How I use time-boxing
No product review from me this week. Instead, following a discussion with my running buddy (RB), I'd like to share with you how I use 'time-boxing' to (try to!) organise my day.
RB and I got into a discussion about time and to-do lists, after he sent me an Instagram video where a guy ponders whether he's living, or just doing a to-do list. And whether that to-do list is something he wants to work on or if it's other people's stuff. RB and I could both relate. Both of us can have a tendency towards being 'people pleasers' which can mean we put 'our' stuff on the back burner because we've said 'yes' to too many things (so as not to displease).
However, there are always 1440 minutes in a day, and they ALL get filled, whether we plan what we're doing in them or not. None of us can stop time. None of us can create time. It ticks past, filled with something, even if that's mindless scrolling through social media.
My way to try to tame it and to ensure that I balance my time better so that my stuff gets at least a small look-in, is to time-box. It's why I like diaries with vertical columns for the days.
I didn't invent time-boxing. I don't know who did. Or even if there's a 'proper way' of doing it. This is what I do:
I have a scrap pocket notebook which I use for daily pages. This is currently a Clairefontaine gridded notebook, but frankly, it could be anything, because it's never kept.
I draw a vertical line ~3cm in from the left-hand edge of the page. It's ~the width of a ruler (to the nearest vertical line) because I don't need it to look neat or pretty, I just need it to work. Then I write in the day at the top of the page, and the hours down the side, starting at 8am and finishing at 6pm. On the right-hand side of the vertical line I write down my goals for the day/to-do list.
It's the next bit that makes or breaks the day for me. I schedule the task list into the time boxes.
This works for me, for three main reasons. 1) it forces me to estimate how long a task will take (and potentially adjust my to-do list as a result); 2) I know I'm not the kind of person to overestimate the time and then end up filling in the allotted slot just because I've said that hour will be spent on a particular thing. If I finish a task early, I move on; 3) I reflect on reality at the end of the day.
Reality gets recorded in my actual diary. Noting that has two benefits for me: 1) I can see when I misjudged my estimates; 2) I can see where I got dragged away from my plan and into non-planned stuff.
So, how does Nero fit in? Well, Nero sells a lot of notebooks that you could use in this exact same way for you, and some of them are really cheap, so you could have a go and not lose much if it didn't work for you. They don't have to be gridded, or even dot-grid. They could be lined (or even plain if you're happy drawing your own lines).
If, like me and my running buddy, you can get to the end of a day and think, "Where did that day go??" maybe this might work for you.
