One of the best personal development tricks I have ever learned is the concept of timeboxing. What is timeboxing, you ask?

Timeboxing is a fairly simple time management technique. When you have a task to accomplish, you set aside a certain amount of time to complete that task. You do your very best to complete that task, regardless of the final outcome. For example, say you’re writing a new blog entry on timeboxing. You give yourself an hour to do that task in, and however it comes out is how it comes out.

With timeboxing, the quality of what you’re producing is still very important, but the overall concept is to get a finished product churned out for you to use and for people to see. The end goal is a completed item, task, or project. You can assign any amount of time (30 minutes, an hour, two hours, etc.) to any task (cleaning, writing, reading, etc.) In addition, you can always go back and revise what you’ve hammered out.

I often use timeboxing when I’m practicing piano. Oftentimes, when you’re practicing a certain skill, like learning a musical instrument or a sport move, it’s easy to practice for hours on end but not get any real work accomplished. The more you practice, the worse your actual practicing becomes. Timeboxing practice into a limited amount of time forces you to make intelligent decisions based on the time you have and what needs to be done. If I give myself exactly one hour to practice, am I going to diddle around playing showtunes? Of course not! I’m going to be practicing Chopin. In this case, timeboxing works very effectively. When time becomes scarce, my practice sessions shoot up in value. Less time to mess around, more time to buckle down and get to work.

Here are some other useful uses for timeboxing:

• Highly creative work. Creative work needs to get done one way or another, and oftentimes amazingly creative people don’t bother with setting deadlines. But if no tangible work gets completed, how will the world see their gifts? Use timeboxing to get that creative work done, such as composing a song or writing a blog entry.
• Finishing off lots of little tasks together. Can you finish off 20 little things that need to be done today in a course of an hour? Batch them all together and knock them off one by one instead of doing one here, one there. Saves time and energy.
• Tedious, ugly, massive projects. Most goals that one will try to obtain in life can be broken down into numerous projects. Some of these projects will be enjoyable to blaze through; others, not so much. Use timeboxing to make an impact in completing the nastier projects bit by bit.
• Stuff you just wanna get done. Some stuff isn’t fun to do, but it’s not exactly something that can fall into a category. If it looks like a huge, looming, annoying project, use timeboxing to knock it off of your to-do list once and for all.

Remember, the goal of timeboxing is a totally finished item. You can always go back and revise if you feel the need to later, depending on the item itself.

What can you be timeboxing and completing today? Why haven’t you done it yet? Get to work!