Stop Multitasking and Try Timeboxing

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are all kinds of productivity tools out there promising to help you make the most of your day. Some people swear by timeboxing: the method of reserving time on your calendar each day for each task you want to get done, and then truly focusing on that one thing at a time. The return on merging your to-do list with your calendar like this, says Marc Zao-Sanders, is higher productivity, better collaboration, and less distraction and anxiety. He explains how try to the method yourself and the how your team and organization benefit from it, not just you. Zao-Sanders is author of the book "Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.
0:14.4	I'm Kurt Nickyff.
0:27.2	Do you ever reach the end of a work day and say to yourself, the day kind of got away from me?
0:33.0	You started out with a list of things to accomplish, but you got distracted, they piled up,
0:39.6	and it feels like you never made any headway. You're not alone. It's an all too familiar feeling nowadays,
0:45.5	feeling unproductive and anxious. It's all too common to look back on the day, the week,
0:50.5	the month, or the year, and feel like you never ended up doing what you wanted to do.
0:54.8	Today's guest is here to tell you about a productivity practice called time boxing. It's the idea that you decide ahead of time what you'll spend your time on
1:00.2	each day and for how long, the idea that you stick to the calendar you set for yourself, truly
1:06.7	focusing on one task at a time. Our guest today says it's not just a method, it's a mindset.
1:14.6	And he's here to help us learn how to take it on. Mark Zau Sanders is the CEO and co-founder
1:20.5	of the learning technology company Filter.com. And he's the author of the book, Timeboxing,
1:26.5	the power of doing one Thing at a Time.
1:29.1	Mark, thanks for being here.
1:30.7	Kurt, nice to be here.
1:32.5	Did you struggle with productivity before you discovered time boxing?
1:37.7	Yeah, very much so. I had a problem at the start of my career. So I was a disorganized mess.
1:42.9	I was ambitious. I was bright. I was in a job
1:46.3	that I could have done very well in. It was strategy consulting. But I didn't have a system for
1:51.5	organizing my work and getting stuff done. That led to not doing a great job, getting in trouble,
1:58.2	feeling stressed and overwhelmed. So you weren't being lazy.
2:01.5	It's not like you weren't working enough hours.
	...

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