Top 10 time management techniques
Timeboxing is better & easier than the rest, yet also supportive of them all
Of course, I have an explicit and official interest in promoting timeboxing. So take this with a pinch of salt if you like, but: I’m quite sure timeboxing is the greatest of all time management techniques. I’ll make the case here.
Six years ago, my company, filtered.com, undertook some research into the Top 100 productivity tips. We scoured the web for all the top-X lists of productivity techniques, categorised them all, removed duplicates, and calculated a ranking from 1-100. It was a content marketing exercise – we and I had no skin in this game.
That research took off, initially on LinkedIn. It was featured in this Harvard Business Review article, and it’s been quoted around the internet and on LinkedIn countless times. It’s become productivity folklore, for good or ill. It was also used in this viral TikTok about timeboxing, which got millions of views.
At the weekend, I was working on an infographic (image above) to list the top 10 time-management techniques (simply drawing on and from the larger list, while maintaining the ranking).
Timeboxing is, of course, top of the list, since it was top of the entire productivity list. But my argument that it’s the best runs deeper than that. Timeboxing enables and encourages every single one of the other techniques on this list. Take Eat That Frog, which advocates tackling harder problems first. Well, if that’s how you want to tackle your day, choose such tasks for your early timeboxes. Timeboxing makes the frog-eating happen at a particular time. Or take the last one: time auditing. You get this for free with timeboxing as your timeboxed digital calendar will have a (searchable) log of what you’ve done and when, as a by-product of the method.
In fact, timeboxing, properly conceived and carried out, incorporates the majority of the methods on the wider productivity list. I count about two-thirds that belong to timeboxing.
This is not surprising, really. Not to me anyway. Fundamentally, timeboxing is giving space for our intentionality and a system to carry those intentions out. There’s little else that we’d want or need from a productivity system.
But on top of all that, timeboxing is utterly facile to put into practice. We all already timebox, with the meetings that we have in our calendars. Timeboxing is simply a mindful, deliberate extension of this existing habit. So in the terms of BJ Fogg, it’s tiny, or in those of James Clear, it’s easy.
That’s why it’s the greatest of all time.
If you’re not already fully in the swing of timeboxing (and 88% of you are not), you really should give it a proper go over the next seven days.
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)
Connect with me on LinkedIn (I will say yes!)