Time Boxing Promotes Time Awareness
Working on your own often means working at your own time, at your own pace, and at your own terms. But too often, with this type of set up, you would end up not being aware of the time you have spent, or wasted. If you want to work on a fixed schedule or make sure that you are able to maximize the time you have on hand and spend it well, there is technique that has been circulating among freelancers for quite some time now. It is called time boxing. It can help you keep up with your tasks and keep tabs on the amount of time you spend on working on your tasks.
One of the reasons why time boxing can help you be aware of the time you spend is because the technique is time-bound, which means that it is not focused on the tasks done but on the time spent instead. As you go about your daily tasks employing the technique, you will notice that each task is listed and lined up according to the amount of time you intend to spend doing them. As a rule of thumb, when the alarm sets off for each task, you’ll need to stop what you’re doing and, no matter how little or how much work you were able to do on the tasks, drop it and do what’s next on the list. But this doesn’t mean that you are bound by that rule. You can always choose to continue with the tasks after the alarm goes off, you can customize the technique however way you want, and use it to your advantage. But the bottom line is, it keeps you aware of how long you’ve been working, how much time you have spent on your tasks, and how much time there is left both for each task and for your whole work day in general.
Another way that time boxing can help you be aware of your time is that it allows you to plan your tasks for the day according to how much time you tend to work for the whole day and divide the time into enough time boxes to accommodate your tasks. This way, your day is set up not according to what tasks you need to finish but to how much time you have to use for work. So as you progress along your day, you are definitely aware of your activities and how much time you have already spent.