Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. From work, to chores, to entertaining distractions, there are many options for what you can be doing at any moment in the modern world. We often endlessly toggle between these options and, as a result, feel frazzled and frustratingly unproductive. We feel ever haunted by the question, what
should I be doing right now? Or, what am I even doing right now? My guest will share a simple but effective productivity method that will quash this feeling of overwhelm, answer that question, and help you make much better use of your time. Markzow Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of Filtered.com, a learning tech company, and the author of Timeboxing, the power of doing one
thing at a time. In the first half of our conversation, we unpack what Timeboxing, which brings your calendar into do list together, is all about, and it benefits as a time management system, including how it can help you get more done, live with greater intention and freedom, and even create a log of memories. In the second half of our conversation, we get into the practicalities of Timeboxing. From how to capture the to-do's that will go on your calendar,
to how to deal with things that might pull you away from it. We enter conversation with how you can get started with Timeboxing right now, and have a more focused, productive, and satisfying day tomorrow. After shows over, check out our show notes at a-wim.is slash Timeboxing. Markzow Sanders, welcome to the show. Nice to be here, thanks, Brett. So you got a new book out about a productivity system that you've been using for the past 10 plus years, and it's called Time
Boxing. What is Timeboxing in a nutshell? In a nutshell, Timeboxing is a simple, easy system for spending more of your time on what matters to you, so that you live a more intentional life, set more intentions, and see more of them through. I can give you a definition if you'd like. Yeah, definitely. Let's see what's that definition. The definition I use, which I came up with, and is in the book, is what when, when, and so forth, so first of all, what are you going to do
that day? Then when are you going to do it? It was start and then times. Then one is doing that one single thing and nothing else, and not multitasking. And enough means doing it to a good enough standard, not trying to do it perfectly. Gotcha. And the way I described it to myself when I was reading this, it's basically your to-do list, but on your calendar, scheduled out. That's a good way of putting it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly that. I mean, look, more concretely, I wake up in the morning, I get dressed, I brush teeth, and I feed the cats, I time box for 15 minutes, right at the start. So there's a 15 minute time box at the start of my day. It recurs, so I make sure that it's going to be in there. And in that 15 minutes, I'm planning out the subsequent 15 hours of my day. And so I know that what I want to do when I'm going to do it, and all the way through the day, I can stick to that.
So that's what it is for me. And I know that once I've planned it, I know that if I see that through, it's going to be a good day. I plan in leisure, work, break, slack. And the main benefit is that any given moment, I know what I'm supposed to be doing. That's really reassuring for me. How is time boxing different from time block? Because I've done that in the past, right? Look at my calendar, and I block off time to do things. How would you say it's different from that?
In time boxing, you've got the notion of completing something within that time frame, within the box. So it's a little bit more proactive. In my definition, which had the what when one and enough, the what when one is absolutely that's part of time blocking. So time blocking is also deciding what to do when to do it and sticking to that one thing. The time boxing adds a fourth dimension to that, which is I'm going to do it. I'm going to get something done. Something done
that I can ideally share with someone, someone else. So there's something complete. So I'm moving the thing on the pattern of productivity moves on at the end of my time book. So in a nutshell, time boxing has a notion of completion to it. Okay. So with time blocking, you might put something like, you know, work on essay on your schedule. With time boxing, it's going to be more like finish first page of essay. And we'll keep unpacking what time boxing involves throughout this
conversation. But when did you discover time boxing? Well, I'm just a long story, but I'm 44 years old. I started my career in 2001. I was a disorganized mess back then and I was getting into trouble at work. It just wasn't really working out. There were mental health issues that came from that performance. It just wasn't good. After a couple of years of frankly suffering and not doing very well, I developed my own system of personal productivity, which I called a daily work
plan, DWP. That was good. That did some good. It settled things, but it had some problems. It didn't enable me to collaborate with others. It didn't give me that answer to the question of any given moment. What should I be working on? So to answer your question, we get to 2013 when I just came across an article by a guy called Daniel Markovitz in Harvard Business Review called Why To Do List
Don't Work. And it was exactly as you just put it, right? So it's coalescing the calendar and the to do list in such a way that together, they bring a lot more value than either of them on their own. So when I saw this, the logic of it really resonated. I started doing it straight away. So that was 2013. I'm doing it for the next five years. I'm tweaking the system. I'm bringing some of my own thoughts and applications to it. In 2018, so five years later, having done it for five years,
I wrote my own Harvard Business Review article about time boxing. I was calling it time boxing. The original article actually didn't call it time boxing. And that was really popular. It was on their most popular pages for, you know, for some years, actually. There was no a nearest popular as a TikTok video for someone made in 2022. And 10 million people watched that video. And one of those watches, one of those views was from Penguin Random House and they got in touch about
writing a book and that's how this has come about. What problems do you think time boxing solves in general when it comes to personal management that other systems don't solve? Okay. So in terms of what problem it solves, first of all, modern life is tricky. There's so much going on. And we feel like at any one time stressed and frazzled and overwhelmed, you hear those
words all the time. And this is partly because of a constellation of mega trends. So there's the internet obviously there's smartphones, there's knowledge work, more recently there's more and more work from home. So that means that about a billion of us that are knowledge workers have a huge amount of choice at any given moment of the day. That obviously sounds great, but it leads to feeling of it being a burden. Three quarters of us report mental health issues. And a big part
of that is lacking clarity, intention, agency or autonomy. And that's kind of the price that we pay for technology. We have everything in our fingertips. It's always on. And what this means is that we often don't use our time well. So ultimately that's really the problem that time boxing is focused on. It's using our time better. We default to smartphones and feeds and streaming.
We don't decide. We let these activities become decided for for us. So time boxing is a simple system that addresses this by saying, well spend 15 minutes or whatever it is in the morning. Or the night before deciding what's most important for you to do and just doing that. On your question of well how does it compare to other time management techniques? Well, okay, so there's a few things to say there. But one of them is that it's just consistent with
all of the other time management techniques. I can't think of a single one where it doesn't fit with and doesn't facilitate and doesn't help with. Let me give you a couple of examples. So take the Pomodoro technique. I don't know if you know. Do you know that technique? Oh, yeah. Of course. I would use the Pomodoro lots of time. I'd use a lot in law school, especially. Okay. Right. So that's 25 minutes of hard work and then five minutes break as you
will know since you've used it. Great. But why be so arbitrary is that? Why have 25 minutes exactly? Is that the right number for every single human being? It can't be. So what time boxing is is completely consistent with the Pomodoro technique? You know, do 25-5 if that works for you. But if it's 30-10 instead or 45-15, do it that way. So it's consistent with but supportive of more flexible than the Pomodoro technique. I'll give you another one. Eat that frog by Brian Tracy. So this is the idea
that it's better, it's more productive. It makes you feel better to start with the hard stuff first. Now personally, I agree with this. I actually much prefer to get the difficult stuff off my plate at the start of the day so that my day gets easier. But there are other people that like to build momentum by starting with some easier tasks. Maybe they're not mourning people so much. The point I'm making about time boxing is that it accommodates either approach. It's flexible to eating that frog
or eating that frog later. I'll give you just one more. So Eisenhower, the important urgent matrix, you know, that two by two. Well, with time boxing, I mean, it abysits consistent with that. That's a way of ordering your tasks or prioritizing them. But at the end of the day, which are you going to do and when it gives you, I mean, literally gives you a timetable of slots, options to put those important urgent tasks and the other ones into your can to get them done. So that's the
sense in which it's a very, very nice method because it's just you're already doing it. There are all kinds of benefits and it's really as consistent with with all of the other time management techniques that are already out there. Yeah. Another one that's consistent with is getting things done. We've had David Allen on the podcast before talking about. I heard my head podcast. Yeah.
Yeah. And so with getting things done, one of the big takeaways I took from that idea is that when you listen action or to do that you want to get done, you want to make sure it's actionable. You don't want to be vague with it where it's like, oh, vacation planning or I don't know. I mean, I might that's maybe that's not a good example. But like with you want to be very concrete and with time boxing, same thing you want to make whatever you put on your calendar,
you're boxing off time to do something. You want to say, I'm actually doing this specific thing and not be vague. Well, exactly. I mean, just to pick your example, I think it is a pretty good one. So vacation planning is vague. Yes. So you need to break that down and make it smaller, more actionable, more actionable partly because it is smaller. Like break it down to a half-hour task. So which vacation, what's the short list of countries, who am I going to go with,
who's the decision-making group here? Is it family, is it friends, make sure that that meeting happens or meet up with them to make that decision. So breaking the task down, I mean, this is really, really basic stuff. But the thing that time boxing brings is that once you've broken it down, it gives you a specific time in which you're going to do it. So you're not just saying, I want to do such and such, like I want a vacation. You're saying at a certain time, I'm going to do this action,
which is going to be a milestone, a step towards getting that thing done. Do you want to get done? Okay. So time boxing, you're taking your to-do list, you're putting it on a calendar, you're scheduling out, the things you're going to do on your to-do list. I think a big benefit to that. It gives your day a concreteness. I think a lot of times people in knowledge work, as you said, we have all this stuff coming into our inboxes and just passing our screens. And it's kind of just
bleeds together. And then you just kind of pick and choose what you're going to do. And you leave things half finished and then you have all these open loops going on because you're just pulling from the stream. With time boxing, you just basically plan out your day. It's like in 15-minute increments or 30-minute increments. Here's what I'm going to get done. And then when that time is
up, you're done. Like you move on to the next thing. And there's something about adding that structure to your day that it alleviates a lot of the stress that I think comes from having all those open loops in your head. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think with open loops, you put it very well. Structure is part of it. I think it's also, it's just that protection from any other task. Like, you know, for most people, Brett, they could be working on any number of the emails that are
in their inbox. They'll probably have some Slack messages. There'll be some stuff on WhatsApp. There'll be several work streams that they've just got open. And it's quite possible. In fact, it's very likely that several of those are going to occur to you in any given moment. What time boxing is saying is whatever occurs to you, whatever distractions arise, there is just one thing that you should be working on. You in a better, quieter moment that morning or the night before
said that that was the thing that you should do. So come back to your time box even if you're feeling distracted and stressed and chasing a couple of tasks, come back to the time box, do that one thing that is enormously reassuring. I mean, the specific thing that I do is when I have that feeling of being distracted or sort of chasing a rabbit down a rabbit hole, basically doing that second task or maybe thinking of a third task, I feel slightly stressed. I mean, maybe even
mild panic. It's an uncomfortable feeling. And what I've trained myself to do is associate that feeling which is uncomfortable with the action of literally uttering out loud. I mean, I literally say this to myself one thing at a time. And that mantra, that utterance, the act of uttering that mantra, it calms me down. I know where I am. I know where I need to be. You know, I need to be, it's just to come back to my calendar because I probably lost track of what the task was that I should
be doing. And I just feel so much better immediately. That's actually the main, there's all kinds of benefits, right? You're more productive, you've got to log of what you've done, more intentional life, all of this stuff. But every single day for me, I get the benefit of feeling calmer when I have those thoughts that occur and I start to go down rabbit holes. So that to me is the number one benefit. And it's a mental health as well as a productivity benefit. Yeah. So time boxing also
brings in another productivity idea. Monotasking, you mentioned that we've talked about that on the podcast before. But I think this idea of structure is really underrated when it comes to your mental health. I think that's why a lot of people have a lot of issues now. I'm feeling anxiety and just feeling the overwhelm. There's no structure. If I look back in my life, the periods where I felt the most on it, the most productive, the most just flourishing, there was a structure to my day.
And I really enjoy that. And when you're a young person, you might have the structure imposed on you because of school and you have athletics. When you're an adult, you have to impose that structure on yourself and time boxing as a tool that can help you do that. If you do that and you're imposing the structure on yourself, that is freedom. Yeah. Because you're setting those intentions and then you're living them out. It's no longer so some people look at my time box week and they say,
well, that looks really restrictive. You know, you've got all of these boxes everywhere. This color coding may come back to the color coding in a second. Isn't that restrictive? No, not at all. It is literally it's a picture of freedom because every single one of those boxes, I decided on and then by and large, I mean, not absolutely every single one, but 90 something percent, I've then seen through. That to me is close to the very definition of freedom. It's doing the
thing that you set out to do. Over the last 10 years, I've probably done 50,000 time boxes. That is a lot of freedom. So another benefit that time boxing can provide to help you get more done is it harnesses the power of implementation intentions. What are implementation intentions and how do they help you get more done? Well, the formal definition is it's a statement that you make of the
form. When situation exorises, I will perform response. Why? So not just I want to lose weight or be kind of or go on vacation, but you're saying that when a certain thing happens, then I will do such and such and such. So time boxing is exactly that because it's saying with the situation arising, it's at a certain time when the situation exorises. So when it's a one o'clock,
I will do such and such activity. And what the science behind it says, and you can Google this, why implementation intentions, you'll see a bunch of journals that basically say, look, if you say that you're going to do something at a certain time, you're very, very likely to do it, about 90% chance of doing it. Whereas if you just have a vague notion of, well, I probably should do it and there's some light encouragement that there's it's more like 30%. So actually,
there was a study in which there were three groups. The first group was a control group, so they were just given the instruction. It was about exercise. So they're given the instruction to just record when they do exercise. The second group was given some motivation and educational material and also asked to record the exercise. And then the third group were instructed to time boxes. The first two groups are very similar, about 30, 35% of them did the exercise, or exercise
weekly. But the third group, the time boxes, they did it to, I think, was 91% of them exercise weekly. Now, that's a study. I think, first of all, it's just a study, right? The real question is, does this work for you? If the study is convincing, all it really means is, okay, there's a good chance
that this might work for me, so maybe I'll try it out. But it also makes sense, I think, in terms of, you know, I mean, take this meeting between me and you, Brett, like it might have been that we couldn't go ahead because something on your end or something on my end, actually, that very nearly did happen. But how often is it that we actually need to cancel meetings? Once we've made that commitment, I would say it's single digits percentage wise. So basically, you know, and it just makes
intuitive sense. We're human beings with agency, right? So if you say you're going to do something, probably you're going to do it. Of course, there's exceptions, but in general, you're going to do it. If you put it into your calendar and there's no way that you're going to forget, you get prompts from that calendar. There's a little bit of a public commitment as well because with shared calendars, other people can kind of see what you're saying that you're going to do. It's no wonder
that you get to 90 something percent. So that's the sense in which implementation intentions are important to time boxing, because there are examples of it, and they provide a lot of the science that backs it up. I mean, that's the other difference between time boxing and a lot of other time management techniques is there's no science behind the other ones. I'm not going to say that's the truth. Absolutely. Every single one, but there's just quite a lot behind time boxing and
implementation intentions in particular. Yeah, we got an article about implementation intentions on our website. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But yeah, time boxing can be a tool, not only help you get through your to-do list in your work day, but this can be a great tool for self-improvement. If you always want to start exercising, well, you just put it on the calendar. If it's three o'clock in the afternoon, I'm going to exercise for 30 minutes, and you're more likely
to do it if it's on the calendar. Yeah, exactly. Exercise is a great example, but obviously there are, you know, many others. I've got a mnemonic which might be helpful to listeners, Brett, which is Mr. Elf. So Mr. Elf stands for meditation, reading, exercise, learning, and friends or family. So the idea here is that, you know, if you add a loose end to either because you're planning your day at the start,
then, and you don't know, okay, what am I going to do? 10 to 11. What would be healthy for me? What would be a good use of time that I won't regret later? Think of that in the mnemonic, Mr. Elf, and it might help you out. It's also very helpful I find when sometimes an expansive time just opens up before you. So, I know, someone, you're going to have dinner with someone, you had to get there, and then you're going to come back. So, you know, all in all, it was going to be three or four hours,
but they cancel on you. All of a sudden, you've got three or four hours. Now, it's very easy to then get into, well, just stream from Netflix or go to social media. And, look, I'm not judgment about that. I do some of that myself. But what I'm encouraging people to do more of is in that moment, when you realize that, okay, dinner's not going to happen, let's think about how I'm going to spend my time and choose the right thing. So, with Mr. Elf and these five activities, it's just very easy to
remember. And it's a good thing to keep in mind when this expansive time just opens up before you, like if you've, you know, didn't plan to get canceled, rather than just defaulting to very easy, but not all that worthwhile activities. Keep that in mind. And you probably use your time better and feel better about it after. All right. So, not only can time boxing help you get more done, can improve your life, help you achieve those self-improvement goals you've had for a long time.
But you also talk about the record-keeping benefit it provides. Walk us through that benefit. I will. In a second, I just want to say that the other benefit and to do with getting more done, it's not just getting more done. The main reason that time boxing helps you in terms of productivity is that it gets you to the right things. It helps you to get the right things done. There's a quote from Druka, which you may have heard of before, but he puts it really well.
There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency, what should not be done at all. So, is making sure that you do the right thing rather than just more of it. But I'm glad that you brought up the point of the record of what you've done. This for me is the least important benefit, but it's also the most underrated. So, I'm very pleased to be asked about it. The benefit here is that it enables you to remember what you did on
planet Earth in your life. So, this could be work or could be pleasure. Because it's in your calendar, you can go back and you can see how prepared you were to present to all of those people last time, you presented to them. When the last time you had a one-to-one with someone was or how you celebrated your son's 10th birthday, actually my son did 10-10 recently, when you last had a date night. Obviously, photos capture some of that too, but they're not quite so well structured and they're not
quite so comprehensive. They're also kind of self-selecting. There's only certain kinds of events where people will take pictures. And a time box calendar is more objective because it's just kind of everything. That's just how your life was. And if you use a Google calendar or Microsoft or whoever the provider is, the way that search works, it's also just so instantly findable. And if you've got some kind of log of what you've done, it's not like that's the end of the
information. You go back to your calendar appointment. So, let's take the example of my son's 10th birthday. So, last December, he turned 10. We went go-carting. There'll be a time box on that Sunday when we did. And if I just look at that time box and that date, memories will flood back, memories that just would probably have been inaccessible to me without that time box.
So, it's really an extension of your memory and that can be useful in a kind of defensive mode if you need to sort of give an argument as to why you were doing certain thing at a certain time. Or just, you know, emotive, positive reasons like remembering a date night or a 10th birthday. Yeah, and my grandfather, he kept the pocket diary his entire life. And he did some time boxing in there, some rudimentary time boxing. He put out a schedule that he did every day.
It was nice to hear. But he's able to use his diaries throughout his life to write his memoirs. And he's extremely detailed. He'll tell you like, I visited so and so to discuss this topic on this meeting. And I, it's really interesting to get that view. So, I really appreciate that he time boxed and was able to write that memoir. Absolutely. I mean, it's very useful if you're going to write a memoir and it is story of your life, obviously. In fact, I was out for
a singer friend for a drink last night. And she was asking me, how long did it take to write the pitch for your book? Because she was interested in writing a book. I didn't know the answers to that question. But I thought, well, I just have to go back through my calendar and see the time boxes. And, you know, the answer was only 15, 20 hours. And I could see exactly when I did it. So, you know, can answer some questions that help some people, including yourself. And mostly it would
be for for yourself. If you've got it recorded somewhere. And you can't otherwise. Another benefit of time boxing and you mentioned it earlier, is it can help us collaborate more effectively? What does that look like? Well, this comes from the fact that for most people, the calendar that they use is a shared digital calendar. So that comes with a bunch of advantages. But I'm going to focus on the shared aspect of it here. So if you share it with some people that you trust,
they can see what you're up to. They can accommodate that with their work demands or their life demands. It can deepen relationships. I mean, if they've seen that you're planning to see the new Dune movie, for example, it might be a natural ice break. And next time you, you see them. So there's, you know, superficial stuff like like that, but superficial that can go quite far. And there's also just the efficiency of interpersonal commitments. So, you know, if you ask me to do
something, Brett, and I say, okay, yes, we'll do. That is of some benefit because I've told you that I'm going to do it. But when is that going to happen? If instead I say to you, I've time books it for such and such a time, it's a lot more reassuring for you that it's going to get done. You're going to know when it's going to get done. And also, I mean, just to come back to the collaboration
and the shared calendar, you might not even ask me in the first place. If you look in my shared, you know, look at my commitments and you see that, you know, I'm just having a really busy week. So you might just hold that back until next week. So one of the things it helps with is the efficiency of interpersonal commitments and how we interact with each other. Just to, you know, increase harmony and reduce friction through just efficient knowledge, extra information exchange
about what we're up to and when. Now, that's a kind of very positive way of putting it. It's not always that simple. You do need to have that trust. And, you know, if you work in a place where you don't have, you know, have trust issues with, you know, with your some of your colleagues, then that's a tricky thing. I mean, you can do some things like, you know, change the permissions and what people can see on your calendar. That's something you've got to keep in mind as well.
But in an ideal world where you can trust and you can be transparent, it's very, very efficient way of describing to people what you're up to and when. Yeah, I interviewed a Cal Newport a few weeks ago about his idea of a more sustainable, slow productivity. And one of the things he said is the problem with our current work system is that it's, it's not transparent. People can't see how much you have
on your plate. And so they don't think twice about adding to your load. And this is one of his suggestions is to let people see your project list or your calendar so they can see, you know, yeah, I was going to add another project to your plate. But actually now that I see how much you have already got going on, I'm not going to. So time boxing fits in perfectly with that. We're going to take a quick break for your words more sponsors.
And now back to the show. All right, let's dig into how we can start time boxing and get into some big high level principles for people. You recommend a digital calendar because the versatility of it is amazing. You can have it on your smartphone, your desktop, you can collaborate with it. Is there software that you prefer or is anyone fine? I mean, any of them are fine. Like, frankly, the functionality between these different providers is pretty minimal at this point. So I think
this become a commodity, which is one of the reasons it's free. So no, I don't particularly recommend anyone in, I mean, obviously there is one that I use. But I think it's even worth mentioning which one it is because I'm, it's not like I'm endorsing it specifically. Right. Well, I'll just be open. I mean, it's a Google calendar. Yeah. But I don't think that's particularly pertinent to the practice of time boxing. Okay. So it could be anyone that you like.
Another part of this time boxing element is capturing the things you're going to put on your time box, the to-do list. Do you have any recommendations about that on how to capture all the stuff that you need to put on your calendar? Yeah. So capture is very much part of the David Allen method. And that's absolutely consistent with time boxing. So for me personally, I have one list. It's a single Google doc with all my meeting notes as well. I update it every three months or so. Otherwise,
it gets too big. And it's really important to do that. For exactly the reason that David Allen says in general, and I think he said actually on your podcast, which is that you want to make sure you capture it so that you don't forget it, but also so that it doesn't linger in your mind and distract you. You know, you can kind of offload and free up your mind. So yeah, I have one Google doc. That's where my to-do list goes. All my meeting notes are in there as well. And I don't think that that's
the perfect method for everyone. That's what I do. But how it links to time boxing is when you're in that 15 minute session at the start of the day, planning out your day. That's when the to-do list comes in. So, you know, whatever the version of it to do list is for you. That's when you bring it in. It's the 15 minutes that the planning and then you decide, you know, what you're going to do and when, over the course of your day. Yeah, for me, I use to-do list. That's my capture tool.
And I put everything in there. So it's not only like I put in ideas that I have that I think I could take action on eventually. Maybe they're not fully formed, but they could be fully formed. I put in emails. I even put emails in my to-do list because if I have found if I don't, then the emails don't get answered. I don't think treating your inbox as a to-do list is very useful. I put text messages. It might to-do list. So I had an open text message. I didn't respond to. I put that
it might to-do list. And then I sort that out during my weekly planning. Or you can sort that out during your daily planning or your time boxing. Well, is that the thing that, I mean, the pertinent point, though, I think, Brett, is that it's one place. So you know that everything is going to be there. You have a system, presumably, for, you know, well, you're probably going into a daily,
right? Yeah. So it can't be missed. And it's the same as true of the calendar. You know, when you move that along to when you're actually going to get something done because the calendar is just so central to so many of us, you know, we have meetings every day. We have to use the calendar. We have to return to the calendar whether we like it or not. So things can't
be missed. The point with a to-do list and your time box calendar is that you need to just make sure that they are a destination that you go to frequently enough that you're going to not miss anything. Okay. So we got our calendar. We got our to-do list. How do we get those things on the calendar? The things that are on our to-do list on the calendar? Like, how do you know you're going through your list and you see a task? You're like, is this time boxable? Like, how do you know
if the way it's phrased or set out or established? You can time box that. Is there any trick to that? I mean, it's really just anything you want and need to do, right? So let me give you some examples. There are some of these I did actually today. So the time box today, time box, which is 15 minutes at the start of the day. I've mentioned that a couple of times. That was one of them. I did some exercise. That was 60 minutes. So that's a time box that goes in. I mean, for me personally,
I don't love doing exercise. So having this extra commitment that is in my calendar, it makes the thing happen and then I feel, you know, I get the benefits later. I have another one which is meetings prep. I do actually want to just explain this because I think this is really underestimated as a as a thing to do at work. So this is a 30 minute time box that I have not every day, but most days in which I will go through all the meetings that I've got later and just do a
little bit of preparation for them. That might just be two minutes of preparation, you know, checking last time I saw that person, what was the last email who's going to be on the call, maybe check the meeting notes from last time or reader report. But that means that every time I come to a meeting over the course of that day, I'm a little bit prepared. I'm feeling a little bit more confident. We're hitting the ground running in the meeting. It's just a better experience. So meetings prep is
a time boxable time box meetings themselves are obviously time boxes. They are in your calendar already. And this is the sense in which we're all already time boxing because we've got meetings. So really time boxing is easy because it's an extension of a habit that almost everyone listening to this is already engaged in. I've also got time boxes, you know, one to one time with the kids, with my wife. There's one later for later on, which is writing an email to a potential client. That's
a 15 minute time box. So really just anything that you feel like you want to do, it is important to do that day. I mean, with that example, I just gave the potential client. I met this person a few nights ago. There is an urgency because I didn't want to leave it too long before I got back in touch. So it did make sense for it to go on to today's schedule. So I think mostly,
Brett, people have a good idea of what makes sense for a time box. It's just a task. And time boxing, it just means that you've got to start time in an end time and you bring a little bit of pressure to getting it done within that time. Do you have a recommended increment of time you like to use for your time boxing? Is it 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour? What's your ideal time box? You almost got it perfectly right. So I have 15, 30 and 60. Obviously you can have
any combination of numbers. But what I recommend is not having too many. So you know, you're not sitting down to do a task. And then part of your brain is is lost in. Well, should this be a 14 minute task or 17 minutes task or lots of different options? I just got three options, small medium, large. Anything less than 15 minutes for me just doesn't make sense. There's too much admin involved. So I just said a minimum of 15 minutes. Sometimes that 15 minutes will consist of
three very small tasks or even five very small tasks. But yeah, 15, 30 and 60 are the three sizes I have. And I don't have anything more than 60 because, obviously, sometimes a task will take more than 60 minutes. I had to write a long blog, a long-ish form blog this week. And that definitely took me more than 60 minutes. But breaking it down into more manageable chunks was a big part of my method for getting it done in the, I don't know, two hours it took in
in total. So I wouldn't have a two hour time box for that. And I did break it down into several smaller time boxes in those denominations, 15, 30, 60. I like to break up my date, 15 minute increments. I wonder if that's from my, I was an intern at a law office, the billable hours like based on 15 minute increments. And so I like to relate to the money. Yeah. How do you figure out, so you look at your task list and you're trying to decide how long this task will take to complete,
how do you figure out how long it's going to take? How do you estimate that? Because like there's this idea of the planning fallacy. Sometimes we over estimate or underestimate how long something will take. So how do you overcome that planning fallacy? Okay. So there's a lot of tasks where it's just really easy. Like you're saying, well, I'm going to meditate for 30 minutes. So there's no way you can get that wrong, right? You just set a timer and the 30 minutes elapses and then that's
the end of it. So there's just no estimation that can really go wrong with that. Well, the meeting just is an hour or you go for a 5k run and you know that it takes you 25 minutes or 30 minutes or or whatever. So I do want to say that although yeah, I'll come onto the planning fallacy in a second, but there are a lot of tasks that just are very easy to size, almost by definition. And then on the planning fallacy, which is basically that we are a little bit optimistic very often. There's some
wishful thinking going into how we think about a task. We don't anticipate what might go wrong. We just see it as if it all goes smoothly. The way to get around this and this is reasonably well understood, I think now is make sure you're not setting a time box unless you have some experience of it. So if you've done this before, let's say the task is to write a 500 word blog. Well, you could say what's 500 words and it doesn't take me very long to write say 100 words multiplied that by 5.
That's very likely to suffer from the planning fallacy because it wouldn't take into account the edits, your dissatisfaction, yeah, just some of the gnarly details of the real world. But if instead you have written a 500 word blog before and you know that it took you 45 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever it was, that's a much better indicator. And so the time box should reflect that. You can
obviously work on that and try and improve on your personal best in the future. But the really the main solutions of the planning fallacy is to base it on experience where you possibly can. And if you've got a brand new task, it's harder to do. And so you're going to have to be a little bit more experimental and keep some leeway in your schedule. Oh yeah. So we're speaking to that. Let's say you're planning this new task you've never done before. You're not sure how long it's
going to take and you time box that activity for 60 minutes. And you're coming up on 60 minutes, you're like, oh, I'm not going to get this thing done. Do you extend your period? Do you work on it or do you like, okay, I got to stop this for now, move on to the next item and then schedule this for later. How do you handle that situation? Okay. So obviously that does happen sometimes.
But I'd say a couple of things before we even get to that moment. So first of all in the planning and the first place, be really, really careful about how you're estimating as much as you can, how you estimate those time boxes. Then secondly, don't just wait until you get to the 60th minute and then say, oh, I'm almost out of time. Set a midway point. So if you've got a task, let's use the blog again. So 500 words, you've got to write in 60 minutes. Set a midway point
of 30 minutes in. How are you doing? What's the word count? What's the quality like? But still, even if you sit a midway checkpoint, you might get to that scenario that you just described, Brett, of, well, I'm kind of running out of time now. What do I do? And in that situation, you've got to use your judgment. I mean, it depends kind of on how important is that blog? What are you doing in the next time box? Is that something that's flexible or do you,
is it a very hard stop? And then you make a judgment call. In my experience though, if you time box carefully and you do the midway checkpoint, it's not very often that you need to, to change them. You know, something like the 10% I was talking about earlier. So sure, you need to be flexible, but that's built into the system of time boxing. It's not saying at the start of the day that when you, when you, in those 15 minutes, everything's got to map out exactly that way. And
if it doesn't, there's a big problem. So another element of this time boxing isn't just, as you said earlier, it isn't just making sure you have every 15 minute increment of your day scheduled out in time box. There is that. But you also want to think about the order you do that in. You're not just going through the list and just kind of half hazardly, okay, you know, it's nine o'clock to
nine 30. I'm going to do this nine 30 to 10. I'm going to do this. You actually want to think about this like, okay, when during the day, when will I be most effective at getting this thing done or when does this thing need to get done? Does it need to get done early in the day or in the later than the day? So you also want to be thoughtful about the order you create your time box. You do. I mean, the order definitely matters. The most obvious sense in which it matters is that there
are certain dependencies that you might have, right? So let's say you've got a meeting on Thursday afternoon, you definitely need to do some preparation for it. Then your prep meeting for that will need to go at some point earlier in the week, right? So that's pretty obvious and people need to take that into account. So that's part of what it means by order. But then you've also got mood and energy like you, like you say. So for me personally, I'm pretty low energy mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
So I tend to do a bit of exercise in the mid-morning because that just perks me up in the first half of the day. And I'll tend to do easier tasks in the mid-afternoon. So that's what works for me. But different people are going to work differently. So this is not me saying, well, you should
do everything in the morning or you should do exercise in the morning. You just got to work out what is the way of curating your day and planning your day that's going to bring you the most fun work with the schedule that you have and how you're collaborating with others and get the stuff done on time. Let's take an example, right? So let's say you've got two tasks to do. One is to write a report and the other is just to do some exercise. What's the order in which you should do
them? Is it exercise then report or report then exercise? And that would just be different for different people. For some people, if you do some exercise first, the blood's then flowing, you've got endorphins running around, you've got great energy, that might be great for the creativity you might need to write that report. But for others, it might be that, well, I want to write the report first, get some of those ideas in my head and then do some exercise like going for a run.
I'll be able to think about it, think of improvements, I'll be able to come back and then update the report. There's no right or wrong. It's just what will be most productive and enjoyable for you. Again, to come back to the word, keep using with time-boxing intention, the point is think ahead about your day, how things are going to go. What's the order that's most likely to yield what you want to get from the day and do things in that order? Let's say you've done your time-boxing,
you've got your day all nice and scheduled. You can color code these things if you want, you don't have to, people have different systems of color code for work time, personal time, etc. That can be useful if you like to do that. But let's say you've scheduled out your day, your time-box perfectly and you're like, this is amazing. And then you start going throughout your day, first couple of time-boxes, you pull off without a hitch, just things are only smoothly. But then
some unexpected, urgent but important matter pops up during the day. And it caused you to have the deviate from your plan. So what do you do if that happens? Well, I guess first of all, I just question, do you really need to deviate? Is it really that urgent, the thing that's come up? I mean, people often use this as an objection. And of course, there are situations, like let's say your kid sick or you have some sort of an accident or there's a really pressing
work thing that has come about. So this does happen, but how often does that happen? There's a proportion of the, you know, it's not very often. It's not most of the time. So when it does, you just move your time-boxes around in the 5-10% of the time that it happens. I don't think I've ever set out at the start of the day, this isn't probably quite true, but it's very rare that I would plan the fifth in those 15 minutes, plan out the rest of the day and not a single thing changes
from there. And occasionally a lot changes because there's some big, you know, urgent thing that that comes along. But the point is that it's not that frequent. I just say one other thing. I mean, if you've got some unpredictable phase coming up, and for example, you've got a bunch of deliveries that are coming that afternoon, then it just doesn't make sense to set some time-boxes where you've got some deep work plan because you know you're going to be interrupted and distracted
by those things. So in that case, well, you know, probably don't set any time-boxes for that time. Maybe go for a walk or we'll do something that you can be interrupted from, and it's just not going to cost you very much. So I think that this actually is, but this is the most common objection that I hear to time-boxing is, but what about if plans change? And so I just say, look, set,
realistic goals of the start. Allow some slack in your schedule. Know that it's not going to happen that often, really, probably less than 10% and in those 10% cases when it does, just move them about. It's not a problem. Yeah, I think that idea, when something urgent and what might look important pops up, ask yourself, does this really need to be taken care of right now? And I would bet nine
times out of 10 the answers know. I've noticed this with people who are in positions where they're, they're in helper positions, could be a pastor, caretaker, and they'll get this frantic text or call at seven o'clock at night and like, oh, I need to talk to you right now. I've got this big problem and they're like, okay, well, I'm busy right now because I'm with my family. I can't squeeze schedule it for tomorrow at six o'clock. They're like, okay. And they get to that time
and they're like, well, what's the problem? Like, oh, it's not a problem anymore. It resolved itself. Everything's fine. Exactly. Okay. In the moment, it feels urgent because it's happened just then. I think actually for modern knowledge workers, for most of us, the best example of this is just the inbox. So some email comes in and it's from someone reasonably important, like a client or a boss or, you know, a colleague or whatever. And it feels like this is something, it's just been
said to you. So surely you need to react. And there is this natural inclination to want to react straight away. But in reality, like you just said with that example, you know, it's probably not that urgent. And actually, the way to fix this and not be bothered by it is to just not see your inbox. Don't see your inbox apart from in those time boxed occasions when you are supposed to be in email. Now, that might be three times a day. It might be once a day. It might be a couple of
times a week. From it, it's actually only about three times a week. So that for the rest of the time, I don't get bothered by the apparent urgency of some email that's come in from from someone. So I think you can protect yourself from apparently urgent requests on your time by not seeing certain things. Let's say you had your time box scheduled and you're working on something that requires you to be online doing research. And then you find yourself down this rabbit hole and
you've blood over into the next box. How do you avoid getting distracted from your time box schedule? Well, I think to some extent, it's not a bad thing when that happens. I mean, in the example that you just gave, like you're down a rabbit hole, but it's kind of it's interesting and feels important and you're getting some stuff done. So and to some extent, I would say that's not necessarily awful. But I think the thing to do is look, you get these distractions and sometimes
it is just something that's very, very interesting. The trick, which I mentioned earlier in this conversation is to try and notice, and this is, I would say honestly, this is the only thing that's a tall difficult about time boxing, but really this is about managing distractions because distractions
are going to occur whether you're time boxing or not. The trick is to notice that feeling that you're going down and you're doing this second thing, this thing that you're not really supposed to be doing that you, it's not this thing that you said that you're going to do, you're moving off, you're going off track, you're going down a rabbit hole. Notice that feeling and associate it with a controlled and better response, which is to, I mean, in my case, and what I'm advocating,
coming back to your time box and coming back to that one thing. And you can get better at that. You can make the association stronger. Now, it's not like I don't get distracted. I get distracted several times, many times, over the course of the day. The difference between me and a lot of people that have an issue with distraction is that I don't get distracted for very long,
because I'm associating that feeling with coming back to my calendar. So yeah, it definitely happens that trying to associate it with a better behavior and coming back to what you're doing, and you'll feel more in control and less likely to be down those rabbit holes. So let's say someone's listening to this and I want to give time boxing a try. How can people
get going with this? Well, I would recommend this. Set a calendar appointment right now. I'm you're listening to this unless you're driving, you know, do that on your phone or on your computer in your digital calendar, set an appointment for tomorrow for 15 minutes at the start of the day, soon after you wake up when it makes sense for you. When that time comes tomorrow morning, take a look at your to-do list. You'll also have a bunch of stuff in your head about what you might
do and put two or three items in your calendar for later on. I have this way of remembering, which is 15.15. So I think of as 15 minutes at the start of the day to govern the remaining 15 hours of your waking life, obviously you don't need to time box 15 hours. So I'm suggesting to get started, just put in two or three items from your to-do list. And then when they come up, obviously do them, you probably will, like I was saying before, when we were discussing implementation intentions,
there's a 90% chance you are going to get them done and that will feel good. That will be good. It will feel good. And so you want to do some more. So I'd strongly recommend set that 15-minute appointment right now. You can forget about me, you can forget my name, you can even forget the term time boxing. But then that calendar appointment will come up tomorrow and remind you to do something. So yes, I do it now, put it in your digital calendar and start time boxing to my morning.
I love it. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? I used to have this URL. This was actually part of the pitch, which was timeboxing.com. But Penguin, the publisher said, no, don't do that. You need to use your name. So it's my name. It's markzaltzanders.com. That's a tricky name mark with a C. And zaltzanders,
no hyphens, L-A-O-S-A-N-D-E-R-S.com. And there's newsletto and you can sign up and follow my thoughts on time and time management and time boxing and intention agency and what have you there. Fantastic. Well, Mark Zaltzanders, things should have been a pleasure. Thank you, Brett, for me as well. My guest today is Mark Zaltzanders. He's the author of the book time boxing. It's available at amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more of
Fmation about his work at his website, markzaltzanders.com. Also check out our show notes at aweb.is slash time boxing. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the aweb podcast. Make sure check out our website at artofmanis.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you've done so already at
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