Loud Thinking July 23, 2014 at 01:17PM
Reclaim Your Time with a Time-Box System
Time boxing is a planning tool that’s a cross between a calendar and a to-do list. It lets you divide your schedule into increments (half-hour or hour-long chunks) that you can slot tasks into and monitor. To set it up:
Review your week. Take one day to plan for the week ahead. Inventory your deadlines, commitments, meetings, and so on.
Prioritize what’s on the list. Put deadline-sensitive tasks first, goal-oriented tasks second, and then schedule these around any recurring obligations.
Estimate time for tasks. Err on the side of caution when calculating how long each will take.
Enter series of time boxes into your calendar. Designate a task for each time slot (“8 AM to 9 AM: Return phone calls and emails”), and keep a log of how long it actually took you. Later, review whether you allocated enough time by seeing what you were and weren’t able to finish.
Adapted by HBR from Managing Time (20-Minute Manager).
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