Being productive has always been a goal in every profession. The reason why many companies are constantly looking for new methods to improve productivity in their business. Timeboxing is one of the methods to boost overall productivity and manage your work-time efficiently.
Timeboxing is a very simple and modern time management technique that can assist you to take sufficient control over your schedule.
It’s also a very effective procedure for training self-discipline and organizing your schedule so that your most important tasks come first. With timeboxing, you can also be more attentive to how much time you spent on a particular work and avoid overdoing it.
Let us understand what exactly is Timeboxing and traverse it to tell you how to use it for gaining more benefits for your business.
What Is Timeboxing?
It simply means that you open your calendar and enter a block of time that you’ll spend on a specific task in the future. Basically, Timeboxing means setting a fixed amount of time in your calendar for a particular work. It is like scheduling an important meeting on your schedule, you can say an effective time management plan.
The concept of timeboxing gained popularity when Elon Musk started using the timeboxing method to create 5 minutes tasks throughout the day. And he claimed that this method helped him manage two companies while also having enough time to spend time with family.
Benefits Of Timeboxing
There are multiple benefits of time management at work. It can help you to improve your production cycle and track the work progress. Here are some of the benefits-
- Avoid time delays on your procrastinated tasks and projects to complete them before deadlines
- You can more easily set stern limits on how much time you will spend on a particular task
- Boost your productivity and focus if you make sure that nobody hinders you or diverts you while working on your task
- Deal with perfectionism and any over-processing and overdoing of tasks
- You can avoid late delivery, low quality, and over-doing and over-processing tasks
- If a team has a deadline to finish a work, they work more efficiently to reach the goal
- Sometimes we can become lousy and neglect some of the crucial tasks but, with timeboxing, you can avoid the avoiding attitude. So that you can put more effort and try to reach perfection in your work
- It helps the employees to measure their performances to improve their professional skills
How To Use Timeboxing Methods?
Here are the four ways to implement Timeboxing at your workplace-
Set your tasks and goals
The initial thing to do is preparing a list of work that needs to be done for your teammates. Mention the urgent tasks that need to be completed before the deadline. Initially, timeboxing may feel like bonding to the workforce in which they need to complete the task anyhow within the given time frame. But with time, it would help them to improve their professional skills.
Decide a time frame to complete
After creating a list of work, the next step is to determine a time frame to accomplish the job before touching the deadlines. Sometimes due to external interruption and other delays in the work, employees are not able to finish off the task on time. In this case, you can provide them some extra time to finish their work beforehand.
Assessment of work
After setting up timeboxing, schedule your task by giving it limited time slots, called timeboxes. Make sure that your team is following it and organize a brief session to measure the performance of your employees.
Reward your team
If your team is working hard to complete their tasks according to the timeboxes, reward them for their efforts. It would help you to improve the impulse of your employees. So they would try their best to keep moving forward and try to reach all the exacted goals without abstaining from the deadlines.
Timeboxing in agile software development
Timeboxing in agile software development, there are several types of meetings that are fixed in advance.
Timeboxed meetings in agile software development are:
- Everyday scrum– A 15-minute daily synchronization meeting that occurs every day at the same time and habitually in the same place.
- Sprint planning– It’s planning, where a team decides which task can be done in the next sprint, usually in seven days with a limit of two hours.
- Race review– The team reviews all the work that has been done, hasn’t been done, has been added, was removed from the sprint, with a time limit of one hour.
- Sprint retrospective – It’s a meeting at the end of the race, where a team does a retrospective of all the work that has been done so far.
Wrapping Up
Timeboxing can be very propitious to claim efficient workflow, with a committed and motivated workforce! The above mentioned strategies can help you accomplish more genuine productivity in your business. However, make sure to not be too vigorous to employees. Putting more load on employees may also boomerang you.
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