I had a searchable, digital record of my daily endeavours.

But it was still far from perfect. I had to force the spreadsheet to dovetail with existing commitments such as meetings. Colleagues didn’t have access to the file (this was the early 2000s, before the advent of Dropbox and Google Drive) and I certainly couldn’t invite someone to see the detail behind a particular, single item. Most importantly, the tasks in the spreadsheet didn’t relate to the time of day without a lot of manipulation and management: at any given moment it wasn’t clear what I should be doing; nor was it clear if I was on track or behind.

A little over 10 years ago, I happened upon an article by Daniel Markovitz in Harvard Business Review1 that suggested that migrating the to-do list to the calendar would have a transformative effect on productivity. Markovitz argued that to-do lists, on their own, are overwhelming, hard to prioritize, lack context and don’t commit their owner to them. A shared calendar addressed all of these problems. This resonated. So, in early 2014, I began to adopt the method each and every day and came to know it as timeboxing. First thing every morning, I would spend 15 minutes deciding what to do, and how long I’d do it for and log all this into my Google Calendar.

It changed everything.

I was much more on top of it all. I knew what I was doing and felt confident that these were the right things to be focused on. I was better at predicting when I would complete my tasks and therefore able to say yes or no to new work with justification and confidence. In moments of uncertainty and overwhelm, I had refuge in a mantra I developed, ‘Return to calendar’, which has been a constant source of light whenever I’ve needed it. When I started my own business, I wanted to be a transparent and helpful CEO. Timeboxing enabled me to exemplify both with an open, shared record of all I had done and all I was doing for anyone in the team to see.

And I got better at it. When I look back over the past 10 years of calendar entries, I see a reassuring, poignant, instructive evolution of my timeboxing practice: gaps in the working day lessen; the size of the timeboxes becomes more regular; their names become more usefully recognizable; I began to colour code the timeboxes so I could see, at a glance, how much time I was spending in different areas of my life; and as I saw that this systematic approach could be useful outside of work too, more and more of my non-work hours got timeboxed. It really had changed everything.

The method substantially affected what I did and when and how I did it for most of the waking hours of my life. It was indispensable.

Five years on and increasingly enthralled with this new way of life, I wanted others to benefit too. So, I wrote my own article for Harvard Business Review (HBR) on the subject.2 Having timeboxed for several years by this point, I had observed some additional benefits that made it even more powerful: seeing projects with colour-coded dependencies at a glance; showing others what I was working on and when; keeping a useful log of all I’d done; being and feeling in control; and simply getting through work faster. That article remained on HBR’s Most Popular list for several years. Many readers wrote to me directly. Most just to say that the idea resonated and that they would give it a try. Some said that they had been using the method for a while and were glad to discover it had a name. A single dad told me that it had helped him to cope when life had seemed impossible. Markovitz himself got in touch! And lots asked me directly just how to implement the method.

It didn’t just catch on there. In 2022, an enterprising TikTok creator made a video3 espousing the benefits of the method and featured my article. Within a few weeks, it amassed ten million views. The response to the video provided further evidence of substantial interest in what timeboxing has to offer.

I knew that hundreds of thousands of senior managers already employ personal assistants to timebox for them every day, managing their calendars and increasing their levels of output, comfort and happiness. Many of the world’s greatest achievers — Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Mary Callahan Erdoes — have employed some version of the practice too.

It seemed that the concept had extraordinarily broad appeal, from Gen Z TikTokers to busy parents to business execs to some of the world’s leaders and iconoclasts.

* * *

Every single weekday morning, a billion or so knowledge workers wake up, gravitate towards a pixelated screen and process information for 8 hours or more. The work is endless. The choice of what to work on is endless. And then there are all our non-work tasks and responsibilities — with their own levels of urgency and importance — which need, somehow, to be juxtaposed and squeezed in.

At any and every given moment, then, we are faced with a sea of non-trivial choices. This causes us to suffer in several ways. We’re fatigued by so many always-on options and this diminishes our ability to make the right decisions.4 We’ve developed a fear of missing out on all the things we could be doing that pop up on social media. Insidious, unseen algorithms determine much of the quality and nature of modern-day experience and just when we break free, untimely, unsolicited notifications draw us back in. We fail to make space for the habits and activities that will lead us to what we truly long for: self-development, a successful career, fulfilling relationships, good health — a happy, intentional life.

Many of us are therefore more perplexed, bewildered, frazzled, anxious or depressed than we should be. This is the condition of the most privileged people on earth.

In response, thousands of books and articles about productivity and time management have been written. Each has its own angle, often intersecting with some of the others: habits, checklists, focus, flow, energy, prioritization, the promise of doing more with less, anti-procrastination measures, mental health and spirituality. Several of these books offer powerful methods and have become bestsellers: Deep Work, Indistractable, Four Thousand Weeks, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, Eat That Frog! and Atomic Habits, to name just a few.

And yet none of these books offers a sustained and thorough guide to timeboxing. All six of the aforementioned bestsellers, for example, acknowledge the practice and agree on its potency, but devote just a few paragraphs or pages to it.

So, it seemed that there was an opportunity and responsibility to bring the method and mindset to many more people. This book reveals timeboxing as the fundamental time management philosophy, ripe and ready to help the billions of us weighed down by choice every hour of every day.

Ripe and ready to help you.

Why it’s for you

Let me guess.

You’re busy. You often feel overwhelmed. You live many hours each day digitally, in front of a screen. You own and use several devices that tether you to this digital world. You pick up your phone within minutes of waking up. Your phone charged overnight, next to you, as you slept. You have flexibility in your day, possibly about where you work and probably about what you work on at any given moment. You’d like to develop your skills, to learn, much more than you do. You often find yourself working on several things at once, usually unaware of how that happened, and not feeling good about any of them. You find it hard to keep up with email and messaging apps, often leaving messages unreturned. You don’t read as much as you think you should. You carry work worries home and home worries to work. You’re often stressed. You don’t see the people you love anywhere near as much as you’d like, and you’re not fully present when you do. You’ve tried several productivity techniques and none has worked and stayed. You’re dissatisfied with your work-life balance. You’re tired. You suspect social media takes more from you than it gives, yet still, you scroll.

You wish you had more time.

Perhaps you are:

• a student struggling with procrastination and meeting deadlines

• a freelancer juggling multiple clients, jobs, finding new work, developing new skills, chasing invoices

• a remote worker managing all that freedom and all those choices

• a creative, needing to reconcile inspiration and artistic expression with hard deadlines and deliverables

• an athlete, cross-fitter or personal trainer, organizing training schedules and diet plans for yourself and your clients

— Sherlock Holmes


Copyright © 2024 by Marc Zao-Sanders