The Time Management Technique That Can Work For Anyone

Overcoming the fear of being unavailable is essential to making timeboxing stick

Photo by Creative Christians on Unsplash

Too often, people eschew a method of bettering their life by naming the reasons it won’t work for them.

“I can’t adhere to that diet because…”

“Using an app to find love just isn’t for me because…”

People regularly give me similar excuses about timeboxing, a powerful technique I recommend in my bestselling book, Indistractable.

I, like many others, have transformed my life by using timeboxing every day; in my humble opinion as a behavioral designer for over a decade, it’s the most powerful time management technique out there.

But I can always find defeatists who are sure that timeboxing isn’t for them for one reason or another. Needless to say, that kind of thinking is not helpful.

Finding the exceptions to a well-studies technique shouldn’t be the rule.

Rather than searching for excuses why it won’t work, we should try to find ways to make it work.

To do that, we have to start by asking the right questions. Instead of looking for reasons why, “This won’t this suit me?” try asking, “How can I adapt this to my life?”

Here are some ways to overcome the resistance to putting timeboxing into practice and get started right away.

Start Small

Adopt this mindset shift: Any progress, even incremental, is progress.

Many people are overwhelmed by timeboxing because they can’t imagine planning their day with their unpredictable schedule: Perhaps their workload fluctuates day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute, or they’re at the whim of their clients or boss.

But timeboxing doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can take a few small steps each day.

First, separate your work into two buckets:

• Reactive work: Being on call and reacting to others’ needs via calls, texts, emails, etc.
• Reflective work: Tasks we can only do without distraction like planning, strategizing, writing, thinking, etc.