Go Toe-to-Toe with Time — Choose To Thinq

(Written by Ankita Verma for Edition 52 of The Upleveler, our weekly smartletter)

Innovation? Learning? Executing more?

Trying to find time to uplevel all these can have you on the ropes.
Try timeboxing. No, it doesn’t call for perfecting a mean left hook or owning a membership to a secret fight-club.

Though fun, unstructured time is bad for productivity

Parkinson’s Law states, ‘work tends to expand to fill the time allotted to it’. Without set deadlines and priorities, a to-do list can be inefficient. Though choosing tasks to do can lend a self-led person some degree of freedom, the repeated switches from execution-mode to thinking-mode can drain your time and energy. The paradox of choice can even cause one to procrastinate or just throw in the towel.

Why box your time?

Timeboxing is the practice of pre-allocating a fixed amount (boxes) of time for each of your tasks. Migrating a to-do list into a calendar lets you prioritize different types of tasks, force results, and measure/track progress. The limitation afforded by time-constraints also creates a sense of urgency, which curbs perfectionist tendencies and enhances creativity and focus. Providing a sort of gamified discipline, timeboxing is the ultimate time-taming tool – urging you to complete tasks on time and giving you rewarding dopamine hits when you do.

We hope you’ll consider throwing your hat into the ring for timeboxing. Remember, you can get time in your corner, simply by going the distance and not pulling any punches.

Like learning about interesting concepts? Subscribe to The Upleveler for more such posts.