Sentence Starter Pack 1
Comfort Zone, Growth Zone, Panic Zone and Situational Goals: Life Is Easier Than You Think
Chinese Project Notes 10: Big Developments (Anki, Text-To-Speech, Cantonese, Victory Calendar)
【台詞コーナー】攻殼機動隊・・・全部だよ／ Exact Japanese Dialog Transcripts for Ghost In the Shell, Son!
One Kanji Poster to Rule them All, One Kanji Poster to Bind Them, One Kanji Poster to View them All, and into the Mind Grind Them, Or "Shameless Product Placement is Good for the Wallet, and the Lymph"
LiveStation
NHK High School/NHK高校講座
Kanji Pict-O-Graphix
KanjiPoster
Remembering the Kanji
Remembering the Kanji III
Remembering the Kana
All About Particles
Japanese In Mangaland
Japanese In Mangaland 2
Japanese In Mangaland 3
Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference
Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics (Part 2)
Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics Vol 1
13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese
英語は絶対、勉強するな！２：不安が消える・疑問が打っ飛ぶ・マジでペラペラ
英語は絶対、勉強するな！：学校行かない・お金掛けない・だけどペラペラ
Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You
The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 1: What Is Timeboxing, Why Does It Work, And Why Should You Care?
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 2: Nested Timeboxing
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 3: Dual Timeboxing
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 3.5: Timeboxing Turns Work Into Play
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 4: Decremental Timeboxing
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 5: Incremental Timeboxing and Mixed Timeboxing
- My (Current) Timeboxing Tools: Hardware Timers
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 6: Q&A
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 7: Isn’t Timeboxing Just A Waste of Time?
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 8: Don’t Those Super-Short Timeboxes Make Timeboxing Meaningless?
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 9: Birthlines And Timeboxing
- Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 10: Timeboxing, Tony Schwartz and Recovery
- Decremental Timebox → Real Time Conversion Table
This is the first post in a multi-part series on timeboxing. I’m expecting the series to run for about 3 parts, plus maybe 1 or 2 extra posts to answer any questions that come up along the way.
This first article is just a placeholder to help us get our bearings. The real tofu and potatoes will come in the next two parts, where I’ll discuss two timeboxing variants that I’ve recently been using — dual timeboxing and decremental timeboxing, both of which are “AJATT originals” AFAIK…
What Is Timeboxing?
If you’re not familiar with timeboxing, WikiPedia, Steve Pavlina, Litemind, and J.D. Meier and Dave Cheong all give great, easy-to-read introductions to the concept. My first exposure to the idea was Mr. Pavlina’s article.
While we’re being definitional, when I talk about timeboxing here at AJATT, I’m generally referring to what WikiPedia calls “personal timeboxing”.
Anyway, the short answer is this: timeboxing is a technique where we place deliberate, prior, artificial limits on the time to perform a given task. Within reason, the tighter (shorter) the time limits, the better.
Why Timeboxing?
Why is timeboxing so powerful and useful? Well, recall the Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT) equation by Piers Steel. This equation tells as that for any given task:
U = EV / ΓD
- U = Utility, i.e. fun. The idea is that humans always make the choice they believe maximizes U. IIRC, humans always want and choose to do the thing that has the highest U.
- E = Expectancy. Your confidence in your ability to complete the task.
- V = Value, i.e. importance of the task.
- Γ = Distractions.
- D = Deadline, delay. How much time you have to do the task.
For a fuller discussion of the whole Temporal Motivation Theory thing, you might want to check out the rather verbose article I wrote about winnable games, as well as the original TMT paper by Steel himself. In my humble, non-expert opinion, Steel has probably managed to compress virtually the entire body of work of the personal development industry into a workable equation using only simple arithmetic and just one Greek letter. Hot stuff.
So timeboxing works by artificially limiting D. By giving you a smaller delay – less time – to work with, the utility (U) shoots up and the power of distractions (Γ) is weakened. In fact, the more we shrink D, the weaker Γ becomes. So if you could only do one thing to help your situation with regard to some task you’ve been avoiding, reducing the amount of time you have to do it, would be it.
While we’re here, this seems like as good a time as any to bust out Parkinson’s Law – of course, it’s not a “real” law, but…it might as well be:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
So reducing D makes Parkinson’s Law our friend rather than our enemy, because not only do we actually get the work done, but we also find that there is less work to do. More accurately, limiting the time causes us to make choices that reduce the quantity of work; we trim the task down to size.
That’s all for now. Come back for the next installment in the series! Feel free to share any ideas, info and/or insight you may have down below in the comments section. 
I completely agree. It seems that about the only time I can focus on completing a school task is when I have scarce time to complete it. In any other case, I become lazy, get distracted etc. The remedy for this is to work away from home; if I’m at the library etc, in the company of people, I feel obligated to work and don’t stuff around.
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[...] about – you just get started on it. You’ll drop whatever you’re doing and do it, because the D parameter (see the equation in the previous article) is just so freaking small. Small blocks of time invite [...]
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When i first heard of time-boxing it was from this website and i thought of it more like chessboxing, not like putting time in boxes, and i like that way of thinking about it.
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Link to the original Steel’s article is not working. Is there is a name of the article, so that I could look it up?
THX
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[...] I started using normal, “vanilla” timeboxing to help me make it to the trains I needed to make it to. But that actually didn’t work too well. [...]
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[...] those daily priorities into even SMALLER tasks. I first heard about the timeboxing technique from Khatzumto’s site. I tried it out with cleaning my room and it worked out really well! Basically, I gave myself small [...]
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[...] go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous [...]
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[...] Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment. [...]
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[...] with all this talk of timeboxing lately, I’ve conveniently left out the details of what tools I (currently) use to actually [...]
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And here I thought I’d actually learning how to physically punch time in the face…
While I’m disappointed that I don’t physically get to beat up ‘time’, I will continue reading the following posts. I think time management is probably my worst area in language learning.
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[...] go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous [...]
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[...] go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous [...]
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[...] it, I”m not going to turn my pc on as soon as I wake up in the morning, I’m going to time-box Him, yeah that’s it, specially for Japanese, but for all other “pleasure” things [...]
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[...] smaller steps”. Cut. Slice. Dice. Make things too small to resist. That’s most of what timeboxing is about. It’s what our “cell division” is about. It’s what Maurer’s [...]
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[...] Series starts here. Previous post is here. [...]
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Great tip on Timeboxing. I guess I’ve been unconsciously performing this method on my short trips to and from work on the subway… I learn a word a day — it’s not much, but it’s something!
Japanese companies really should look into Parkison’s Law. People pull crazy hours at work, but really, nothing more gets done. Chaps play their PSP’s and take naps during the day because they know that they’ll be there until 11pm. What a waste of your life.
But I love Japan and learning Nihongo!
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[...] me”, you say. [That's true and false...what it is is that last-minute work forces ad hoc timeboxing. It forces us to deal with real time (hours, minutes) instead of "days". "Days" are a meaningless [...]
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[...] The previous installment of the trilogy is here, first installment here. [...]
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[...] start. Start on stuff. Start on it. And then start again on it. And then start again. Start. Put a timebox on it. Start, rest, start again. The more times you start, the more you [...]
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[...] no one cares. Stop trying so hard to make swine appreciate your pearls. You’re wasting your life away. Start finding some grateful, paying, human customers [...]
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[...] how many people notice? And how many people act? Relatively few. I know…I’ve been there; in fact, I still go, from time to time [...]
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[...] is an eternity to me. That’s why I came up with all this crazy incremental/decremental timeboxing ****, because 10 minutes feels like forever to [...]
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[...] finished reading AJATT’s Timeboxing Triple Trilogy (TTT/3t xD) and came up with two new variations: Plane Timeboxing and Timeframe Workboxing (could be Workframe [...]
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[...] Shadow it for 2 minutes. [...]
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[...] counting language exposure time in seconds? Because it’s a cheap win. It’s like timeboxing. It usurps the delay component of Piers Steel’s Temporal Motivation Theory equation. Or [...]
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[...] has been going well the last few days. I’ve been using time-boxing to get a lot of reviews done. I still haven’t been able to reach my goal of a hundred new [...]
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I recently read about the Zeigarnik Effect on a psychology blog and I think it also explains the benefits of this method of studying.
The Zeigarnik Effect
www.spring.org.uk/2011/02/the-zeigarnik-effect.php
Basically, it discusses how our working memory preferentially keeps things around that are “unfinished” like waiters keeping orders in mind only until they are finished.
But they also did an experiment asking people to solve difficult puzzles, then interrupted them and told them the study was over. About 90% of people kept working on the puzzle anyway. As the article says, this Zeignarnik Effect could also be called the “Cliffhanger Effect” because it keeps you interested the same way a TV episode with a cliffhanger ending keeps you wanting to watch the show again.
Anyway, from this I can derive there are two benefits from this method of studying. The first is that it improves your memory since you are “interrupted” (by the timer) before completing the task. If my task is to study a chapter of Mandarin, but I only get through half of the material, it is an “unfinished task” (like a waiter’s order that hasn’t been filled) and gets preferential treatment. The second is that it improves motivation like a cliffhanger ending.
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[...] to increase productivity but it never quite gelled for me until I started reading AJATT articles on “timeboxing.” Khatzumoto started to write about using timers to get things done. He struggled with keeping [...]
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