May 3, 2020
Timeboxing is a very powerful technique for making progress when your attention is being pulled in many different directions. It is related to the Pomodoro technique.
A timebox must have:
Let’s take each one of those in order.
The pressure of a deadline does wonderful things in focusing your mind. I am a huge fan of deadlines in many situations.
For a timebox, you can commit to a deadline of an hour, a day, a week, or anything in between. I’m reluctant to go much longer than that. If you have a larger project, I recommend decomposing it into multiple smaller sub-projects, and having a timebox for each sub-project.
This is the secret sauce that makes the timebox so powerful. The default action is what you commit to doing, in the event that the timebox expires (reaches the deadline) and yet the work you were trying to do is not complete.
Default actions are a very simple failsafe or fallback action and they set a floor for the worst case scenario.
For example, if your timebox is supporting your need to write a job description for a new open headcount, then your default action might be to post an empty job description with nothing more than the job title and a bullet list of your tech stack. It won’t be perfect, but something is better than nothing. I can think of better default actions, and as you get familiar with the practice, you will think of better default actions more quickly.
Sometimes your default action is embarrassing, either in its incompleteness or some other dimension. Still, you must commit to doing it. This can inspire more focus prior to the deadline, on the grounds that a small negative outcome is better than a large negative outcome.
The key concept about the default action is that you choose it BEFORE starting the work inside the timebox. You should not change your default action during the timebox.
Now you do your work. Keep your eye on the clock (or calendar). When you are halfway to the deadline, ask yourself “is the work I have now better or worse than my default action?” Then keep working. Work intensely until the deadline is upon you. Then decide. If your final work product is better than the default, then ship it. If it is not, you must do the default action, and move on to your next task. No looking back, and no regrets.