Timeboxing doubles productivity

A calculation of the benefits of the ultimate time management method

If you're at a corporate and interested in a talk from me about timeboxing or AI use-cases, just LMK by replying to this email.

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In a 2018 HBR article I claimed that timeboxing had ‘at least doubled’. To be honest, this was a just a hunch, not scientific rigor. I intend here to investigate that claim of mine.  

It won’t be easy. It’s much harder to ascertain the productivity of knowledge work than it is to calculate the value of labour in the field or the factory. 

In the field, labour can be measured in perfectly tangible outcomes, such as how much crop is harvested each day, eg kilograms of apples per worker per day. Apples then have a price on the market so the value is clear.

In the factory, value is similarly easy to calculate. Consider an assembly line for manufacturing bicycles. The productivity of the assembly line workers can be quantified by the number of bicycles assembled per shift divided by the number of worker days required for that output, eg bikes per worker per day. Bikes then have a price on the market and the value is clear here too.

Knowledge work is a different story. Such work is so varied, and seemingly disconnected from unit and market economics. What’s the productivity of a marketing strategist or the value of a marketing strategy? What’s the productivity of a back-end engineer or the value of some of the code behind a microservice? 

But I want to share a crude methodology which works by indexing to the as-is knowledge worker and estimating uplifts to that person’s productivity. I’ll state the assumptions and the logic all the way through this article, so you can call out what you disagree with and/or adjust numbers to fit better with your own intuitions and context. I’d much rather sound naive, stir up debate and elicit criticism, than play it safe by not offering a number at all. I know there are several economists who receive this newsletter, whose critique and refinements I look forward to.

For individuals

Timeboxing boosts productivity for individuals in several ways.

The biggest factor is working on the right stuff. By giving yourself just a little time at the start of the day, before pressure descends, to work out what it is that really matters, we…achieve more of what really matters. Peter Drucker puts it perfectly, ‘There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all’. I can’t find a study that makes a serious attempt at quantifying the benefits of systematic prioritisation vs ad hoc. So let’s proceed with a simplistic but to my mind credible pair of assumptions: without first prioritising, in dedicated and systematic ways on average we work on tasks of 7/10 importance, on average; and when we do systematically prioritise as with timeboxing, we work on tasks of 9/10 importance, on average. That’s a 29% uplift for starters.

Parkinson’s Law has been interpreted to state that work expands to fill the time available. By fixing the time, then, we get a useful corollary, that ‘work contracts to fill the time allotted for its completion’. Many studies support this idea, but there’s a limit to this productivity bargain and that limit is, according to several studies, approximately 30%. We’ll assume conservatively that by timeboxing we can achieve half of that, ie 15%. 

Multitasking and context switching is now widely understood to reduce productivity. Some research suggests that distractions can take us away from our peak concentration for 23 minutes and that their negative impact can be as much as 40%. With the big three distractions and others, this is believable. Again, we’ll take a more sanguine figure of 20% for our calculation and further assume that we don’t entirely extinguish multitasking-borne distraction, and assume just 15% here. 

Pockets of time. Timeboxing makes us much more aware of even 15-minute boxes of time that open up to us over the course of the day, usually when we are forced to wait (for a train, a download, a friend, in a line). For many of us, these pockets add up to around an hour a day. Let’s assume we are able to use 30 minutes of that hour for more productive activities. That’s an extra 30 minutes out of the 8-hour working day, ie another 6%.

What does this get us to? With the assumptions above which will compound we can multiply the factors together: 

1.29 (right stuff) x 

1.15 (Parkinson’s Law) x 

1.15 (multitasking) x

1.06 (pockets) 

= 1.89

Already, then, we’re strikingly close to the promised doubling. Add to this some of the less tangible benefits (timeboxing provides a searchable record of all you’ve done, timeboxing helps us reduce our levels of stress, timeboxing helps us think more deeply and clearly and achieve a flow state, timeboxing helps us in our non-working lives too) and it seems certain we’ll get well over the 2.00 threshold. 

For businesses

Businesses double dip on the benefits of timeboxing. Of course, they derive all the benefits for individuals discussed above. They also gain from the network effects of this collaborative practice. And with network effects, the the more widespread the practice, the more deeply those benefits are felt. I list a few here which I won’t try to quantify, partly because the set of assumptions we’d need to make are just so broad, and partly because I feel I’ve already substantiated my 2x productivity claim in the section above. 

Efficient communication & collaboration. The digital sharing of calendars promotes pre-emptive transparency, trust and coordination. Deadlines and workstreams are much clearer, along with the communication around them. As more employees across teams adopt the practice, this efficiency and clarity is amplified further still. 

Employee wellbeing. By enabling and encouraging people to choose how they spend their time and dovetail home life responsibilities with greater purpose and intention, staff are happier, more engaged and report greater job satisfaction.

Employer care. Implementing a method and mindset like timeboxing signals a company's commitment to efficient work practices and work-life balance for its people. It enhances its reputation as an employer that values staff wellbeing in a highly practical way. Timeboxing can even be established as part of the organisational identity of the company, one centred around innovative and intentional time management. Why might you choose timeboxing, specifically, to be at the heart of such an identity? Because time is fundamental, productivity is a necessity, and timeboxing touches on so many productivity techniques (roughly two-thirds of these, for example).

How will you know?

I hope the above is persuasive enough to encourage you to buy the book and try out timeboxing. But let’s say you do both. How will you know that you’re getting this claimed doubling of productivity (or any of the other benefits)?

In the last chapter of the book, there are two tables. The first is a list of behaviours which indicate that you’re doing timeboxing, that you’re an active timeboxer, eg Do you maintain a to-do list? Do you choose when to reply to emails? Do you actively think about when to take breaks? 

The second is a list of behaviours that indicate that timeboxing is making you more effective and happier in your job and in your life, eg Do you think more clearly, deeper or better? Are you sleeping better? How often do you not follow through with a scheduled timebox?

These should go quite some way to tell you the answer, if it’s not already obvious. And for corporate clients I send a survey, straight after the session, and a follow-up after 3 months, to show the before- and after-state.

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Timeboxing doubles productivity, after all. Phew. It therefore provides a near-instant return on investment. If you spent a 60-minute timeboxing session establishing the basics of the habit you’d be paid back within 60 minutes of the end of that session. This is not surprising since not only are the benefits substantial (and, now, quantified) but there’s barely any associated cost because we all already timebox to some extent through meetings. Timeboxing is merely an extension of an existing behaviour, not a brand-new one. 

I’m glad to have carried out this more thorough investigation, but my hunch from five years ago never felt wrong.