I've tried a bunch of productivity techniques like Pomodoro, GTD, Eat the Frog. Nothing works as well as Timeboxing / Timeblocking.
Timeboxing helps you realistically plan your day - vs having 100 things in one day's to-do list.
For me personally, I find that there are a lot of tasks that would just take 5 minutes. But I end up procrastinating on them.
Timeboxing helps solve that problem.
"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion" – the Parkinson's law and true for timeboxing.
Don't allocate a long time slot for one task. Elon Musk plans his day in 5 min increments. You don’t have to be that extreme, 30 mins should work.
The best part about timeboxing is that you will learn while doing it. For e.g. if you timebox 2 hours when you should do 3 - you will realize it and adapt next time.
It also seperates the doing from the planning. Sort of like Paul Graham's Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule.
You don’t go through thoughts asking "What do I do now?"
How to start timeboxing?
1. Use any to-do app like Todoist or TickTick. Set up Google Calendar sync. Todoist allows for 2 way sync and TickTick offers 1 way sync.
2. Configure 30 mins as the default interval
3. Add start time as the due time of your tasks
4. Profit
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