How to Actually Finish What You Need to Get Done

Welcome to HBR on Leadership. I'm HBR Executive Editor, Alison Beard. On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts. Hands selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. We carefully curate this feed from across the HBR portfolio, aiming to help you unlock your next level of leadership. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Welcome to the HBR ITA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickyf. Do you ever reach the end of a work day and say to yourself, "The day kind of got away for me." You started out with a list of things to accomplish, but you got distracted, they piled up, and it feels like you never made any headway. You're not alone, it's an all-too-familiar feeling nowadays, feeling unproductive and anxious. It's all too common to look back on the day, the week, the month, or the year, and feel like you never ended up doing what you wanted to do. Today's guest is here to tell you about a productivity practice called Time Boxing. It's the idea that you decide ahead of time what you'll spend your time on each day, and for how long. The idea that you stick to the calendar you set for yourself, truly focusing on one task at a time. Our guest today says it's not just a method, it's a mindset, and he's here to help us learn how to take it on. Mark Zau Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of the Learning Technology company Filter.com, and he's the author of the book Time Boxing, the power of doing one thing at a time. Mark, thanks for being here. Curt, nice to be here. Did you struggle with productivity before you discovered Time Boxing? Yeah, very much so. I had a problem at the start of my career, so I was a disorganized mess. I was ambitious, I was bright, I was in a job that I could have done very well in, it was strategy consulting, but I didn't have a system for organizing my work and getting stuff done. That led to not doing a great job, getting in trouble, feeling stressed and overwhelmed. So you were being lazy, it's not like you weren't working enough hours. I was working many, many hours, that wasn't the issue. It was to do with working on what made most difference to the project that you were involved in. But then I saw an article on Harvard Business Review. It's by a guy called Daniel Markovitz called Why To Do List Don't Work. And it immediately, really struck a chord with me. I thought, okay, this makes logical sense. I want to try this immediately. And so I did. And I spent the next week doing it, actually the next five years doing it. And it really made a huge amount of difference, not just to how much I was getting done, but also how I felt. It improved my confidence. I just knew at any given moment what I should be working on. What was that idea? I mean, if to-do lists don't work, you didn't just get rid of them. What was the idea there? It's really to bring the benefits of the calendar and the to-do list together. So you put your to-do list in your calendar, you set appointments for when you're going to get things done. So you don't just have a list that you could do at any point in your life. You have a list of items at a time when they're going to get done and a system to see when they should be getting done. So it's a calendar multiplied by the to-do list, which actually brings benefits that are greater than the sum of parts. So there's that old saying, you know, if you want something to get done, ask the busiest person, you know, to do it for you. What do you make of that when you hear that? Honestly, I would say that almost anyone who is very productive or successful has some kind of system that sounds a lot like time-boxing. They may not be calling it time-boxing, but for example, people who are, you know, important senior in business, they will often have some kind of an assistant, an executive assistant, a personal assistant. What is that person doing? They are largely managing their calendar. Almost everyone that has that kind of assistance is time-boxing or actually employing someone to time-box for them and make sure that their use of time is just what it should be. I kind of like that idea. It's a little bit like the same way a budget puts dollars towards things that you think are important. Instead of just having like 12 things on your to-do list for the day, that putting them into your calendar and giving them different amounts of time and also which ones you do first, I can see how that's, you know, a reflection of just priorities in making budgeting your day for what you'd like to get done. Well, exactly, and I think the budgeting analogy works because with a budget, you have a finite amount of cash. With your day, you have a finite number of hours. How are you going to spend them? Be intentional about it. Have a system for being intentional and time-boxing isn't the only way of doing it, but I do actually think it's the most logical, easy, accessible and has multiple benefits. So it's just such a good way of achieving just that. So how does it work in practice like take us through a typical day? My typical day starts, I get dressed, I brush my teeth, and then the very first thing I do after that is to time box for 15 minutes. So I have a recurring calendar appointment in my calendar for 15 minutes and it's called time box today. So in that time, I'm doing nothing, but just thinking ahead to my day and my week and how I should be spending that time. And that's not just work, that's also exercise, that might be some readings, meditation, time with the kids, time with my wife. And I'm putting that together from meetings that I have that I can see elsewhere in the calendar from my inbox, thoughts that have occurred overnight, also just knowing that there are certain activities that are good for me, like learning or spending time with friends or exercise. So I'm then deciding what is most important and slotting that into my day usually around some of the existing meetings and commitments that I have. When I've done that at the end of the 15 minutes, I can see my whole day ahead. I know then that it will be a good day if I stick to that plan. And so it's a guide all the way through the day, you know, as inevitably I'll be pulled in different directions, but I always have a voice telling me, well, there's actually this one thing that you should be doing at this time. And so if I get distracted and I feel like I'm distracted, come back to the calendar, come back to the one thing, immediately feel less stressed, less overwhelmed, and get back to that one thing. And even if that one thing is difficult, it's much easier to face one difficult thing than several things that are irritating you, bothering you at once. How do you know how much time to give everything? Well, sometimes it's just really easy because the time box is, or your aspiration is to meditate for 30 minutes, so by definition, okay, it's going to be 30 minutes. But for a lot of knowledge work, the thing to do is to base it on your experience of having done something similar before. So, you know, you've gone through your inbox before when there are 100 emails, you've gone to your inbox when there are 50 emails, you'll have some sort of sense, you'll have some kind of internal or maybe explicit external calibration going on. And this is how you avoid the planning fallacy, which is that we don't anticipate the unexpected, I mean almost by definition. But if you look back at how long things have taken you in the past, you kind of, you get that bedded in, that's factored into the, to the estimate, you know, you won't get it perfect at the start. But if you, if you do it a little bit, you get a little bit better. And one of the points of time boxing as well is that if you say, okay, I'm going to write a 500 word blog, and I've got 45 minutes or an hour to do it. When you get close to the end, or actually, maybe when you get half way through, you adjust your expectations. So, if you're a little bit ahead, then you can slow down a bit and focus on quality. If you're a little bit behind, you might need to speed up. So, you don't get to, you know, two minutes until the end or the very end. And all of a sudden, you've run out of time and it's a, you know, it's a disaster. You pace yourself. I call it pacing and racing. So, it's partly a gamification thing. But also just a, a planning within the time box so that you get something that's useful and shippable done by the end of the, a lot of time. Part of the art of time boxing is adjusting things as you go. So, you get, you know, you're not aiming for perfection with any of the tasks that you're doing and none of, none of us achieve perfection with any of the task that we do. So, it's, we're acknowledging that. We're saying that we're going to fix the time. We're going to get something decent done in this time and then move on to the next thing. And then what do you do if you have a job where little fires emerge, you know, you get that email from your manager or things come up that you just have to deal with as you, as you go. Everyone has plans that change in their job. There's not a single job that wouldn't have that. My job is no exception. This is actually the most common objection to two time boxing and I'd say a few things about this. So, first of all, be realistic with the goals that you set in the first place. I'm only set time boxes for when you're less likely to be disturbed or where, if at all possible, you're less likely to have plans changed. So, just be sensible about it. Then allow some slack in your day so that there's a little bit of, or just leeway and breathing space in case a small thing changes. But then, of course. sometimes the plans just will change and they'll be big, but I would say that this is not very often. If you think about a meeting that you might have, and how often do you have to change a meeting? What you do, we do have to change a meeting sometimes, something comes up for one party or both parties or the other party, but how often is that? I would say it's less than 10% for almost everyone, and so if it's less than 10%, well then sure, you just move your time boxes around when you need to, which is less than 10% of the time. I do that every week, there'll be some time boxes that move, and it's shifting a few pixels around on a screen. It's really not a not a big deal. So, this objection that plans change, I mean, of course they do, but time boxing is flexible to accommodate that. What does your calendar look like? I'm just curious how much of your time you time box? My calendar looks pretty full. It is colour coded. There are a few different colours that correspond to different areas of my life that I deem to be important, so friends and families is one of them. The book is another time boxing in general, and then there's you know, some others do to do with work. So, the colour coded, I would say probably 70% of my time is time boxed in some way, so there are a lot of time boxes obviously in each day, and a lot of them are 15 minutes, so I actually have three sizes of time box. There's 15 minute time boxes, small, 30 minute time boxes which are medium, and 60 minute time boxes which are large. I have these three because they stack nicely, they stack up to an hour obviously very easily, they're simple, and I have a lot of 15 minute time boxes in particular because I feel that for me I can get a lot done, a surprising amount done in 15 minutes, so if I break tasks down, so sometimes it might be a 45 minute task really, but I break it down into three lots of 15 minutes, and then I get more done, I feel better about that, there's more time to relax later. Most of my days are time boxed and then I would say that maybe three quarters of my evenings and the weekends are time boxed as well. I really do feel with time boxing that if I make a plan, and I see it through and this applies to the regular working day, as well as the weekends and the evening, if I set the plan and I stick to it, I always feel good about it at the end because I set good intentions, you don't think when you're planning that you're going to, I don't know, waste some time here and just be scrolling on social media or watching this Netflix documentary that I'm not really that interested in, you'll make plans that do matter to you, and if you then get done, the things that matter to you, you feel good, I mean it's just utterly logical to me, that's how I and increasing number of people are living their lives and reacting against the overwhelm and everything else beating at our doors. I guess one thing that seems super important here is single-tasking. You are essentially blocking off time and a lot of people do that, but you are really just trying to do your serial single-tasker and not a multi-tasker in that sense. Yeah, I mean there is some new ones here, but essentially what you're saying is right that we get a lot more done if we're focused on one thing, I mean that's why actually that my newsletter is called one thing at a time, there is this firm belief that I and many others have that you get a lot more done, you feel less stressed if you're focusing on just one thing. Now the new ones is just that there are some combinations of tasks that do actually work reasonably well together. I mean for example, you can go for a jog and listen to a podcast, is that multi-tasking? Yes. I say single-tasking in general for new cognitively difficult tasks. I'd say one other thing about multi-tasking. Multi-tasking for most people really just means doing one thing for a short amount of time, being distracted then about a minute later and then doing something else and then doing something else a couple of minutes after after that. So it's really, it's also single-tasking really, but just doing it you know, minute by minute, not making any progress on any of these things, feeling frustrated, not knowing what you were meant to be doing at the beginning and that is a very unpleasant experience and I get to that as well, you know, because you're working on something and it's fine, you're totally focused on that and then some thought occurs or there's some notification that pops up somewhere and you start to be distracted and as that happens it starts to feel a little bit stressful for me and this is actually the real trick. This is the other objection to time boxing but what if you get distracted? Well, we all get distracted. I definitely, it definitely happens to me, you know, multiple times a day. When it does, I notice this slightly stressed feeling that I'm having. I actually say out loud to myself one thing at a time and as soon as I remember even to utter that mantra, I feel more relaxed. I know what I'm supposed to be doing where I need what I need to do which is to come back to my calendar. What's the one thing I'm supposed to be working on? Then get back to that. You feel happier. Be more productive. Happy days. Yeah, that's definitely a familiar thing and I know a lot of people feel like that sometimes that you can ask them like, you know, how was your day or how did things go and they're like, I'm not even sure exactly what I did. Well, you just hit on one of the most underrated benefits of time boxing. It's just to remember what you did on planet earth that day or, you know, even more difficult. What did you do last year's day afternoon? Almost no one would have any idea what they did. But I have a very good idea because it's in my calendar. Sometimes when you're reviewing the week, it can be handy as a reflective exercise. It can be poignant. So there's also benefits to time boxing. One of the ones that is least celebrated is the one that you just hit on which is, yeah, it's a log. It's a record of what you what you did. And if you've got a record of it, that can then unlock your memory. How does this work though in in organization? I'm just curious, like, I have a personal calendar. I have a work calendar. If I time box on my work calendar, that's going to look like I'm never available. I also don't want to, you know, managing two calendars. I'm just curious, like, how do you how do you recommend just kind of making the time box on your calendar that to do's line up with the rhythms of an organization? Yeah, okay. So you've raised a couple of points there, I think, cut. So one of them is, well, if you time box your work calendar is going to look like you're busy all the time. Well, it will by the time you get to the end of your week. But if you think about it as you go through this, let's say it's a Tuesday morning, you wake up early like, like I do and you time box the day. So at about at the 738 o'clock or whenever you're finished with that, you will at that point have a full looking Tuesday. But there's two things with that. First of all, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday will not be so full. So anyone wants to spend time with you on, you know, that later that week or the week after it's completely fine. There's also then a question of just your ways of working with people. So you may have fully time boxed Tuesday. But if people know that you're an avid time boxer, they will know that with certain kinds of items that you've put in there, they may be movable or half movable or movable in the case of emergencies. So this is about trust and transparency and collaboration and just being clear about how you work with your colleagues. This is also the office hours idea too. You can reserve time on your calendar and communicate that to the people on your team. They know they can always get you then. Exactly. I mean, you brought up something there that sort it depends on how it works in your organization or what kind of permissions you have set on your calendar. But people may only be able to see that you've blocked off time. Yeah, that is private. There's also the ability then to make it more visible to show exactly what you are doing when, which is a level of comfort that a lot of people don't have or need to work up to. What kind of benefits do you see from time boxing, but then also making how you budget and box your time more visible to your team or to other people in your organization? I think if you've been asked to do something and so let's say I'm cut. I want you to write this report and you say, "Yep Mark, we'll do." That often happens in business that that is the response. I mean, it's literally those words, "We'll do." So you're saying then to me that you will at some point in the future of time get this thing done. That doesn't really help me all that much. It's a little bit reassuring, but I'm not totally confident you're going to get it done. In most of them, you're not confident you're going to get it done by the time I need you to do it. Right. And so in your mind, you're thinking, "I need to follow up now. I've got to check on this person." I might need to follow up. Yeah. So it's an extra stress for me. So just compare and contrast that to, "Okay, thanks, Mark. I will get that done." And it's time boxed for 3 p.m. on Thursday. How does that sound? I can then say, "Well, first of all, thank you for being so helpful." And secondly, I can say, "Okay, well, no, I'm actually going to need it the day before that or it's completely fine. Regardless, I'm going to feel like you're a great colleague to work with and feel a lot more confident that you're going to get the thing done by the time I need you to get it done." So I think part of timeboxing is really about collaboration and communication and more harmonious work relationship between colleagues, because when people get asked someone to do something and it doesn't get done or doesn't get done to time, it's often just completely unnecessary that it goes that way. - It's funny you say that about communication because if you ask the question like, when can I expect that? - Sounds a little bit aggressive. - Yeah, I mean, it's a totally fair question, but it's just kind of like, you know, you feel like you're checking up on somebody because you want to know because you need a plan. - Yeah, I think with that actually as well, that ideally, if I say to you, yeah, I'd like that report by, you know, Thursday, 3 p.m. please, then you can time books accordingly, it's actually even more efficient because then you'll obviously put the time books at some point, you know, before Thursday 3 p.m. - Right, and you don't forget a deadline, which is, you know. - No, exactly. - It's tough and to be like, hey, can I have more time on this? Deadlines have become this kind of dirty word in business, but, you know, like, it's associated with micro management and, you know, difficult bosses, it really shouldn't be. I mean, sometimes there's just a deadline because something needs to go at a certain point. That's just a piece of information that we should, we should be able to treat a little bit more robotically. There's nothing personal about that. We just need to get that information across to others so that they can treat it accordingly. And part of that treatment in, and my view should be, can be and should be time boxing. - You've been time boxing for years. How is it a mindset for you? Just tell us a little bit more about what it has done for you. - In my case, it has led to becoming an author. So it's changed my career. For me though, and for many people I speak to, you can think of it simply as a technique to manage your time better, and it's definitely that. But it's actually a lot more. It's about intention, agency, purpose. It feels a lot bigger. You're basically saying with time boxing, that life is unpredictable and often hard. We could all do with some guidance. You can't or don't want to rely on other people all the time. But there is one source of certainty that each of us has in us. And that is, it's us. Not us in all moments when we're hurried and harried by everything that's going on in the world and the hustle and bust of the day. But it's us in that earlier quiet moment when we had the space and time to think and the way we're all to make some good, important decisions about what we should do and when that day, that's us at our very best. It's kind of us, you're accessing yourself in a higher self, in a quieter, better moment, being able to tap into that guide all the way through the day. So that's how it is with me. I think the greatest benefit that I get from time boxing is every single day, there'll be a point where I feel stressed. A bunch of thoughts occur to me about what I might be doing. And I can come back to the time box. But by coming back to the time box, I'm coming back to me in that earlier moment, giving my future self the reassurance that there is just one thing that you need to be thinking about, people that are about at that moment. Just come back to that. It's interesting you use the word agency because I do feel that we actually control a lot more than we think we do, right? We do have a lot of control over our time. And we have a lot of autonomy, even in jobs that feel like, you know, you don't have any. But it is, yeah, it's very easy to feel like you're losing control or things are controlling you. And you're saying that time boxing helps you kind of take ownership of that. Absolutely, there's a constellation of mega trends, the internet, smartphones, knowledge work, work from home, post-COVID in particular, that does exactly what you just described. It means that we've got a lot of choice at any given moment over what we do, but we also have a lot of systems and powers that are influencing what we spend time on. So time boxing is an antidote to that. You're saying, okay, look, there is all of this stuff that you could be doing, but there is just one thing that you should be doing. And it's whatever you said that you should be doing at the start of your day. So it's very, very much about agency. That's actually the way if I had to sum up the whole book in one word, it would be that. It would be agency. -HBR leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review. This episode was produced by Mary Dew. On leadership's team includes Maureen Hoek, Rob Eckhart, Erica Trexler, and Ian Fox. If this episode helped you, please share it with your friends and colleagues and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. While you're there, consider leaving us a review. 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