A Time Boxing Experiment

One idea I have been experimenting with is a type of time boxing. The basic idea of time boxing is it's a productivity technique where you box off a certain period of time and work exclusively on one task.

One example you might have heard of is the Pomodoro technique.

Personally I don't have a problem getting going in a task, my bigger problem is stopping and get a balance between the various things I want to get on with.

I would like to read more books but find I slip into programming in a evening and do not stop. I would like to write a larger game for android but find myself hacking on small HTML5 games (also something I want to do). There are other desires in there as well. It is the classic problem of wanting to do more than time can possibly allow.

Not progressing is a cause of annoyance or perhaps even stress for me. To combat this I have decided to try time boxing. Using a round robin algorithm I will just go from one task to another. This will lets me progress, albeit slowly, on all projects I want to focus on.

For some reason 45 minutes seemed to jump out at me as the duration for each boxed of time. Roughly the duration a lecture at university would take by the time it got going.

After some thinking I arrived on three project titles/subjects to round robin though.They are quite general to give some freedom in the system. The first is Android development. That is creating things that will predominantly focus on android, for now this is likely to be games but should I want to develop app it would be done in this allotted time.

Second up is simply called "Web", You guessed it web development, whether this is HTML5 games, web apps or even articles/website development it goes in this time. It won't include blogging as I tend to do that in downtime while waiting for things or over a lunch hour.

Finally we come to what I called "Enhance", this is where most learning will happen, reading technical books, or fiction for that matter, You Tube videos and longer online tutorials. I almost called this "Fun" but thought Enhance fitted better, In this allotted time I will enhance myself.

I originally started with a list of about 6 possible titles but alternating though them all would have taken so long progress would have felt like walking across Europe with a snail. A side effect of setting up this style of work is it has helped to focus on a few number of ideas at any single time. Three feels like the correct number.

The final part of the technique I am using is to have a log book where I just write the date and the name of each time boxed session I finish on that date. It should over time let me spot days I am not getting much done and figure out why. It also make it a game, How session can I finish in a week and so on.

Am I worried about splitting my time too much? Yes I am! It is a worry although I am hoping it will be offset by seeing how much time I spend on other activities that offer no benefit and gradually eliminating those.

You might also be thinking my title sound a little broad, that's deliberate. My interests cycle a bit and I want to have flexibility in the system so I don't have to think about the system just what is happening in each boxed of time. It will be a bit of an effort but the plan is to form a habit of time boxing and then not notice that I am doing it.

Just for your, possible, interest here is what each subject currently means in actual work I do in the boxed of time

•   Android - sketching ideas/graphics
•   Web     - Working on a remake of a simple tile based puzzle game
•   Enhance - Reading Twisty Little Passages - A look at text adventures.

I plan to experiment with time boxing for the whole of June and July before deciding if it is working out for me.