Titans Journal Day 45: Timeboxing Tools

Sample time tracker screen on Clockify

Timeboxing

To track my time and improve productivity--taking another advice from @8bit--I set up my timeboxing tool finally.

I decided to use Trello to track the smaller tasks spawning out from the big refactoring project.

I installed the Chrome extension for Clockify. Then I set up the tasks and created a time-estimate for each task. I arranged the boards from "Tech Debt" -> "Current Sprint" -> "Tomorrow" -> "Today" -> "Now" -> "Done". When I start a task, I will click the "Start Timer" button on the Trello card, and the tracking will begin. Clockify integrates with Trello automatically, pretty neat.

To keep my day transparent, I also created a Zapier integration (there's a default workflow for that) to auto-publish the task name on which I'm working to Slack status. The Zapier works manually, not sure why the auto-publishing isn't really working. I ended up having to push to Slack status by running the Zap manually.

I tried this for the afternoon, and it was amazing. I'd minimize or quit all my social media and email apps, browser tabs not related to the task, keeping only Slack online. Then I can be super focused for the next block of time. I usually end up having 5-10 minutes before the time's up, so I will do a quick 5 min easy workout or just a quick walk around. I would keep this timeboxing habit going and see if there's any improvement in daily productivity.