# Timeboxing

> Giving an activity a fixed maximum duration, then stopping to assess, finish or schedule another box.

## What it means

A fixed maximum time for an activity, after which you stop and assess, as distinct from scheduling the day (time blocking) — note honestly that HBR’s article uses timeboxing for putting to-dos into the calendar, so the two words overlap in use. The agile meaning people search for (‘in agile’, ‘in scrum’, ‘in pmp’): the Scrum Guide 2020 (verified, scrumguides.org) — “Sprint Planning is timeboxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint” and “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team.” Personal examples: a 30-minute box for email, a 2-hour box for a first draft.

## A practical example

A first draft gets ninety minutes. At the end, you decide whether it is usable, needs another box or should stop.

## Put it into practice

- Name the concrete situation before applying the label. Timeboxing is useful only when it changes a choice, boundary or next action.
- Make the state visible: write the owner, time, source or stopping condition down instead of relying on memory.
- Review what happened. Keep the part that reduced ambiguity and change the part that added ceremony without helping the work.

## How it relates to Plexii

give a desk a Duration, watch the countdown, and when time is up choose +15, +30, +1 hour or Mark done (/help/desk-status-time); the Timer widget for a box on a desk (/help/widget-timer).

## Sources

- [The Scrum Guide, 2020](https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html)