Timeboxing as a Productivity Strategy
Timeboxing is time management method and a productivity strategy.
We’ve all been there – we have a project or a deadline to meet, and time is running out. Most people have difficulty staying focused on open ended tasks, or they seem overwhelmed if they have a lot of tasks to complete in a day. Timeboxing can help in many of these situations.
If you’ve never heard of it before, don’t worry – you’re not alone. However, timeboxing is quickly becoming more popular with people who need to arrange their time better, as it can be used in a variety of ways. So what exactly is timeboxing?
If you work for someone else, your manager may Timebox for you. In the simplest terms, when your boss says, “Jones, you have 4 hours to finish that report, do the best you can!” He has just, timeboxed for you.
You may already Timebox in your personal life. For example, you may need to buy a gifts for some friends. However, you work during the day, weekends you want to relax, and evening shopping isn’t really for you. But you still need to get that shopping trip completed. So you look at how your time is spent at weekends, and factor in how much time you can allocate realistically to your shopping trip. Then decide what gifts you need to buy beforehand, and what shops you’ll need to go to. You head out to the store at 8pm, knowing that they close at 9pm. Essentially, you’ve boxed your time – you’re going to complete the task by 9pm no matter what it takes – even it it requires compromise.
Timeboxing works by completing any work that you have to the best of your abilities in the agreed timescale – anything you can’t do within that timescale is left incomplete. While this may mean that you have an unfinished task, it’s only unfinished from your original plan – this is because by “timeboxing,” that is, by fitting the task into a specific timeframe, you’ve come up with an alternative version that does what is needed (within the time constraint you set).
Digest Widget – Text to RTF for Sony Reader & Amazon Kindle
DigestWidget is the fastest way to get formatted text into your Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle.
I find myself most often using my eBook reader to read free books and documents from the web that I want to read away from the computer. So, with the DigestWidget, I can either copy the files to a folder and process them as a batch, or if I’m reading something online, I can highlight the text I want to capture and copy it to the clipboard to instantly make a file I can copy to my eBook reader.
- A text digest is ideal for off-line reading of long articles and newsletters you receive by e-mail.
- These digests contain text only and no images.
- Print digests to save paper
- Create and read digests in the best font style and size for your Sony Reader or other device.
Read the digest files on your eBook Reader / Smart Phone / PDA or other portable device
DigestWidget makes text digests from your Windows Clipboard / Outlook e-mail files (.eml) / Text files (.txt) / Saved web pages (.html)
DigestWidget allows you to select one of three font styles and several font sizes. It automatically left and right “justifies” the You can also select the folder where the batch files will be read and in which the digest will be written. DigestWidget removes multiple line feeds and “cleans up” the text before making the digest file.
- DigestWidget can read a batch of files in a folder and convert them to a single RTF digest file.
- DigestWidget can write a text digest of everything you copy to your Windows clipboard. A new capture session is started each time you start the DigestWidget.
- The Digest files can be directly copied to the reader or directly to an SD card and inserted into the reader. No additional conversion or formatting is required.
I’ve probably spent about 25 hours working on the Digest Widget, and I’ve taken it as far as I want to go with it. However, it seems to me that someone who either knows the free AutoIt language may want to change or improve the program I’ve written. So, I’m publishing DigestWidget, including the Autoit source code,
Your derivative works from my source code must include this attribution:
“This program derived from DigestWidget from Chuck Eglinton and ChuckEgg.com”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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