Scheduling for Life’s Surprises: When Timeboxing is Toast - Nir And Far

Most people think that the whole point is to finish the task. But that's not what timeboxing is about. Timeboxing rather is about figuring out how long things take you to do by working on them without distraction.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. Today we're going to be reading my article, Scheduling for Life Surprises When Timeboxing is Toast. And with me, as always, is Nick Gray, author of the fantastic book the Two Hour Cocktail Party. Nick, how's it going?

It's going great. It was nice to see you in New York a few weeks ago.

That was amazing. Just so everyone knows, we put Nick's book to good use. Nick led the charge on hosting a party at my place with some other authors and creators and he blew it out of the water. It was honestly one of the most amazing parties I've ever been to in my life. It was that good.

It was a great event and I also got listeners will be happy. I got near to talk about timeboxing for this room of top YouTube creators and Instagram superstars and they loved it. So it was a lot of fun and it's just nice to hang out and to meet in person with other people that are interested in productivity and time management and things like that. So thank you. Thank you for hosting Nir. We got to do it again.

Absolutely. Yeah. And to see your book. I read your book. I loved your book. And to see it put to good use and to see how you put it all together using the methodologies in your book. From the name tags to the mixers, to the meet and greet to the way you split up the evening. It's something anyone can do. So again, highly recommend if you haven't already. Read Nick's book the Two Hour Cocktail Party. Fantastic book.

Thank you. Thanks for the shout out. I'll start in and we're going to read this article. Nir will chime in a couple times to give some behind the scenes info. This is scheduling for life's surprises. When timeboxing is toast, you have more control than you think. Some days the world seems intent on sabotaging your timeboxed calendar. A meeting goes longer than expected. The daycare center calls to say that your child is ill and has to be picked up asap. A project you thought would take an hour to complete instead took three. Before you know it, the end of the day arrives and you've barely given time to the tasks you had wanted to do. But what can you do? Some events are just outside your control, right when it comes to the unpredictable. A time boxed calendar just can't hold up. Well. No, if you regularly fail to follow your time boxed calendar, you might be doing it wrong. The mission of a timeboxed calendar is to protect your time. We can bolster it using five methods to avoid a derailed calendar and to recover when it does happen.

Yeah, I just wanted to give a little background on why I wrote this article, because this is something I hear all the time when people hear about timeboxing. And again, the point of time boxing is to use this technique. That's the most widely studied technique in in time management, which is setting an implementation intention. And literally thousands of peer reviewed studies have shown that this is the most effective thing you can possibly do. Which is just a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. And despite it being so effective, we hear a lot of people providing one excuse or another around why this can't work for them. And so one of the excuses I heard most often when it comes to why someone can't time boxes is because of what if there's a surprise? What if there's something I couldn't have planned for? And so that's the background around this article that if you ever heard, you know, I'm thinking about timeboxing, but I haven't really put into place because my life is too chaotic and too hectic. I can't do it. This article is for you.

Great. Number one, be honest about what's really unpredictable. Be proactive about preventing distractions from your timeboxed calendar. This means getting real with yourself over which events are truly unpredictable. A family member put in the hospital after an accident is unpredictable. This kind of event is rare and you couldn't have done anything to prevent it. But if you experience the same distractions repeatedly, they are not unpredictable. You know there's a good chance they could happen, even if you don't know exactly when. Meetings that go over time and client calls out of the blue are actually very predictable. And considering that more than 100,000Americans had to skip out on work because of child care problems in October 2022, calls from the daycare to take your kid home are predictable too. Identify the most common unexpected events that tempt you away from your timeboxed calendar. What can you do ahead of time to thwart those distractions?

All right, so the point here is that if something is predictable, then it's something you can plan for. Do kids get sick? Yeah, kids get sick. As a father of a teenager. You know, our daughter got sick a lot when she was back in public school, so we know that something that is in fact predictable. So what do you do about that? You can't just throw up your hand and say, oh, we couldn't have known that our kid gets sick, because that's something that you in fact, do have some visibility over. Traffic. I hear that all the time. How can I possibly plan my day if traffic might, might, might happen and I might not get to my first meeting on time? Well, traffic is kind of predictable. It happens from time to time.

Number two have a contingency plan. The best way to combat recurring unexpected events is to plan for the worst case scenario. If a certain meeting often runs late, timebox an additional half hour for it so you have some leeway. Handle random client calls by implementing availability hours for clients to call you, or split availability hours among your team so one person is always on duty. Or you might pad your daily agenda with 30 minutes in case clients call. Parents and guardians can build a reliable network of people who can pick up and watch their kid for a few hours when the daycare center calls for an early pickup. Search for three or four parents or guardians in your neighborhood or at your child's school, or use Facebook or another app to find them. See, social media can be a good thing. Everyone from single parents to those with a partner or family members nearby will be interested in a free network like this. Number three overallocate Overestimate how much time you need for every time BOX task in your day. Our instinct is to pack as much as we can into the time we have, but that greatly increases the risk that one small disruption, say chatting with a coworker for 10 minutes, will throw our entire day off kilter. Try allocating 20% or even 50% more time for a task than you think it needs. If you have extra time left over, then you can either take a break or address the next task early. Over time, you should gain a better understanding of how much time you need for each task and tweak your timeboxed calendar accordingly. Don't over timebox Avoid shoving every little task into a timebox calendar. They'll just pile up and bleed into other tasks. Or having too many things to do may overwhelm you and make you not want to do any of it. A timebox calendar is not a to do list with scheduled tasks. The goal of timeboxing is not to get everything or even anything done. The goal is to work without distraction when you said you would on what you said you would. So instead of scheduling every little task, do what I schedule time for admin. Three times a week, I schedule an hour and a half for admin, during which I choose whichever tasks I want from a list of to dos that aren't time sensitive. If I feel overwhelmed, I start with an easy task number five when you miss one task, adhere to the next. Despite all your efforts, something might still manage to derail your time boxed calendar. If so, don't let the domino effect occur. Call it quits on the missed timeboxed event and recommit to tackling the next without distraction. Reserve extra time in your calendar every few weeks to handle the overflow. Having a hectic life is no excuse for constantly breaking a timeboxed calendar. People make time for what they want. As the saying goes, you should too.

Yeah, that's it in a nutshell that there's really. You know, I've heard every conceivable excuse you can think of and to date no one stumped me. So I would love if you have any reason to think hey, you know what? This just won't work for my life. That's very nice, Nir. I know you've done all this research, but here's why it won't work. I would love to to hear from you. Here's what I'd love for you to do. If you're listening to the sound of my voice, go to your podcast service, whatever that might be, whether it's Spotify or itunes, whatever you use and leave a comment in that in our podcast. Just click over to the podcast and tell me why in the comments. Why? Why this might not work from you. Or you can email me at near and far.com I'd love to hear from you as well. And that would that will inform kind of my next articles because from what I've seen to date, if you use these tactics that we just discussed that Nick just read off these five tactics, I have not found anyone that this doesn't work for now. Again, those tactics require us to, number one, realize what is actually not predictable. And those things, you're right. Like those one in a million type of events of my house got struck by lightning. You can't plan for. You just have to roll with the punches. But it turns out that 99% of the things that people think are unpredictable are actually quite predictable. Like traffic, my kid getting sick, the common excuses. These are things that you can plan for. Number two, have that contingency plan of if that thing that happens sometimes. But not always happens. What are you going to do about it? You over allocate the time, right? Just like if somebody very, very important is going to have a meeting with you, if Oprah Winfrey or, you know, somebody you really admire was going to have dinner with you, you would get there a little early to make sure that traffic didn't make you late to a very important meeting. And, and yet, somehow, when it comes to going to the gym or reading a book or doing something for ourselves, somehow we let that time slip away. We don't overalllocate the time to make sure that that time is there. We don't over time box. Step number four here of making sure that your timebox is not a to do list. That we make sure that we have plenty of time for those admin tasks, those small little tasks, and that we don't measure ourselves based on completing the big tasks. This is really, really important that most people think that the whole point is to finish the task, but that's not what timeboxing is about. Time boxing, rather, is about figuring out how long things take you to do by working on them without distraction. This is a really, really important point. A lot of times when people start working on a task, they think, well, I didn't finish, so I have to bleed into the next time box. Big, big mistake. Rather, what you want to do is say, okay, here's how far I got in this task. How many more of these time boxes will I need to allocate tomorrow, the next day, the next week in order to finish the entire task? That's the purpose of timeboxing, not to finish the task. Because that is the only way that you will create this feedback loop to inform how long things actually take. And then the fifth point, again to reiterate, is that when you miss one task, you get right back to the next. You don't stop and let it bleed in. You get back immediately to what you said in advance that you were going to do with your time and attention.

That idea that if you miss one task, not to waste the whole day, but just say, hey, I got off track on this one. My next time box is scheduled in 15 minutes. Maybe I'll do whatever I want to do for 15, but in those 15 minutes, I'm going to start right on time and do what I said I was going to do.

That's right. That's exactly right. And then, by the way, you can change it for the next time. Right? The point here isn't to be a drill sergeant, to beat yourself up and say you're somehow inferior or how could you get distracted? We all get distracted from time to time. I still get distracted from time to time. The difference is I see why I got distracted and I make sure it doesn't happen again in the future. Polo Coelho said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So if you keep getting distracted by the same things again and again, you're deciding to be distractible. Whereas an indistractable person says, okay, I got distracted that one time. I'm not going to let it happen again and again.

We heard that at our meetup during your Q and A, people said, hey, I know I have an article due. They were a writer. I know I have a project that's due, but I see a pile of dishes that's in the kitchen and I feel like I have to clean those dishes. And you said, well, do you make time to clean the dishes? And it turned out no, they just would clean the dishes whenever. And so you said, well, time box, clean those dishes. Maybe do that first to get it out of there. And then now you can focus a little more clearly.

That's right, because you've offloaded that thinking of I got to do the dishes, I got to do the dishes, I got to do the dishes. No, there's time in the schedule. You don't have to think about it until it says it's time on the schedule to do so. And that prevents you from. From letting it become an internal trigger. Right? That when I feel a task is difficult or boring or I don't really feel like doing that thing, well, let me just go do something else. I'll go do the dishes. In which case you're really hurting yourself. Because even though it's a productive task, I need to do the dishes at some point. If it's not what you said you were going to do in advance, now it's a distraction. So it becomes an excuse that we lie to ourselves, telling ourselves, well, this is a productive thing. And really it's just as much of a distraction because. Because it's not what you said you were going to do in advance.

Well, these are really helpful tips for how you can schedule for life surprises. Even when you think timeboxing is toast, near is willing to bet that it can actually work for you. You're listening to near and Far Business behavior and the brain. Nir Eyal is the best selling author of Hooked how to build habit forming products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. Sign up for his free newsletter if you haven't yet, you can find that@www.nearandfar.com. that's www.nir and a n d far f a r dot com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next. Epis.