How to Increase Employee Productivity with Timeboxing

Do you want your employees to work more efficiently with less distractions? Today, we're talking about one of the most innovative and effective techniques to help you do just that, and that technique is timeboxing.

What is timeboxing?

Timeboxing is one of the most versatile, easy-to-apply and effective time management techniques. Like many such strategies, it originated in the Agile sector, but has quickly gained popularity in a wide variety of industries and in conjunction with a wide variety of approaches.

Its basic idea is very simple: for each task you define a "timebox" which is the maximum amount of time that can be spent on that particular task. At first glance, it sounds very similar to other typical time management practices (when managers define the agendas for each day by saying, "today we have deadlines for this, this and that task"). In practice, however, there is one key difference: timeboxing defines not the moment when the task should be completed ("the deadline is at 2 pm today"), but the amount of time that can be spent on that task.

Advantages of timeboxing

By using timeboxing, you get a number of valuable benefits straight away:

Simplifying the scheduling. It is much easier to look at the distribution of work based on those deadlines, since you always have the time allocated for each task in front of you, which is easy to synchronize with the schedule.
Eliminating the false sense of calm. Some employees might think along the lines of, "the deadline is not until Thursday, today is Monday, there's still plenty of time!" No matter when the deadline is, the amount of time allocated to each task remains the same. Besides, other tasks are always visible as well, with their own timeboxes. The week is already pre-planned and clearly scheduled, so there is simply no time left to procrastinate.
Creating extra motivation to concentrate on a task. Switching between different tasks requires a lot of energy and time, and timeboxing makes such waste of efforts clearly visible. The intention to spend their time more efficiently allows employees to cope with the negative consequences of multitasking, track their working time better, and increase their labor efficiency altogether.
Protecting from excessive perfectionism. There will always be people who need everything to be just perfect; however, it is not always best from a business point of view to deliver impeccable results. Usually, a task should be completed at an optimal cost/benefit ratio - you don't need "perfect" all the time, you just want "good enough". Timeboxing helps perfectionist employees find that sweet spot after all.
Saving time and energy of your employees. It is much easier to monitor the schedule created of "timeboxes" cubes, and there is no need to puzzle over prioritizing tasks.

All of the above makes timeboxing an excellent addition to the traditional deadline management system - or, if you take over the entire schedule creation task, this tecnique may even replace the latter. In this case, employees will receive a ready-to-use schedule with timeboxes, and they won't have to worry about deadlines at all.

Example of using timeboxing

Let's say you are creating a schedule for your software developers. There are three tasks at hand: implementation of a new feature, review of another team's code, and planned refactoring. The schedule in this case might look like this:

9.00-9.30 am - morning meeting, discussion of current issues;
9.30-9.45 am - break
9.45 am-12.45 pm - work on a new feature
12.45-1.00 pm - short conference call to review progress
1.00-2.00 pm - lunch
2.00-3.00 pm - code review
3.00-3.15 pm - break
3.15-5.00 pm - refactoring

Please note that the schedule quite often includes short breaks. This is crucial, since timeboxing is a form of the sprint approach. Employees try to maximize their productivity in one "timebox", and then they naturally need to rest and reboot a bit, in order to recover and regain their energy. Yet, even with these breaks, overall productivity increases.

Limitations and drawbacks of timeboxing

Like any method, timeboxing has its own bottlenecks. These include:

Adaptation period. Those employees who are used to constantly bouncing between tasks will find it especially difficult to get used to this format. At first, you will need to closely monitor your employees (we'll cover the how-to's below).
Setting time frames (timeboxes) for demanding and complex tasks. It's important to recognize that timeboxing is only good if you can actually determine with high accuracy how much time it will take to complete a task. If, for example, we are talking about finding a bug in some software, it is rather difficult to make certain predictions and it is better to use other techniques.

Either way, while it will take some time for everyone to get used to timeboxing, it's definitely worth it.

How to make timeboxing effective

There are a few questions you will first need to answer:

How should a manager keep track of what employees are doing and are they genuinely concentrating on the task? If not, what is getting in the way?
How often should breaks be taken? The metrics are likely to be different for different job titles.
How to understand if timeboxing is profitable for the business? Does it increase efficiency?
How do different employees respond to timeboxing? Who is performing better, who is struggling?

These questions can all be addressed with the help of Kickidler employee monitoring software. Our time tracking solution is ideal for use in conjunction with timeboxing: all you need to do is install monitoring modules on your employees' machines, and you'll always have detailed statistics on who's actually working, what they're doing, when, and how much they've done. Plus employees themselves can track their productivity, and if someone gets distracted during the timeboxing, our Autokick module will gently remind them to get back to work.

Try the Kickidler + timeboxing combination! We're certain that it will greatly help your business for the better!