How timeboxing helped our team feel less 😩 😩 😩 about our workload

Timeboxing keeps the team sane

If you often feel overwhelmed by work, you’re not alone. We know that feeling of having too much to do and too little time to do it. For the past 2 months, our team has been experimenting with timeboxing to help ease the pain. We ended up liking it so much we decided to build a better interface for it into Sunsama.

For the unfamiliar, timeboxing is the practice of structuring blocks of time around chunks of work. For example, if today your top priorities are “finish up Nike presentation” and “review sales metrics”, you would choose when to work on each and block that time off on your calendar.

By building our schedule each day around the work we needed to accomplish, we noticed some major improvements:

• We’re more consistent about finishing the work we’ve set aside time for.
• We’re less likely to feel overwhelmed because we have a better sense for what can be reasonably accomplished each day.
• We’re better at prioritizing what really needs to be done when we’re honest about how little time is available each day to fit our work into.

Before (without timeboxing). No clear sense of what to do each day.

After (with timeboxing). Each day structured around what needs to be done.How to get started

1. Add things you need to work on to your task list.

As new tasks come up, add them to your task list so you can decide later when you want to work on them.

2. At the start of each day, drag the tasks you want to work on that day onto your calendar.

The 1-day view is helpful here. Be conservative with how long you think the task will take. Often, tasks require multiple blocks of time across different days to complete. You can drop the same task onto multiple days.

3. As the day goes on, fill-in and adjust as needed.

It’ll take some time to figure out how long you’ll really need to work on things. If you underestimate, just expand your timebox. It can help to only fill in the first half of the day in the morning and do the rest after lunch.

The new “1-Day” view makes timeboxing a breeze. Try building your dream day here.

If you use your timeboxing powers to craft a particularly stellar work day, send us a screenshot (ashutosh@sunsama.com). If your submission stands out, we’ll share your glorious day with the rest of our community in a future newsletter!

You can also reach out if you want to learn more, we’re happy to swap tips about our own experiences.

Here’s to savoring all 525,600 minutes we’ve got this year!

💖 Ashutosh & The Sunsama Team

Special thanks to Travis Meyer for writing the original version of this post.