One of the most popular techniques today in organizing and managing work is time boxing. This has become very popular that it is now being widely used in almost all types of work environment, even for students and professionals. This is especially useful for project management because it allows you to set both short-term and long-term goals, as well as make big projects less intimidating by breaking it down to smaller tasks.
With time boxing, you can allocate fixed deadlines for you tasks. This technique is time-bound, so you can designate a specific amount of time to be spent on each task depending on your predicted deadline. For example, if your project for the day is to come up with research proposal for your pre-finals in school, you can divide the task into smaller ones and set time boxes for each. You can allocate an hour for research and resource seeking, a full two and a half hours for writing the proposal itself, another hour for editing and revising, and then maybe take a 15-minute break, and then review the proposal for an hour. You can then allocate an extra 30 minutes for further revisions. You will find that the time you spent on the project is only four hours, giving you enough time to do other tasks for the rest of the day.
Another great thing for using this technique when doing any type of project is it allows for immediate feedback. When you’ve set up and delegated your initial time for each task in your project, you will find that you are able to adjust it as you go along and get an instantaneous picture of the task on hand, whether or not the amount of time currently allocated for it is enough or more time is needed for the task, and you can easily adjust it accordingly.
Notice how we tend to prefer smaller tasks than bigger ones? Same goes for projects, the huge ones always seem to overwhelm us while smaller ones are much more -bearable-. Time boxing solves this problem. This technique will help you break down the project into smaller tasks, giving you a visual of the small tasks instead of one big task. You will find that you can have more progress slowly working on the smaller tasks than when you see the big project as a whole. A huge house cleaning project, for example, can get you overwhelmed when you think about all the rooms and areas you will need to clean. So when you apply the technique, you can divide the project into rooms, set aside certain amounts of time for each room instead, and work on that. As you slowly work your way to the other rooms in your task list, you will find that you’ve achieved more this way.