What Is Time Management?

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You can become more focused by protecting your time better.

Assigning similar tasks to pre-scheduled time windows helps prevent distractions.

Separating task types makes you more effective in your professional life.

It also helps you shield your personal goals from work demands.

We all have the same amount of time: 24 hours per day. Yet, some people seem to make the most of it consistently, while others endlessly complain about how interruptions, distractions, and social media waste their time and keep talking about all the personal goals they will chase “someday.”

Here is the good news: You can become more focused by protecting your time better.

Many highly productive people, including famous authors and highly paid executives, have developed routines that sharply separate activities in different time windows. For example, some prolific novelists report devoting a set number of hours each morning to writing new material and undertaking revisions and editing only in the afternoon.

This is the essence of “time-boxing” and “task-batching.” Those are productivity and time-management techniques that divide your time into well-defined “boxes,” each devoted to only one task, or a type of similar tasks (for example, writing new material in the morning and revising in the afternoon). As we explained in this post, these methods help because they prevent multitasking, which research in cognitive psychology has shown to be a productivity killer. Many modern best-selling books on productivity and time management advocate some variant of time-boxing.

What can time-boxing do for you?

Think of time-boxing as a way to protect your time for the activities that bring you forward or make you happy. Do you find yourself wasting time because of countless interruptions? Do you regret wasting your time on social media instead of spending it with your family or pursuing personal projects? Do you often wonder where your time went and never have time for your own goals? Then time-boxing can help.

Time-boxing is a contract with yourself. Begin by honestly listing all the types of activities and tasks that you need or want to do regularly. This includes work but also personal projects, and can include leisure and even family time (more on that in a later post). If checking social media is something you want to do, it belongs in your list.

Each type of task should be concrete enough to identify a class of recurring, related activities, but not so detailed that it will reduce to a single one-off task. “Work” and “leisure” are definitely too general, while “get the data for the quarter report” and “revise the draft of chapter three” are too specific. “Answer email from customers,” “work on my novel,” and “do the home accounting” are better.

Once you have your list, divide your weekly schedule into boxes, starting with the ones you cannot change (e.g., work meetings or lunch breaks). Do not stress about details. Just make a full schedule allocating tasks to boxes. Also, assume that each box includes a 5- to 10-minute break each hour.

By time-boxing your week, you are making two promises to yourself. First, you will protect the boxes devoted to your goals and wants (e.g., writing a book, spending time with your family, or, if it makes you happy, surfing the web). There will be no spillovers from other boxes into those. So don’t feel guilty when you sit down to work on your personal projects, as long as you have allocated enough time to everything you are supposed to do.

What Is Time Management?

Take our Time Management Test

Find a therapist near me

Second, you will also protect the boxes devoted to the tasks you have to do, no matter how much you dislike them (e.g., home accounting, doing your taxes, or chasing after obnoxious clients). So no chasing your hobbies around on the web while you are focusing on a work task. By clearly separating task types, you will avoid distractions and become more effective in your work and in achieving your personal goals.

How do you make it work?

The bad news is, it will not work out of the box (poor joke, I know). That’s why it is important not to stress about “the perfect plan.” Just start with some kind of schedule. Imperfect action beats perfect planning! If you are spending more than 15 minutes sketching your first time-boxed week, you are thinking too much.

At first, you will be disappointed. You will still be distracted, your boxes will overflow, and you will have to skip some of them entirely.

That’s just life. Keep to the plan. Every time a new box starts, switch to the scheduled type of tasks. And every time that something goes wrong, make a short note, either in the schedule itself or in a notebook (you should always have a notebook handy: see “Three Self-Help Tricks for Busy People”). For example: “Kept being distracted by X.” “This needs more time.” “Was called by Y, and time disappeared.”

At the end of the week, take 15 minutes to review your notes. What worked, and what didn’t? How can you make adjustments? Maybe the box for customer emails needs to be longer. Which one can you shorten? Maybe you were checking your emails in the wrong time box: commit to closing the email app and turning notifications off (hint: leave your phone in a different room until the appropriate time box). Also, move the boxes around as needed. If you are most productive and creative in the morning, that is not where your email time box should be.

Keep making adjustments, but only once a week. Otherwise, stick to the plan. Your actual time-boxing schedule will be the product of trial and error over time, and it will most likely remain dynamic as your needs evolve.

Don’t stress over results

Last, don’t worry about results. Those will come in time. Time-boxing is about protecting your time and avoiding the distractions that come from not having a clearly defined focus. You are just protecting your time better, but you still have no control over the world around you or even your inspiration. Time-boxing will not magically finish your novel in three months, build a broad customer base, or make you happy with your tax report.

It will, however, give you better results while protecting your time better. And in the long run, time savings and focused work will add up, and probably make your life a bit better.

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