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Timebox Your Day

  • Artikkeli

Grigori Melnik joined our team recently.  He's new to Microsoft so I shared some tips for effectiveness.  Potentially, the most important advice I gave him was to timebox his day.  If you keep time a constant (by ending your day at a certain time), it helps with a lot of things:

  • Worklife balance (days can chew into nights can chew into weekends)
  • Figuring our where to optimize your day
  • Prioritizing (time is a great forcing function)

To start, I think it helps to carve up your day into big buckets (e.g. administration, work time, think time, connect time), and then figure out how much time you're willing to give them.  If you're not getting the throughput you want, you can ask yourself:

  • are you working on the right things?
  • are you spending too much time on lesser things?
  • are there some things you can do more efficiently or effectively?

To make the point hit home, I pointed out that without a timebox, you can easily spend all day reading mails, blogs, aliases, doing self-training, ... etc. and then wonder where your day went.  Microsoft is a technical playground with lots of potential distractions for curious minds that want to grow.  Using timeboxes helps strike balance.  Timeboxes also help with pacing.  If I only have so many hours to produce results, I'm very careful to spend my high energy hours on the right things.

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2007
    Ahem! We work to live, not live to work. To be productive you need consistent amounts of sleep, down time, time to tend to life, etc.  It's in the company's best interest that you maintain your personal life. In my past I've had numerous times where I've stayed late for several hours only to give up to stress and fatigue and after a good night's sleep solved the problem in minutes with a refreshed mind the next day.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2007
    Whether you're a new hire or taking on a new job, here's some principles, patterns and practices to be

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2007
    Patterns and Practices for New Hires from J.D. Meier's Blog has really good advise on this: Whether you're

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2007
    Time boxing is a way to chunk up time and get results. If you continously miss windows of opportunity