Timeboxing and self-help books

Ok so for pretty much my entire life I've been a very unproductive procrastinating anime-watching time-wasting whiny little loser.

Recently though, since I got into a university, I realized that if I want to not be miserable for my entire life, I should probably start practicing some more willpower and self-discipline. So I decided to finally suck it up and actually go do something productive read a bunch of self-help books and fill my browser history with motivational blog posts. You know, stuff like this, this and this.

Now, during my perusal of this material, I noticed a lot of reoccurring subjects. Among those, one of the things that stood out to me was the concept of Timeboxing. It was so simple and so easy to implement that I felt guilty for not coming up with it myself. Basically, the idea is to set a timer whenever you are doing a task and in theory, this should make it so that you use the time allotted a lot more efficiently (no pun intended). This takes advantage of our natural inclination to procrastinate and of the fact that we are much more productive when there's a deadline to obey.

So I started trying to implement this into my own life. I started timeboxing my daily activities such as studying for university, doing homework, working out, practicing my drawing skills, watching hentai learning Japanese and other such productive, stuff-i-want-to-get-done projects.

The thing I misunderstood though, and this is something that they usually don't talk that much about when talking about timeboxing, is how much time you need to give to the task. I was under the impression that the timeboxes need to be very short. I would give myself 20 minutes to do as much homework as possible, and then I would stop and do something else, and later come back for another 20 minutes, and so on. The thing I realized, later on, was that for a lot of mental activities, such as studying, doing homework, or practicing drawing or any other skill, the mind needs some time to warm up. The first 15 minutes or so are very unproductive and slow, but after that, the brain picks up the pace and starts working very efficiently. Now you see what the problem was, I was cutting my "productive time" right when it started getting productive. I would only get 5 minutes of results from 20 minutes of work. This started stacking up and before I knew it I was wasting very large amounts of time every day "warming up" to work instead of actually getting anything done.

It made me realize that if I wanted to actually spend my time efficiently, I needed to do a few long timeboxes, rather than a lot of very short ones. The thing is, even though you need to put a deadline in order to be productive, the deadline also needs to be realistic. Basically, you need to take into account the time you think you should need in order to complete a task. Let's say you need to do homework that you feel like you should need around an hour to complete. Give yourself an hour and a half long timebox for doing it. That half an hour of extra time should be enough to compensate for warming up and any distractions that may arise. It's ok to have more time than you need, and if you complete ahead of time, that's even better. Let's do some simple math and see how much this actually is better than doing multiple timeboxes of 20mins. Since, as I explained earlier, you only get 5mins of work per 20min timebox. That means that you will need to do 60/5=12 timeboxes in order to complete your one-hour long homework. Since every timebox lasts 20mins, that's 12*20=240mins. That means that you would need to spend 4 hours doing your homework when you could have spent only 1.5 hours on it if you were to use a larger timebox. You see what I mean?

Now, you may be asking, "If it's better to have a longer timebox, then why not go all the way and give yourself the entire day to complete the task? And if you finish early even better, there's literally nothing to be lost", and that would be a good point indeed.

Let me now introduce you to The Other Benefit Of Timeboxing. You see, your brain doesn't operate on the same amount of power all the time. Sometimes you are tired, or annoyed, or hungry, or there is something else distracting you that makes you work slower. Now, the priority should always be trying to reduce all distractions, but sometimes you aren't really aware of them, or you just can't for some other reason. This usually lengthens the time needed to complete the task by quite a lot. You ever had one of those days when you tried studying, but you ended up not doing anything the entire time? Let's go back to the 1-hour homework example from earlier. Let's say that you gave it a timebox of the entire day, instead of the 1.5h we discussed. Now, if you were completely rested and free of distractions, you would complete the homework in around an hour, and it wouldn't really matter if the timebox was 1.5h or 15h. But look now what happens in the situation that your brain isn't working for some reason, maybe you haven't slept well or something. Doing homework in this state can jump from taking just 1 hour to taking up to 10 hours. So if you set a timebox that is very large, you would spend 10 hours on the homework. Now let's see what happens if we put the 1.5h timebox back into action. It will force you to stop doing the task if it's taking longer than it should. Now you can notice that you are actually tired, and you can go and take a 30min nap for example. When you come back from the nap you should be well-rested and ready to work at maximum efficiency. Now you can do another 1.5h timebox, and if you really had a good rest (or got rid of any other distractions that were causing you to work slowly) this 1.5h timebox should be enough for you to finish that 1h homework. In total, you spent 1.5+0.5+1.5=3.5h instead of the 10h that you would have spent if you were to try and do it in one go. It's almost one-third of the time. Do you see now how timeboxing can also work as a fail-safe defense from spending more time than you need on something? A lot of times we aren't really aware of the fact that we are working at sub-optimal brainpower, or we just aren't looking at the clock. We waste entire days doing nothing when we could have been so much more productive if we used timeboxing.

In summary, what I want to say is that choosing the right length for your timebox is more complicated than it may appear at first. As we saw, have it too long or too short and you are losing too much time for no reason. I am currently trying to become better at judging the optimal timebox for doing my tasks.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I wanted to say. I don't really write a lot, so I probably won't be making a lot of posts like this. It's just that I felt like talking about this somewhere, and I didn't wanna annoy any of my friends with it. And so it ended up here.

See ya later!