Timeboxing: How to do great work and still leave the office on time

Isn’t it funny how we spend about 8-10 solid hours at work, yet we get the sense that nothing seems to get really done? Isn’t it also strange that we take forever to get an assignment done if it’s due in weeks, but we’ll definitely have a working draft ready if it’s due the next morning?

When there is no time pressure to do something, the following often happens:

• Work just expands to fill the vacuum of whatever time you have. Between having a day and a week to finish a 5-page writeup, the only difference is that we’ll have more time doing peripherally related research flitting from page to page on Wikipedia. Or answering calls or messages from other people about stuff irrelevant to whatever we need to achieve. We spend more time ruminating, instead of deciding.
• People mostly spend unstructured time doing shallow tasks that are non-cognitively demanding, but yet give us the delusion of false achievement. Most of our time tends to be spent clearing emails, or fighting seemingly urgent but ultimately unimportant fires. We get home at the end of the day exhausted, yet weighed down by the heavy misery of not feeling like we’ve achieved anything substantial. This doesn’t necessarily need to happen.

Humans, if left to their own devices, are generally really good procrastinators. We leave things undone until we get hit with the fear and pressure of a looming non-negotiable deadline. This also means that if you want to have a fulfilling and productive work life without having to waste your precious after-office hours still working away, you can use these principles of procrastination to your own advantage.

This means we can employ timeboxing as a strategy at work. To timebox is to allocate a fixed window of time, during which you engage only in the activity that you planned on doing. This way, you are artificially creating time pressure and deadlines for yourself, sending the procrastinating mind into a deep state of necessary focus. There are many ways to timebox.

When we timebox (e.g. set a 60-minute window in which we do nothing else except perform targeted research for an analysis we need to submit), we are providing a clear, definable structure for ourselves to operate in. When this one hour is meant for research, it means it’s not meant for grabbing coffee, or answering questions in one of our many WhatsApp chat groups. Not only do we focus, it also ends up providing our work days a lot more meaning and control.

And when you get real stuff done, this means you have every right to leave the office on time.