- The GoldenEye Principle: Flow, Dopamine, Spirituality and How to Make Everything As Fun as Video Games and Multiplayer Bedroom Sports
- How Zombie Gunship Taught Me All I Need to Know To Make My Real Life Awesome (And So Can You!): Gamifying Real Life For Fun and Profit and (Almost) For Free Using the Awesome New Technique of Randomized Timeboxing
- OMG: A Public Service Announcement from Captain Obvious
- All I Ever Needed to Know in Life, I Learned from Cloud Storage
- More Timeboxing Insights: Ramp Scaling and Polar Switching
- 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
- Can Timeboxing Help Me Do Really Big, Hard Things?
- Three Minutes Of…
- Nothing Is Hard
- How To Get Nothing Done: The Art and Science of Wresting Defeat From the Jaws of Victory
- How to Make Miracles Happen and Get Called a Genetically Gifted Genius
- Remember That You Are, Were and Will Always Be Human: Infinite in Possibility and Finite in Action
- Why America Doesn’t Win Wars Any More and What (Ironically) That Can Teach You About Learning Languages
- The One True Secret to Being Happy, Productive and Sane Forever
- How (and Why) to Make and Use Entropy Bombs
The previous installment of the trilogy is here, first installment here.
What’s that? The meaning of the word “trilogy”? Don’t…Don’t even start. Just…don’t.
Today, I’m just going to quickly share with you a little technique I came up with recently that uses birthlines to approach tasks where unnecessary fear and BS is involved. To keep things short, I will assume you already know what birthlines are.
Basically, this technique combines decremental and incremental timeboxing with birthlines. What happens is that the birthlines keep decrementing in distance, while the work that’s done at the birthline increments. So like this:
- Rest: 64 minutes
- Birthline 0: Work 1 minute.
- Rest: 32 minutes
- Birthline 1: Work 2 minutes
- Rest: 16 minutes
- Birthline 2: Work 4 minutes
- Rest: 8 minutes
- Birthline 3: Work 8 minutes
- Rest 4 minutes
- Birthline 4: Work 16 minutes
- Rest 2 minutes
- Birthline 5: Work 32 minutes
- Return to 1?
So what’s happening up there is that we’re halving the time between birthlines, while doubling the length of timeboxes. The actual numbers are, of course, up to you. I don’t use birthlines like this all the time, but this kind of “inverse timeboxing” is useful for easing yourself into things that would otherwise get unnecessarily avoided. Things like, I dunno, filling in tax forms. For writing AJATT itself I mostly use “parabolic” timeboxing.
If you have a task you’re avoiding, one thing you could do is start with this “inverse timeboxing” or “birthline timeboxing” or whatever we’re going to call it, and then, once you’re past the worst of the fear and avoidance, switch to a simpler timeboxing method.
That’s it. Pretty simple. First you rest for a whole hour, then work for just 1 minute. So you don’t even have to stop procrastinating to begin with 🙂 . Life is sweet, ‘innit?
Next installment: Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 10: Timeboxing, Tony Schwartz and Recovery | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/dM8XoP
thanks for this! i am using it to do my calculus homework as i post this
it’ll also come in handy for my kanji review
I am confused.
Solution.
Let’s take 64 minutes rest from the beginning. 😉
Hmm, very interesting. I dig. Gonna have to mess with this awesomeness.
ok. 唯分かんないよ。最初よりまごまごさせてるの。
perhaps i should do what the guy in post 7 did: completely ditch this.
i’ll just get into the porverbial zone and keep doing whatever until i finish
or someone yells at me, whichever comes first.
My ideas on Timeboxing:
somejapanesealltimearound.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/plane-timeboxing-timeframe-workboxing/