‘The key is in not spending time but in investing it.” – Steohen R Covey.

Are you spending your time or you are investing it?

Which time management technique are you using to the increase the return on your invested time.

Time is one of the phenomena in life that humans can’t create. But we have the choice to make the best or worst use of the time we have. There is always a consequence of how we use our time.

Manage your time wisely as an investment and gain the best out of life. Alternatively, spend it as an expense on liabilities and lose it but gain regrets.

It’s rarely the choice of many to waste the gift of time on procrastination and other time wasters. It’s often a result of absent or poor knowledge of a good time management technique. People who fall easily into the trap of procrastination could extricate themselves with the help of a good time management technique called “timeboxing.”

What is timeboxing?

Timeboxing is a time management technique used to allocate fixed time period to a well thought out activity. An activity ends at the expiration of its assigned period.

If used effectively, timeboxing could prove to be a simple strategy for creating an easy to follow productive daily routine that minimizes or eliminate time wasters from your calendar.

Timeboxing allows the flexibility to adjust to contingency events.

Now, why is timeboxing a good time management strategy?

Timeboxing leads to increase in productivity; With timeboxing, it’s easy to match daily activities to time periods according to personality traits.
As a morning person, plan and build your goal oriented daily routine into the morning hours. Be honest to yourself. When you do this, it becomes difficult for you not be productive within these hours except on your off days.

2. Timeboxing your daily activities results in a gradual elimination of procrastination.

Hours which would have been lost to the unproductive habit of procrastination are invested in gainful activities.

You find yourself moving from one activity to the next activity on your daily timetable and calendar. You suddenly become aware that any period wasted could result to not meeting deadlines. And not meeting deadlines often results in not achieving set goals.

3. A level of focus is achieved;

Planning, organizing and controlling your daily activities with the aid of timeboxing, raise your level of focus.

Every activity in front of you, receives your complete attention because it has been planned for. Your focus on the task at hand hardly shifts to something else that doesn’t demand your immediate attention.

Timeboxing therefore, keeps you conscious of the time you have to complete a particular task and of the fact that when that time period is over, you have to move on to the next task.

So to give the work at hand your best, you realize that you must focus. In other words, attaining mindfulness is possible by using the time management technique of timeboxing.

4. Timeboxing is a sure path to self-discipline.

Self-discipline is a habit that requires commitment to a plan of actions and resolutions.

Timeboxing is a time management strategy that makes it possible to maintain that commitment. Sustaining this commitment over days, weeks and months takes self-discipline.

You must be disciplined because you will have to stick to the schedule regardless of how you feel emotionally and physically.

5. Timeboxing helps to reduce stress.

The stress which comes from working in high and low productive periods just to meet deadlines is reduced. This is because timeboxing allows you to break down a big task into smaller manageable sizes and attend to them in your naturally productive periods.

Given, you will definitely have days of low motivation but gains from days of high productivity will offset losses on bad days and sometimes, exceed them.

6. Timeboxing is a good time management method for scheduling breaks.

Experts recommend taking breaks between every 25 and 90 minutes. They explain that these breaks prevent decision fatigue, strengthen memories, improve productivity and are important for emotional and physical health. Timeboxing is a powerful time management tool for punctuating tasks with breaks.

This is possible because timeboxing generates a daily to-do list and attaches corresponding time periods. So, there’s enough room to consciously throw in periods of breaks that boost your level of motivation, your productivity and your health.