other than you might expect, this slide-deck is not about boxing - even tho the rounds in a boxing match are also timeboxed ;-)

Why did I create a Session about timeboxing? Well, I'm an agile Coach - timeboxing is one of my tools to help teams focus on the important stuff.

We all know timeboxes - maybe not by their name. Here you see one of the most amazing timeboxes in peoples lives - taking almost exactly 9 months, and in the end, when you are happy with the results, you can decide to start another one.

Much shorter timeboxes in our daily lives are park clocks. When you stay for the specified time slot everything is alright, if you take too much time to leave, you're fined.

My work context are agile teams. Agile in the sense of software development mean, that software is released often times in small iterations (of 1-4 weeks) and after each and every iteration, we present the results to see if the customer is still happy with what we created.
Iterations (oftentimes called Sprints) are also timeboxed. meaning: we don't add another day, if something is not quite ready. we just don't ship that part of the product and inform the customer.

one of the shortest meetings in an itaration is the "daily standup". here you can see a team planning the activities for the next day and asking for help, if they couldn't finish what the planned to create the previous day. this meeting takes not more than 15minutes.

while we can't promis our teams to always have the most exciting meeting - we can actually promis them to end on time. which is a lot more than you get in a regular corporate environment.

the tools we use to actually stay on track and discussed everything on the agenda are visual timers. everyone in the room sees how much time we spent with one topic, and how much is still left for the others.

as I said, we don't stretch timeboxes. you might think, that this is doable in some companies, but definitly not in yours, be informed that I can help you with that ;-)
One can even go so far to use timeboxes in her private life.

Ingvar Kamprad is one of the strictest people to handles his timeboxes. He splits every day (work and private time) into 10minute boxes. Limiting the amount of boring or uninteresting timeboxes to a minimum.

You might have seen his initials I.K. on one of his companies. Timeboxes work very well for him, because they also help him with another fact of life...

We do have times every day, where we are more energized (some of us rather in the morning, others at night-time) while we have other slots of our day, where we are less productive (e.g. after lunch).
when you split your day into small timeboxes like Ingvar Kamprad, you can create a nice rhythm that matches your bodies energy levels.

Another way for personal timeboxing is the pomodoro technique. it was invented by the italian engineer Francesco Cirillo to better focus on the tasks at hand.
you use a 25minute timebox for ONE certain task and end it with a "forced" 5minute break. usually you combine 4 pomodori and do a 30minute break.

trying your very first pomodoro might be a bit hard, because we are very good at not being strict to ourselves. but there is a simple way to motivate yourself:
find a friend to time your pomodori or ask your partner or a spouse. they are usually much stricter with us ;-)

you don't just have to use your pomodoro for work-related things. we all have our own time sinks. things like youtube, distractify, facebook,.. you name it. applying a 25minute slack-timebox can help you be much more productive.

some of us are way more into getting things right, and focus way too much time and energy on perfectionizing tasks or work items. using timeboxes keeps us from spending too much time on one thing, and putting our focus on other things, that have meaning to us.

the 5minute breaks in pomodori also help our brains "regenerate" and be way more creative. in these slack-minutes our brains don't really stop working on a problem, rather broadening the focus and many times coming up with ingenious solutions we hadn't have had without the break.

we really have to ask ourselves why we don't use more deadlines for our private endeavours, when these deadlines work very well in a business context.

because they help us very much to not "multitask" hundres of things but keep focus on the things at hand.

in the end, our whole life is a timebox which ends on a certain day in the future. contrary to meetings, pomodori or other activities, we don't know when the time is up. if we manage to be aware of the time that was given to us, we can make the most of our lives.