Its 4pm right now and I’m feeling pretty great about my first day putting TimeBoxing/TimeBlocking into practice. I’ll reflect on it using a Rose-Bud-Thorn template; i.e. what’s going really well or blooming, what’s going good and is forthcoming or budding, and finally what’s been challenging or thorny to grasp.
Rose:
The front-loaded work of TimeBoxing only took about 5 minutes this morning and fit neatly at the end of my morning routine. I finished my morning journaling and capped it off with a few minutes of looking at my schedule for the day, looking at prioritized tasks for the day, estimating how long each task might take, and then strategizing on when it would best fit into my schedule for the day.
I found this first piece of practice to be immediately helpful. It yielded a more realist understanding that the list I’d made for the day would probably not be finished unless multiple things took less time than estimated.
This first payoff alone has been very valuable, because I haven’t felt anxious about “getting everything done” today. I prioritized my tasks and had a plan to do the most important stuff. The rest of the list would be bonus or lagniappe if I got to it.
Bud:
There seems to be two distinct ways to do my TimeBoxes throughout the day:
1) Doing a task while having a stopwatch or open-ended timer going. The point being to focus and get the task done as quickly as possible while still being effective.
2) Setting an alarm for a specific amount of allotted time for the task. Then stopping and dropping that task when the alarm goes off. The point of this one being to move on to other planned tasks so that they get the previously established amount of time.
I think number two is the more traditional and rigorous way to do it, if you’re sticking strictly to the TimeBoxing method. But today I’ve tried doing a hybrid of these two approaches. I’ve set an alarm to go off when the allotted time is done, but I’ve also been running a timer to see how long it takes.
I don’t know if that’s doing too much or defeating the point, but I guess I’m experimenting to see which approach I like more or get more benefits from doing. I’m focused on practicing TimeBoxing this week so I might try one day doing just one and another day doing just the other. We’ll see.
Regardless, I’m finding that I’ve been less distracted today AND I’ve been able to stay more singularly focused on a task. Before TimeBoxing I’d let myself toggle between different tasks on the fly, but since I’m tracking time for certain tasks I’ve been more rigorous with staying with one thing until it’s done. I’m writing other things on a sticky note if they come up and I don’t want to forget to come back to to them.
Thorn:
I did not expect vacuuming to take like twice as long as I’d estimated for today. But I didn’t expect to have to deep clean the vacuum and cut lots of hair off the roller. Twice. lol. Crazy shit. But that’s what the days do, they deliver the unexpected. I’m in good spirits about it, albeit irritated at the much bigger time cost. Feels good to get this task done though.. it had been on my mind for almost a week.
So far TimeBoxing is off to a great start in my world. There’s lots of room for improvement and honing, but this is just Day One. I wonder where I’ll be with by day seven or eight. :)
There’s much good to come.