We grow ‘em big here in Texas. Honestly, it was the size of my forearm.
It’s leap week. By which I mean the week that contains February 29th. We only get this extra February day once an olympiad and I’ve always felt that it really should be observed as a holiday. Every business should be closed this one day out of every four years. No furniture sales, no floral deliveries. Nothing outside of emergency medical care.
On this one special day, everyone should be allowed to focus on what they are most passionate about. Reading, playing guitar, restoring that classic car out in the garage, gardening. Whatever that one thing that you never have quite enough time for is, you should be allowed this one day to dedicate your time to it. It’s a pipe dream, to be sure. But wouldn’t it be nice?
Ah well. Dreams aside, I thought I’d make my first report on the great time boxing experiment. The first thing I have to admit is that I’m doing a terrible job of using any sort of official form or policy to enforce the time boxing. I’m just a little too informal by nature for that sort of thing, I’m afraid.
That said, the good news is that I’ve embraced the concept thoroughly and I’m making it work on a somewhat intuitive level. Case in point: Last Sunday my wife and I needed to get to the community garden to set her plot set up for planting (this is Texas, spring comes early). Neither of us really wanted to put down the Sunday Times, get up from the couch and go shovel… compost. But I knew that if we didn’t do it, then it simply wouldn’t get done. Worse, the window for it would slip by completely and we’d be terribly unhappy that we’d been lazy.
So we turned to the magic of time boxing. We agreed that we’d spend exactly one hour working at the garden. We’d get as much composting done as we could and then we’d walk away, at least for the day. And you know what? We got 80% of the plot covered, on top of some weeding and general cleanup. In the end we went over our hour by about 20 minutes, but that’s fine. In fact, that’s one of the hopes inherent in time boxing for tasks you just don’t want to do - that you’ll get into it and get even more done than you would have without that built-in limit. Sure, we didn’t finish the project, but we got a hell of a lot more done than we would have by simply not going. Or, frankly, than we would have if we hadn’t known that we were going to stop at a certain point. Believe me, I’m lazy enough about stuff like this that if we’d made ourselves go with the intent of working until we were done, I’d have dragged my feet for hours.
Now, imagine taking this approach to those annoying tasks at the office. You may not wind up with zucchinis as big as your forearm, but you’ll get stuff done. And that should help you have enough time for the things that you really want to do.
-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content