Timeblocking vs Timeboxing
And Which One I Do for Efficiency and Ease
In mainstream time management advice, you’ve probably seen references to techniques like timeblocking, timeboxing, batching, and other ways to organise your calendar so that you can get the most out of your day. I want to explore these concepts today and tell you how I manage my calendar so that you can take the most effective ideas and apply them to your own life.
Listen to the episode!
Listen on Spotify or Listen on Apple Podcasts
So I hear quite a bit about time blocking and time boxing, and unfortunately they sound really similar, and I think this can add to the confusion when you are trying to work out how to improve your time management.
These two concepts are really similar in practice as well, so I want to bring you some clarity on this today, and explain exactly what they are and which one I like to use in my own weekly planning. I think that sometimes people use these two terms interchangeably as well, but they are slightly different.
What is the Difference Between Time Blocking and Time Boxing?
Time blocking is quite simple, and refers to setting aside a block of time to work on one task. The important parts here are that a task has a particular time set aside for it, and there is a single focus, so that there is no multitasking. So if you imagine looking at your calendar, you might have 9-12 for meetings, 12-1 for lunch, 1-4 for writing, and then 4-4:30 for travel, 4:30-5:30 for gym, etc.
Time boxing is a little different. Time boxing comes from the project management space, and was first described by an author named James Martin. It was part of a three part system where a project has a particular time period (because of a deadline), a scope, and a budget. So, timeboxing is where you allocate a particular duration for a task, you take that amount of time to do it, and then you must be finished by the end of that time. The idea is that if you don’t finish in time, it means that scope was too big and so the scope ends up being smaller.
These Techniques Affect Your Finished Product
If we think about timeblocking and timeboxing in our own lives, timeblocking is where we try and be efficient by allocating particular types of tasks to particular times of the day, and timeboxing is a little more strict and requires you to finish a task in the time that you have guessed that it will take. If you don’t finish the task in that time, you still need to move on, which means the task is left unfinished.
What actually happens though is that you see the time deadline approaching, and you tend to speed up or cut the scope of what you’re doing, so that you end up with a rushed and/or a smaller finished product. And you feel rushed as well, which is not very nice.
Now this change in the finished product might be a good or a bad thing, depending on your task. So the main thing that I want you to think about when considering these two approaches is can you tolerate a rushed or smaller finished product? Is this a task that has to be done in a fixed way, and has to be right?
Let’s say it’s something like filling out a form that has been sent to you. It has a fixed number of questions and you have to answer them all, and you’re going to work on it at your regular speed of reading or writing. It’s going to take you as long as it takes. This type of example can’t really be stopped when you’re a couple of questions from the end. It has to be completed regardless of how long it takes you.
The alternative is that you can tolerate a rushed or smaller result. For example, when I write podcast episodes, I could spend hours and hours researching the topic. In theory I could read every single scientific article on the topic and more, and come up with the most perfect and lengthy essay of research findings. But that would take me weeks, and it would be a huge waste of my time, and you don’t want to hear all that, so one way to constrain this type of open-ended task is to give myself a time limit. I might say that I want to read the research for 3 hours, and then write a short summary of the main points. So have a think about the main types of tasks you do in your work, and decide if they require a fixed amount of time, or if they are more open-ended tasks that require more time.
Constraint
So if you are going to implement time boxing, it works better for tasks that are open-ended and need constraint. But, I also find that it’s too strict. I might set myself 3 hours to research the podcast, but if I’m at 2 hrs and 50 minutes and I’ve just found an awesome article and want to keep reading because this will add a lot of value to the content, then there is no way that I’m stopping at the 3 hour mark.
So my preference is to actually use timeblocking, where I’m still estimating times, but I’m not strict with it like timeboxing calls for.
Estimating Time
Now I want to give you a little spanner in the works here.
There has been a bit of scientific research on how well we humans can estimate the time it takes to complete a task. This research has been done with tasks that take minutes, seconds, and days and weeks as well, so it’s looked at across the board (and I’ll put some references in the shownotes). The results show that many people underestimate how long a task will take them.
The task tends to actually take longer, and this is a massive problem because if you’ve timeboxed your schedule pretty tight, you are going to end up with a whole bunch of unfinished tasks, which apart from being unproductive in and of itself, it will leave you feeling super stressed out. The research also showed that some people wildly overestimate the length of tasks, and so if you’re doing that, then you’re really left not utilising your time efficiently.
Now, you might have heard of Parkinson’s law, which says that a task will expand to fill the time that you have given it. This means that if you have allocated 1 hour to do it, and it really would only take 40 mins, then you kind of dawdle and procrastinate a little, and end up using the whole hour. You have overestimated the time, and so end up wasting a bit of time.
So it might seem like timeboxing can directly deal with this phenomenon, to keep you working under a little bit of deadline pressure, and again that might be really helpful for you in certain open-ended tasks like researching or brainstorming or designing or something like that. But going back to the issue of difficulty with estimating the time a task takes, this would only really work if you were accurate at estimating the duration in the first place.
The Goldilocks of Time Management
So what are we left with? You want to find a solution that is that nice little Goldilocks rate of working, where you don’t want too many deadlines and underestimating of time so that you’re not working too fast and feel stressed, but you don’t want to have no structure or plan at all, so that you’re not wasting your time away.
I think that timeblocking is the best of both worlds here. When I use timeblocking instead of timeboxing, I am scheduling a rough time and duration in my calendar for one task, and I’m grouping similar tasks together, which is known as batching. The key here is that because I am still susceptible to this tendency to over or underestimate duration, like we all are, then I have some flexibility in my schedule.
Want to join a community of time-management lovers, and learn more about working with your brain to get the meaningful stuff done? Join me over on Substack.
Flexibility
Yes there are deadlines, for example, I might really want my podcast to be out on Monday morning, and so if I don’t finish it in the time I have allocated on the previous Tuesday morning for example, I might either push the Tuesday afternoon tasks to some white space that I have planned in the week, or I might finish it another day in another space that I have left free. The benefit of the first method where I keep it on the same day, is that I’m still in the headspace of researching and writing, and so I continue with the task and don’t lose traction, which is something that can happen if you are strictly timeboxing and cutting off your task.
By having white space or free space in your calendar, and keeping your schedule flexible, you can be responsive to this tendency to over- or underestimate duration. That is the important part here.
Batching
And the way to optimise your concentration and your feeling of calm and ease as you work through a long list of tasks, is to batch similar tasks together when you plan out your timeblocking. When you group similar tasks together, you are avoiding task switching, and so you’re holding all the current and relevant information in mind so your brain can go to work and make connections, solve problems, and work faster to get the task done properly. When you switch between different things, you lose this benefit, and the science says that we make more errors and actually take longer to do things. Once you’ve grouped your tasks, you can then set your priorities and go ahead and time block your schedule.
I like to give myself theme days for my work, so I work two to three days per week in this business, on Tuesdays the priority is the podcast, and on Thursdays the priority is the marketing, so I turn the podcast into blog posts and Substack posts, and I write an email to my newsletter list, and make some social media posts.
That’s the general theme of my workdays, but when it comes to the actual day, I also make sure that I’m batching work and other tasks too, so I’ll batch all my work into two separate categories which I then do before and after lunch, and then I’ll make sure I keep any life admin or house work to one short session in the morning after I drop Ruby at childcare. This way the different categories of tasks are separate and I’m not switching back and forth between email and socials and work and washing and lunch etc.
My Timblocking Yesterday
I’ll give an example of flexible timeblocking that happened to me this week. So yesterday I was making a Reel for Instagram, it was actually for my wedding invitations business. And I allowed myself an hour when I wrote out my timeblocked schedule at the start of the day. I know that reels take me between 45 mins to an hour usually, so I purposely allocated an hour so I had a little bit of breathing space so I don’t feel rushed.
I had other activities in my day, and I built in a little bit of leeway, like when I allocated 45 minutes to make something for lunch from scratch, and when I allocated an hour to do some illustration for a new wedding invitation.
Well, I had issues with the format of the video clips I was using for the Reel, so I had to spend quite a bit of time reformatting them so that they were usable. This meant that the reel took me 1 hr 20 in total. Now if I was using timeboxing and strictly wanted to stick to one hour, I would have had nothing. I would have finished nothing and posted nothing, and basically my hour would have been wasted. But also, if I allocated a different time to go back to it and finish it, I would have lost momentum and flow that I got from already being in the task. So I used the 1 hr 20, and finished when it was finished, and then I just rejigged my schedule. I can do this easily because I have built in a little space, AND because I can’t exactly predict how long each task will take.
Which One is Your Favourite?
So you can see here that timeboxing involves batching, making priorities, roughly estimating how much time it will take, and then planning it out and being flexible, and this means that you can see what you have time for and what you don’t have time for, and you know that I love reminding you of this because this means you won’t experience that pressure of getting to the end of the day and realising you still have 20 things on your todo list, and feeling like you did nothing.
So I love this method of timeblocking, and I like to avoid timeboxing where I can. And I would love to hear your thoughts, which method do you do? Have I inspired you to try your time management a different way? Come and tell me on Instagram or Substack what your thoughts were.
I’m going to end with my favourite quote, Mary Oliver said “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time!
Want to keep reading about time management? Check out my post on why you should stop using the Pomodoro Technique.
Some helpful references:
Francis‐Smythe, J. A., & Robertson, I. T. (1999). On the relationship between time management and time estimation. British Journal of Psychology, 90(3), 333-347.
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the” planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of personality and social psychology, 67(3), 366.
James Martin first talked about timeboxing in his book Rapid Application Development, published in 1991.
