Fixed length meetings. | Strictly sticking to the time allotted in a meeting agenda for a topic. |
Spending 5 minutes on an email and no longer. | Companies with a strict 1 hour lunch hour. |
Allocating a generous amount of time for quality time such as a family dinner. | Blocking your calendar for productivity time in the late afternoon. |
Studying in strictly scheduled sessions of one hour each. | Deciding to leave a problem unsolved if you can’t solve it within a day. |
Working in three week sprints that ship change. | Blocking a day to clear do your taxes. |
A sales person who deprioritizes clients who take longer than an month to commit. | A manager who gives a low performing employee a month to turn things around. |
Keeping idle conversation with coworkers to 5 minutes or less. | Taking breaks in strict 10 minute intervals. |
Giving yourself an hour to make a major decision. | Giving an employee 20 minutes to pitch an idea. |
Meetings
It is common to put a time limit on meetings. This leads to a culture of getting to the point. In many cases, an issue will be identified in a meeting but not resolved. Afterwards, those who can directly fix the issue meet separately.Sprints
Sprints are fixed-length work cycles that produce change. The fixed length nature of sprints allow for incremental change. This is done to prevent projects from becoming long, complex and failure prone. By keeping development cycles to weeks instead of months, teams are constantly delivering work. This tends to minimize the risk of large scale project failure.Problem Solving
Timeboxing is commonly used to limit the risks of problem solving activities. For example, if your computer is broken and you're not sure you can fix it, you might give it 5 hours before you buy another one. If you don't timebox the repair you may end up spending weeks on it with no result.Productivity
Timeboxing aligns to the Pareto principle that suggests that the first 20% of effort produces 80% of value. Limiting the time available for a task may particularly boost the productivity of those prone to needless perfectionism. Timeboxing will also tend to boost the productivity of people who tend to get distracted because going off in random directions is infeasible when you have little time.Creativity
Timeboxing aligns to the idea that constraints are conductive to creativity. For example, if you give yourself an intensive hour to make a life decision you may be more creative than if you spend months and months causally thinking about it.| Overview: Timeboxing | ||
Type | ||
Definition | Setting a strict time limit on a meeting, activity, decision or process in order to encourage productivity and reduce risk. | |
Related Concepts | ||
