Plans change—so what?
Protect yourself from needlessly disruptive info
TLDR: Plans change but that's perfectly fine for the superbly supple system that is timeboxing
Word count: 539
Read time: 3 mins
The biggest objection to timeboxing is that plans change, potentially setting off a wave of deadline misses, failure and disappointment through the rest of the day.
Suppose you've timeboxed 10-11 AM to finalize a client presentation. But at 10:40 you find a critical error in the data, that means you’ll need to rework three slides from scratch. All subsequent timeboxes are now in jeopardy: what happens to the 11:30 team check-in? Or the noon deadline for budget numbers?
My standard answer to this frequently asked question comes in four parts:
Timebox realistically in the first place (neither too ambitious nor too generous).
Allow some leeway in your schedule for breaks. Two 15-min slots, for example.
Ask yourself: do your plans change all that much, really? Compare them to meetings which also need to change - sometimes. But how often? One in 10 meetings?
And if you do need to adjust your schedule, just do it. It’s moving a few pixels on a screen, timeboxes in a calendar. Make what changes you need to, and carry on.
But after a few talks I gave recently, I've dug into this in conversations with attendees and come to understand what most really mean when they say that ‘plans change’.
They're not talking about unforeseeable disasters, genuine emergencies or a force majeure. What they usually mean is quite mundane. They mean that part of the way through their day, they become aware of some new information (usually this is simply a few new emails in their inbox) from a senior colleague or a client. This new information feels urgent and creates an overwhelming impulse to act right away. And so they act. This of course takes time, and the subsequent, best-laid plans go awry.
One helpful question for this scenario is: did that new information really bring such urgency to the situation? Could the email reply wait a few hours? What’s the worst that could actually happen? That email has just come in. It therefore feels of-the-moment, pressing, to be dealt with right away. In reality, a slightly delayed response would not be noticed by the sender 99% of the time.
But there's a prior, even more helpful question: how did you become aware of this new information in the first place? In the vast majority of cases, it's just that you allowed yourself to see a notification about a new message in your inbox, on Slack, in Teams. The urgency wasn't thrust upon you—you invited it in.
So, assuming you don't have an hour-by-hour level of urgency to your work (and most of us don't, thankfully), the answer to changing plans lies in not letting them—by protecting yourself from new, potentially disruptive but ultimately not all that pressing information. Put your phone in a different room, hide your inbox, mute notifications. Create a fortress around your timeboxes. They are precious!
Value yourself and your time, prioritise your plans and yourself more. Create the conditions for focus to thrive. Your plans don't need to change anywhere near as much as you might think. Most notifications can wait until you’re ready to read and act on them. Protect your attention and your ability to do meaningful work, one thing at a time.
Marc
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
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