How to Actually Finish What You Need to Get Done

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to HBR On Leadership. I’m HBR Executive Editor Alison Beard. On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. We carefully curate this feed from across the HBR portfolio, aiming to help you unlock your next level of leadership. I hope you enjoy the episode.

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Do you ever reach the end of a work day and say to yourself, “The day got away from me.” You started out with a list of things to accomplish, but you got distracted, they piled up and it feels like you never made any headway.

You’re not alone. It’s an all too familiar feeling nowadays, feeling unproductive and anxious. It’s all too common to look back on the day, the week, the month, or the year and feel like you never ended up doing what you wanted to do.

Today’s guest is here to tell you about a productivity practice called timeboxing. It’s the idea that you decide ahead of time what you’ll spend your time on each day, and for how long. The idea that you stick to the calendar you set for yourself, truly focusing on one task at a time.

Our guest today says, “It’s not just a method, it’s a mindset,” and he’s here to help us learn how to take it on. Marc Zao-Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of the learning technology company Filtered.com. And he’s the author of the book Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time. Marc, thanks for being here.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Curt, nice to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: Did you struggle with productivity before you discovered timeboxing?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Yeah, very much so. I had a problem at the start of my career. So I was a disorganized mess. I was ambitious, I was bright, I was in a job that I could have done very well in. It was strategy consulting, but I didn’t have a system for organizing my work and getting stuff done. That led to not doing a great job, getting in trouble, feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

CURT NICKISCH: So you weren’t being lazy. It’s not like you weren’t working enough hours.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: I was working many, many hours. That wasn’t the issue. It was to do with working on what made most difference to the project that you were involved in. But then I saw an article on Harvard Business Review. It’s by a guy called Daniel Markowitz. It was called Why To-Do Lists Don’t Work, and it immediately really struck a chord with me. I thought, “Okay, this makes logical sense. I want to try this immediately.”

And so I did and I spent the next week doing it, actually, the next five years doing it and it really made a huge amount of difference. Not just to how much I was getting done, but also how I felt. It had improved my confidence. I just knew at any given moment what I should be working on.

CURT NICKISCH: What was that idea? I mean, if to-do lists don’t work, you didn’t just get rid of them. What was the idea there?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: It’s really to bring the benefits of the calendar and the to-do list together. So you put your to-do list in your calendar, you set appointments for when you’re going to get things done.

So you don’t just have a list that you could do at any point in your life. You have a list of items and a time for when they’re going to get done and a system to see when they should be getting done. So it’s a calendar multiplied by the to-do list, which actually brings benefits that are greater than the sum of parts.

CURT NICKISCH: So there’s that old saying, “If you want something to get done, ask the busiest person to do it for you.” What do you make of that when you hear that?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Honestly, I would say that almost anyone who is very productive or successful has some kind of system that sounds a lot like timeboxing. They may not be calling it timeboxing, but for example, people who are important or senior in business, they will often have some kind of an assistant, an executive assistant, a personal assistant. What is that person doing? They are largely managing their calendar for them. Almost everyone that has that assistance is timeboxing or actually employing someone to timebox for them and make sure that their use of time is just what it should be.

CURT NICKISCH: I like that idea. It’s a little bit like the same way a budget puts dollars towards things that you think are important; instead of just having 12 things on your to-do list for the day. That putting them into your calendar and giving them different amounts of time and also which ones you do first, I can see how that’s a reflection of just priorities, budgeting your day for what you’d like to get done.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Well, exactly, and I think the budgeting analogy works because with a budget you have a finite amount of cash, with your day, you have a finite number of hours, how are you going to spend them? Be intentional about it, have a system for being intentional and timeboxing isn’t the only way of doing it, but I do actually think it’s the most logical, easy, accessible and has multiple benefits. So it’s just such a good way of achieving just that.

CURT NICKISCH: So how does it work in practice? Take us through a typical day.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Sure, okay. Well, my typical day starts, I get up, I get dressed, I brush my teeth and then the very first thing I do after that is to timebox for 15 minutes. So I have a recurring calendar appointment in my calendar for 15 minutes and it’s called Timebox Today.

So in that time I’m doing nothing but just thinking ahead to my day and my week and how I should be spending that time. And that’s not just work, that’s also exercise, that might be some reading, some meditation, time with the kids, time with my wife.

I’m putting that together from meetings that I have that I can see elsewhere in the calendar from my inbox, thoughts that have occurred overnight, to-do list obviously. Also just knowing that there are certain activities that are good for me, like learning or spending time with friends or exercise.

So I’m then deciding what is most important and slotting that into my day, usually around some of the existing meetings and commitments that I have. When I’ve done that, the end of the 15 minutes, I can see my whole day ahead. I know then that it will be a good day if I stick to that plan. So it’s a guide all the way through the day, as inevitably, I’ll be pulled in different directions, but I always have a voice telling me, “Well, there’s actually this one thing that you should be doing at this time.”

And so if I get distracted and I feel like I’m distracted, come back to the calendar, come back to the one thing. I immediately feel less stressed, less overwhelmed and get back to that one thing. And even if that one thing is difficult, it’s much easier to face one difficult thing than several things that are irritating you, bothering you at once.

CURT NICKISCH: How do you know how much time to give everything? I mean, how do you know how much time a certain amount of writing or email response or you’ve got many different tasks and yeah, how do you know how much time it’s going to take or how much time to give them?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Well, sometimes it’s just really easy because the timeboxes or your aspiration is to meditate for 30 minutes. So by definition, okay, it’s going to be 30 minutes. But for a lot of knowledge work, the thing to do is to base it on your experience of having done something similar before.

So you’ve gone through your inbox before when there are 100 emails, you’ve gone through your inbox when there are 50 emails, you have some sort of sense. You’ll have some internal or maybe explicit external calibration going on. And this is how you avoid the planning fallacy, which is that we don’t anticipate the unexpected, I mean, almost by definition. But if you look back at how long things have taken you in the past, you get that bedded in, that’s factored into the estimate.

You won’t get it perfect at the start, but if you do it a little bit, you’ll get a little bit better. And one of the points of timeboxing as well is that if you say, “Okay, I’m going to write a 500 word blog and I’ve got 45 minutes or an hour to do it.” When you get close to the end, or actually maybe when you get halfway through, you adjust your expectations. So if you’re a little bit ahead, then you can slow down a bit and focus on quality, if you’re a little bit behind, you might need to speed up. So you don’t get to two minutes until the end or the very end and all of a sudden you’ve run out of time and it’s a disaster. You pace yourself.

I call it pacing and racing as you go through the timebox. That’s partly a gamification thing, but also just a planning within the timebox so that you get something that’s useful and shippable done by the end of the allotted time.

Part of the art of timeboxing is adjusting things as you go. So you’re not aiming for perfection with any of the tasks that you’re doing, and none of us achieve perfection with any of the tasks that we do. So we are acknowledging that. We’re saying, “Look, we are going to fix the time. We’re going to get something decent done in this time and then move on to the next thing.”

CURT NICKISCH: And then what do you do if you have a job where little fires emerge? You get that email from your manager or things come up that you just have to deal with as you go?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Everyone has plans that change in their job. There’s not a single job that wouldn’t have that. My job is no exception. This is actually the most common objection to timeboxing and I’d say a few things about this. So, first of all, be realistic with the goals that you set in the first place. Only set timeboxes for when you are less likely to be disturbed, if at all possible, you’re less likely to have plans change. So just be sensible about it.

Then allow some slack in your day so that there’s a little bit of just leeway and breathing space in case a small thing changes.

But then, of course, sometimes the plans just will change and they’ll be big. But I would say that this is not very often. If you think about a meeting that you might have and how often do you have to change a meeting? What you do? We do have to change meetings. Sometimes, something comes up for one party or both parties or the other party. But how often is that?

I would say it’s less than 10% for almost everyone. And so if there’s less than 10%, well then sure, you just move your timeboxes around when you need to, which is less than 10% of the time. I do that. Every week, there’ll be some timeboxes that move and it’s shifting a few pixels around on a screen. It’s really not a big deal. So this objection that plans change, I mean, of course they do, but timeboxing is flexible to accommodate that.

CURT NICKISCH: Got it. What does your calendar look like? I’m just curious how much of your time you timebox.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: My calendar looks pretty full. It is color coded. There are a few different colors that correspond to different areas of my life that I deem to be important. So, friends and family is one of them. The book is another. Timeboxing in general, and then there’s some others to do with work. So they’re color coded. I would say probably 70% of my time is timeboxed in some way.

So there are a lot of timeboxes obviously in each day, and a lot of them are 15 minutes. So I actually have three sizes of timebox. There’s 15 minute timeboxes, small. 30 minute timeboxes, which are medium and 60 minute timeboxes, which are large.

I have these three because they stack nicely. They stack up to an hour, obviously very easily. They’re simple. And I have a lot of 15 minute timeboxes in particular because I feel that for me, I can get a lot done, a surprising amount done in 15 minutes.

So if I break tasks down, so sometimes it might be a 45 minute task really, but I break it down into three lots of 15 minutes and then I get more done. I feel better about that. There’s more time to relax later. Most of my days are timeboxed and then I would say that maybe three quarters of my evenings and the weekends are timeboxed as well.

I really do feel with timeboxing that if I make a plan and I see it through, and this applies to the regular working day as well as the weekends and the evening, if I set the plan and I stick to it, I always feel good about it at the end because I set good intentions.

You don’t think when you’re planning that you’re going to, “Well, why don’t I waste some time here and just be scrolling on social media or watching this Netflix documentary that I’m not really that interested in.” You’ll make plans that do matter to you and if you then get done the things that matter to you, you feel good. I mean, it’s just utterly logical to me. But that’s how and an increasing number of people are living their lives and reacting against the overwhelm and everything else beating at our doors.

CURT NICKISCH: I guess one thing that seems super important here is single tasking. You are essentially blocking off time. And a lot of people do that, right? But you are really just trying to do, you’re a serial single-tasker and not a multi-tasker in that sense.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Yeah, I mean, there is some nuance here, but essentially, yeah, what you’re saying is right. That we get a lot more done if we’re focused on one thing. I mean, that’s why actually, my newsletter’s called One Thing at a Time. There is this firm belief that I and many others have that you get a lot more done, you feel less stressed if you’re focusing on just one thing.

Now, the nuance is just that there are some combinations of tasks that do actually work reasonably well together. I mean, for example, you can go for a jog and listen to a podcast. Is that multitasking? Yes. I say single tasking in general for new cognitively difficult tasks.

I’d say one other thing about multitasking, multitasking for most people really just means doing one thing for a short amount of time. Being distracted then about a minute later and then doing something else and then doing something else a couple of minutes after that. So it’s really, it’s also single tasking really, but just doing it minute by minute, not making any progress on any of these things. Feeling frustrated, not knowing what you were meant to be doing at the beginning. And that is a very unpleasant experience.

I get to that as well because you are working on something and it’s fine. You are totally focused on that, and then some thought occurs or there’s some notification that pops up somewhere and you start to be distracted. As that happens, it starts to feel a little bit stressful for me.

And this is actually the real trick, this is the other objection to timeboxing, but what if you get distracted? Well, we all get distracted. It definitely happens to me multiple times a day. When it does, I notice this slightly stressed feeling that I’m having. I actually say out loud to myself, “One thing at a time.” And as soon as I remember even to utter that mantra, I feel more relaxed, I know what I’m supposed to be doing, what I need to do, which is to come back to my calendar. What’s the one thing I’m supposed to be working on? Then get back to that, feel happier, be more productive, happy days.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, that’s definitely a familiar thing and I know a lot of people feel like that sometimes, that you can ask them, “How was your day?” Or, “How did things go?” And they’re like, “I’m not even sure exactly what I did.”

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Well, just hit on one of the most underrated benefits of timeboxing. It’s just to remember what you did on planet Earth that day or even more difficult, what did you do last Tuesday afternoon?

Almost no one would have any idea what they did, but I have a very good idea because it’s in my calendar. Sometimes when you’re reviewing the week, it can be handy as a reflective exercise. It can be poignant. So there’s all sorts of benefits to timeboxing. One of the ones that is least celebrated is the one that you just hit on, which is, yeah, it’s a log. It’s a record of what you did and if you’ve got a record of it that can then unlock your memory.

CURT NICKISCH: How does this work though in an organization? I’m just curious. I have a personal calendar, I have a work calendar, if I timebox on my work calendar, that’s going to look like I’m never available. I also don’t want to, managing two calendars. I’m just curious, logistically, how do you recommend just making the timebox on your calendar, the to-dos line up with the rhythms of an organization?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Yeah, okay. So you’ve raised a couple of points there, I think. So one of them is, well, if you timebox your work calendar, it’s going to look like you’re busy all the time. Well, it will by the time you get to the end of your week. But if you think about as you go through this, let’s say it’s a Tuesday morning, you wake up early like I do, and you timebox the day. So at about, I don’t know, 7:30, 8:00 or whenever you’re finished with that, you will at that point have a full-looking Tuesday. But there’s two things with that.

First of all, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday will not be so full. So if anyone wants to spend time with you later that week or the week after, it’s completely fine. There’s also then a question of just your ways of working with people. So you may have fully timeboxed Tuesday, but if people know that you’re an avid timeboxer, they will know that with certain kinds of items that you’ve put in there, they may be movable or half movable or movable in the case of emergencies. So this is about trust and transparency and collaboration and just being clear about how you work with your colleagues.

CURT NICKISCH: This is also the office hours idea too. You can could reserve time on your calendar and communicate that to the people on your team and they know they can always get you then.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Exactly.

CURT NICKISCH: I mean, you brought up something there that sort of depends on how it works in your organization or what permissions you have set on your calendar, but people may only be able to see that you’ve blocked off time.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Yeah, that is private.

CURT NICKISCH: There’s also the ability then to make it more visible, to show exactly what you are doing when, which is a level of comfort that a lot of people don’t have or need to work up to. What kind of benefits do you see from timeboxing but then also making how you budget and box your time more visible to your team or to other people in your organization?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: I think if you’ve been asked to do something, and so let’s say, I’m Curt, I want you to write this report and you say, “Yep, Marc, very good. Will do.” That often happens in business that that is the response though. I mean, it’s literally those words, will do.

So you’re saying then to me that you will at some point in the future of time, get this thing done. That doesn’t really help me all that much. It’s a little bit reassuring, but I’m not totally confident you’re going to get it done. And I’m also not confident you’re going to get it done by the time I need you to do it.

CURT NICKISCH: Right, and so in your mind you’re thinking, “I need to follow up now, I got to check on this person.”

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: I might need to follow up, yeah, so it’s an extra stress for me. So just compare and contrast that to, “Okay, thanks, Marc. I will get that done. And it’s timeboxed for 3:00 PM on Thursday. How does that sound?” I can then say, “Well, first of all, thank you for being so helpful.” And secondly, I can say, “Okay, well no, I’m actually going to need it the day before that,” or, “It’s completely fine.”

Regardless, I’m going to feel like you are a great colleague to work with and I feel a lot more confident that you’re going to get the thing done by the time I need you to get it done. So I think part of timeboxing is really about collaboration and communication and a more harmonious work relationship between colleagues. Because when people ask someone to do something and it doesn’t get done or it doesn’t get done to time, it’s often just completely unnecessary that it goes that way. So,-

CURT NICKISCH: It’s funny you say that about communication because if you ask the question, when can I expect that?

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: It sounds a little bit aggressive.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, I mean, it’s a totally fair question, but it’s just you feel like you’re checking up on somebody. But you want to know because you need to plan…

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Yeah. I think with that actually as well, that ideally, if I say to you, “Curt, yeah, I’d like that report by Thursday, 3:00 PM, please,” you can timebox accordingly. It’s actually even more efficient because then you will obviously put the timebox at some point before Thursday, 3:00 PM.

CURT NICKISCH: Right. And you don’t forget a deadline, which is tough and to be like, “Hey, can I have more time on this?”

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Deadlines have become this dirty word in business, but it’s associated with micromanagement and difficult bosses. It really shouldn’t be. I mean, sometimes there’s just a deadline because something needs to go at a certain point. That’s just a piece of information that we should be able to treat a little bit more robotically. There’s nothing personal about that. We just need to get that information across to others so that they can treat it accordingly. Part of that treatment, in my view, should be, can be and should be timeboxing.

CURT NICKISCH: You’ve been timeboxing for years. How is it a mindset for you? Just tell us a little bit more about what it has done for you.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: In my case, it has led to becoming an author, so it’s changed my career. For me though, and for many people that I speak to, it is, you can think of it simply as a technique to manage your time better, and it’s definitely that, but it’s actually a lot more. It’s about intention, agency, purpose. It feels a lot bigger. You’re basically saying with timeboxing that, look, life is unpredictable and often hard. We could all do with some guidance. You can’t or don’t want to rely on other people all the time, but there is one source of certainty that each of us has in us, and that is it’s us.

Not us in all moments, when we’re hurried and hurried by everything that’s going on in the world and the hustle and bustle of the day, but it’s us in that earlier quiet moment when we had the space and time to think and the wherewithal to make some good important decisions about what we should do and when that day. That’s us at our very best.

It’s us, you’re accessing yourself in a higher self, in a quieter, better moment and being able to tap into that guide all the way through the day. So that’s how it is with me. I think the greatest benefit that I get from timeboxing is every single day there’ll be a point where I feel stressed. A bunch of thoughts occur to me about what I might be doing, and I can come back to the timebox. But by coming back to the timebox, I’m coming back to me in that earlier moment, giving my future self the reassurance that there is just one thing that you need to be thinking about, be bothered about at that moment. Just come back to that.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s interesting you use the word agency because I do feel that we actually control a lot more than we think we do, right? We do have a lot of control over our time, and we have a lot of autonomy, even in jobs that feel like you don’t have any. But it is, yeah, it’s very easy to feel like you’re losing control or things are controlling you, and you’re saying that timeboxing helps you take ownership of that.

MARC ZAO-SANDERS: Absolutely. There’s a constellation of mega trends, the internet, smartphones, knowledge work, work from home, post Covid in particular, that does exactly what you just described. It means that we’ve got a lot of choice at any given moment over what we do, but we also have a lot of systems and powers that are influencing what we spend time on.

So timeboxing is what is an antidote to that. You’re saying, “Okay, look, there is all of this stuff that you could be doing, but there is just one thing that you should be doing, and it’s whatever you said that you should be doing at the start of your day.” So it’s very, very much about agency. That’s actually, if I had to sum up the whole book in one word, it would be that. It would be agency.

ALISON BEARD: HBR On Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. On Leadership’s team includes Maureen Hoch, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, and Ian Fox.

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