Timeboxing: Timing your time

In the software development world often we see people devoting extra hours to deliver something with desired quality or getting things delayed a little bit. Though there may be different reasons and solutions for this problem, one common factor is lack of essential planning at one or the other level. IMO this can be mitigated to some extent by timeboxing at all levels.

TimeBoxing is a time management technique which allocates a fixed time period, called a time box for each planned activity. This can be used at various levels in SDLC. In project planning the timebox can be in days or weeks and in personal work management it can be in minutes or hours.

The idea is fairly simple and there is a psychology behind this. When you timebox your work, you are aware that you are running out of time and you can be more focused as compared to when you have not timeboxed anything.

Timeboxing is very beneficial to developers specifically. Developers usually are stuck in a decision of quality of code and delivery of many tasks. When they try to be perfectionist, they take much more than usual time. If they timebox their daily work, and communicate the same to team, they can be more productive.

Main benefits from this technique are:

• focus on doing most important things first
• stop being perfectionist when working on open ended tasks
• being more productive and timely