What Is Timeboxing? 4 Best Apps To Get Started

Timeboxing is a simple yet effective time management technique that helps you take better control over your schedule. 

If you think you’ve two weeks to complete a task, you’ll never try to finish it earlier than before. 

However, you can be attentive to how much time you need to spend on a specific task with timeboxing. So you don’t beat your head in multitasking.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about:

• What is timeboxing technique?
• Benefits of timeboxing technique?
• Best timeboxing apps

What Is The Timeboxing Technique?

Timeboxing means opening your calendar and creating a time block you’ll spend on a certain task in the coming day or week.

Once you create a timebox, you need to treat it like a scheduled event which means no adhoc meeting and rapid scheduling while working.

The concept of timeboxing is to create a schedule in advance so that you don’t ponder upon the anticipated time for each task.

Benefits Of The Timeboxing Technique

1. Quit procrastination for any specific task

Most of the time, when you have to finish a task, and you don’t like to work—the best solution you find is to procrastinate over it as much as you can.

But there is a fascinating human psychological phenomenon: we want to finish an activity only after we start it. For example, you’ve started reading a new book, and you realize that it’s not your taste. Yet you’ll read till the end to find something interesting.

Why? Because you feel guilty, and no one can deny this phenomenon. The concept of the timeboxing app is that you start doing a task when your calendar sends you a reminder for the same.

Because when you start working on that task, you forget any struggle and resistance that existed before.

2. It helps you set boundaries.

You need a specific time to finish every task. So if you decide to finish off a task in two hours instead of five hours, you’ll need to work in a more focused way.

Starting a task without time boundaries and considering the importance leads to an unorganized schedule.

Timeboxing helps you strategically answer every question before working on the task. When you start timeboxing in your calendar, you carve a specific section of time while considering all the facts about the task and estimate the amount of time it would take to finish it.

3. It helps you to drop the idea of perfectionism.

If you spend time on every task until it is perfect, then you might never finish that task ever. Timeboxing helps you avoid unnecessary perfectionism.

With timeboxing, you’re forced to finish up a task in the specified period, and it ends the idea of perfectionism.

What Makes A Great Time Boxing App?

You can also use your calendar app to do this or a sheet of paper. The best time blocking apps help you do the following:

• Show your calendar with a list of tasks. This helps you to see the appointments and what you need to do in one place to block your day. 
• It makes it easy to block your day. You should be able to schedule your day by the simple drag and drop method.
• Easily add tasks. This can mean adding your lists from other apps such as Notion, Asana, or Google Calendar.

Best Timeboxing Apps For You

1. Akiflow

Akiflow is a productivity app that offers the best of both worlds—task manager and calendar. It saves you time to spot all your tasks in one place. 

Among all the apps with overwhelming features and complicated UX, Akiflow keeps you organized with its simple yet powerful planning features.

It comes with various views, which means no more reasons for missing a task. And the affordable rate is the cherry on top of the cake. Once you integrate your calendar with Akiflow, you can easily schedule your tasks and timebox your day. The best part is you get a free trial of 14 days.

Features:

• Various integration helps you stay on top of your tasks without switching between multiple apps and websites.
• Calendar for easy timeboxing.
• Compatible with Windows and MacOS
• Different views for a better planning

Pricing:

• $15/month (Comes with a 14-day free trial.)

2. Plan

Plan is a part to-do list, calendar, and dynamic features to schedule your day. It integrates with Google and Outlook calendar, pulling all your agendas and meetings.

To-do lists are a simple list of all your tasks, and you can group each to-do into specific projects to create multiple to-do lists.

But a downside of this app is that it supports a few integrations such as GitHub, Google Drive, Gmail and Jira.

Features:

• Easy interface to navigate.
• Supports Outlook and Google calendar.
• Group a set of tasks to create a new project

Pricing

• $4/month

3. Sunsama

Sunsama is an app that wastes no space, and once you set it up, you’ll immediately understand how to use it. You can spot a task list sorted by date and a sidebar with a calendar.

It makes timeboxing your day seamless, and you don’t waste your time thinking about what to do next. This app is full of little touches and makes planning easier.

Features:

• You can send your plan summary for the day to Slack with a single click.
• Integrations with Gmail, Trello, GitHub, and Jira
• Calendar for easy timeboxing.

Pricing

• $20/month (Comes with a 14-day free trial.)

4. HourStack

As you start with timeboxing, you’ll either end up overestimating or underestimating the time you spent on finishing a task. And HourStack helps you monitor the actual time you spend on any task compared to the estimate.

You need to start by blocking time for the day or week. And once you’re ready to start on each task, click on the task and choose to begin to start the timer.

HourStack also extracts events from Google Calendar and Outlook 365, but it won’t add directly to your HourStack calendar. So you’ll have to drag and drop them onto the HourStack calendar.

The major disadvantage of HourStack is that it doesn’t have a dedicated place to write a to-do list. So you’ll have to use your calendar to add them.

Features:

1. You can schedule and track tasks.
2. Allows you to manage team schedules.
3. Compare the estimated time with the actual time spent.
4. A distinct section for reports where you can get an idea about your working pattern.

Pricing

• Personal- $9/month
• Team- $12/month

Begin Timeboxing

Timeboxing helps you to set boundaries between every task. However, you don’t need to feel overwhelmed with it. As you follow it religiously, you can easily anticipate the exact time for tasks.

With Akiflow, you can schedule your tasks directly on your Google calendar. Take your next productive self with Akiflow today.