Returning from the summer with a head full of good intentions, I have become aware of a philosophical schism in the world of productivity hacks. In one corner, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the other, Elon Musk and the “timeboxers”. (I swear, I am not making this up.) The philosophical divide is over a simple question: how much should you schedule blocks of time in your calendar?
Mr Schwarzenegger reportedly kept his diary clear as a film star, and even tried to do so when he was governor of California. “Appointments are always a no-no. Planning ahead is a no-no,” he once said. Visitors had to treat the Governator like a walk-in restaurant — show up and hope for the best.
The opposite approach is timeboxing: timeboxers advocate transferring the entire “To Do” list to a calendar. Need to do some laundry? Set aside time on the calendar. Have a column to write? Block out the necessary hours. Want to chill out on Instagram? Put it in the calendar. Not getting enough sleep? You guessed it: calendar.
Since any productivity hack needs a celebrity endorsement, timeboxers claim (on thin evidence, it seems to me) that the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk uses the technique. Most of us have to compromise a little more with the rest of the human race than do either Mr Musk or Mr Schwarzenegger. Yet the divide is real: schedule as much as possible, or as little as you can get away with? We must all decide if every minute of productivity or rest should be planned in advance, or whether it’s better to be more flexible.
Timeboxing originated as a collaborative technique for software developers, and in that context it may work well. Yet, as a personal productivity tool, it seems infantilising. Calendars work for time-specific commitments, such as flights or nights at the opera; everything else should go on a to-do list, a much more flexible way of keeping track of commitments.
I do not want to dismiss those who claim timeboxing works for them. I’m just not persuaded. Some say timeboxing helps them avoid being overwhelmed by a long list of tasks; I say prioritise. Timeboxers note Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time allocated. I say, set deadlines.
More recently, I’ve seen timeboxing praised as a strategy for avoiding distractions. Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable, says that timeboxing helps him confine Facebook and YouTube to narrow slivers of the day. If that works for you, fine; I suspect it’s more productive to have a more fundamental rethink of your relationship to social media.
David Allen, author of the cult book Getting Things Done, reckons that timeboxing is a psychological crutch. We all need to feel on top of the commitments we’ve made to others and to ourselves, and it’s not easy. For those of us who feel we’re losing our grip, he tells me, “structuring time for social media, walking the dog, prepping for dinner, might make you feel more comfortable. If you’re like me, though, you plan as little as you can get by with”.
Todd Brown of Next Action Associates, a management training firm, agrees. People like blocking out time because it feels like they can “grab control of the situation”, he says. At the end of the week, however, what if everything has changed?
I agree with both of them. Commitments do not become easier to manage simply because you decide in advance when it is all going to happen. Life has a habit of producing surprises: the boss has an urgent task; the car won’t start; an old friend texts to tell you she is on a flying visit from Australia. The most inevitable surprise of all is that everything always takes longer than you think it will.
Still, that is just my opinion. If a serious study of the rival techniques exists, I have yet to find it. One relevant experiment was conducted nearly 40 years ago by the psychologists Daniel Kirschenbaum, Laura Humphrey, and Sheldon Malett. They recruited undergraduates and gave them some basic productivity tips. One group was counselled to plan their goals and activities in broad monthly blocks. Another group was instead advised to plan their activities and set their goals on a daily basis.
Neither approach is precisely analogous to timeboxing, but the daily schedule is similar because students would draw up detailed plans. These plans backfired disastrously: day after day, the daily planners would fall short of their intentions and soon became demotivated, spending less time on studying and falling behind over the course of the academic year. The more amorphous monthly planners proved far more successful, presumably because they had more flexibility to adapt to events, as well as wasting less time fiddling around with their calendars. A plan that is too specific soon lies in tatters.
It is clear that some people have made timeboxing work for them. Everyone is different, and every job is different. For me, however, my To Do list is long, and my diary is as clear as I can keep it. And if Arnie is on my side, so much the better.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 6 September 2019.
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