Marc Zao-Sanders reveals the key to breaking the cycle of overwhelm with a power tool that makes a huge difference.
You’ll Learn
- How to prune your to-do list effectively
- How to use timeboxing to plan your day with intention
- The art of choosing breaks
About Marc
Marc Zao-Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of filtered.com, a learning tech company. He regularly writes about algorithms, learning and productivity in Scientific American, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. He has followed the practice of timeboxing for over ten years. He lives in London.
- Book: Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time by Marc Zao-Sanders
- Harvard Business Review Article: “How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive”
- LinkedIn: Marc Zao-Sanders
- Website: MarcZaoSanders.com
Resources Mentioned
- Study: “Implementation Intentions and Goal Pursuit” by Peter M. Gollwitzer and Veronika BrandstĂ€tterÂ
- Article: âTo-Do Lists Don’t Workâ by Daniel Markovitz
- Book: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- Book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
- Book: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy
- Book: Winning the Week: How To Plan A Successful Week, Every Week by Demir Bentley
- Past episode: 038: Establishing the Essential with Greg McKeown
- Past episode: 080: Finding and Doing the One Thing with Jay Papasan
- Past episode: 2024 GREATS: 935: The Five Steps to Winning Every Week with Demir Bentley
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Marc Zao-Sanders Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Marc, welcome!
Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to chat and let’s kick it off. I know you have studied productivity, done many experiments, worked it, iterated it. Could you share with us your most surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans and being productive so far?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Most surprising? I mean, maybe it’s just the simple fact that managing your time is so very important and yet it doesn’t get much attention from the public in general, from people at work. If you think about managing time, because time governs everything else, you can adopt a new habit and it might be really good for you. Letâs say it’s exercise or it’s breathing or it’s meditation or whatever, but if you can adopt an exercise, a practice, which is using a time better, then that’s all of the above and many thousands of other things.
So, I find it surprising that, although time management is a thing, if you ask people on the street, what are their systems for managing time, they haven’t thought about it all that much. And yet, that is the entirety of our existence, of our conscious experience of life.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Starting off light, our existence and conscious experience of life.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Straight into philosophy.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, yeah, I think that does ring true. We had Demir Bentley on the show who wrote a book called Winning the Week. And he said that this is, indeed, a theme he has observed amongst many of his high-performing clients, is that they all agree, âOh, yes, planning the week is one of the most important things I could possibly do,â but they don’t do it. And so, almost universally, is the observation there.
So, share with us, what are we missing? Like, why aren’t we doing it? Are we just oblivious to the true benefit? Do we think it’s kind of a nice to have? We haven’t really seen the light, experienced it firsthand? Why are we dragging our feet here?
Marc Zao-Sanders
I think, probably, the main reason is just that life gets in the way. There are so many emails in your inbox, there are tasks to do in a task management system, or communications in Slack or Teams, or whatever it is, our mobile phones now as well. So, there are just so many reasons to not carve out some time for yourself and think about how to spend it well. We’re just hugely, hugely distracted.
So, I’d say that was a big thing with it. And I think, also, with any habit, you need to persevere with it a little bit to feel the benefits. And I think people need to get past that first day or two days to see the benefits of timeboxing or, indeed, another time management technique. Yeah, I think that’s it. And it’s a shame because I think we could, if we all lived more intentional lives, we would be happier. We would be more productive. We would get on better with each other. We’d be better human beings.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe paint a picture for us in terms of an inspiring story of somebody who did just that? They weren’t bothering with the timeboxing approach, and then they adopted it, and what happened for them?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, one such person is me. It has worked for me as an individual. And that’s the key thing, I think, for anyone listening to this. You need to think, âDoes it work for you as an individual?â There are studies, there’s all sorts of science that says that this works. But the key thing, really, is not whether it works for a bunch of other people, it’s whether it works for you.
So, I mean, my personal story is that I’m 45 years old, about to be 46. And when I started my career 20 something years ago, life was hard. I started in strategy consulting and the pressure was pretty intense.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Iâve been there.
Marc Zao-Sanders
I was suffering, frankly. I was a disorganized mess, yeah, the performance issues. I was, but more importantly, I wasn’t feeling very good about the work that I was doing. So, I established a little bit of control by setting up what I called a daily work plan. So, that was just an Excel file. I’d write in the Excel file. These are the things I really need to do today.
This is roughly how long they would take. And I’d check them off. They would sum up then to the productive hours that I’d had that day. That was good. That was much better. And it made me feel better about work, more confident with what I was doing. But it didn’t tell me, at any given moment, what I should be doing. It wasn’t linked to other meetings to my calendar.
So, then, yeah, I saw this article in Harvard Business Review. It’s called why âTo-Do Lists Don’t Work.â And it immediately resonated. I changed what I was doing as an individual, overnight. And then, over the next five years, I sort of honed the technique. I made it my own. I wrote my own Harvard Business Review article that became very popular.
And that led to the book, and talking to many, many people over the years about timeboxing and how it can help not just with your, I mean, it’s really not just about your productivity. It’s really mostly about how you feel, the control that you feel as you go through the day, as you’re going through the maelstrom of a knowledge worker’s day. It can be unpleasant a lot of the time, but if you focus on one thing at a time and you’ve planned that out, it feels a lot better.
So, yeah, the case study I would give most of all, first and foremost, that I know and have lived is mine, but, obviously, I’ve heard that story, that kind of story from many, many people, from, I mean, literally, from around the world. That’s, I mean, just one other thing to say about that, that the book’s been, and I’m an unknown author.
I was an unknown author before I started this, and yet the rights were bought up in 33 languages because the story, because this idea of making your life more intentional through, basically, through your digital calendar resonated across cultures, across languages. And there’s also a bunch of case studies at the end of the book as well, stories from individuals that have made timeboxing work for them in their specific situations too.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s cool. Works for you, works for them. I actually am curious to hear about the studies. And, in fact, in your Harvard Business Review article, at the very top, it says a recent survey of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing was ranked the number one most useful. Tell us a bit about that and any other, I guess, researcher evidence saying, âThis isn’t just a cool thing Marc likes doing. It’s pretty proven for lots of folks.â
Marc Zao-Sanders
So, that study was done a long, long time ago. I did a lot of the research for it, but this is well before I’d written the book or even had an idea about writing the book. I had no, literally, no affiliation with timeboxing. I mean, I happen to do it myself, but actually a lot of the other techniques on the list, I also happen to do.
So, the way that we conducted that study was to look at lots and lots of thought leadership pieces online and categorized them according to which time management technique, which productivity hack or tip they were, and then just see how common they were. And that gave rise to an ordering, a top 100, and, yeah, like you say, timeboxing came top.
Pete Mockaitis
So, that came about by votes or by most frequently cited amongst industries?
Marc Zao-Sanders
No, exactly, most frequently cited, so how many times they were coming up. And it’s not only that. If you look at a lot of the other entries on that list, and like you say, it’s linked to in the in the book and probably on some articles on my site, you can see that many of the other techniques on the list are very, very similar to timeboxing or, actually, they form a subset of timeboxing.
Iâll give you an example. Just saying no, so just saying no is a thing in business. It’s been encouraged a lot over the last five, ten years. By the way, I think this is more of a nuanced thing. Sometimes people should say yes more than they do. It depends on the person and the context. But sometimes they should say no.
Well, saying no is partly dependent on how busy you are and what you’ve got on. If you timebox, you’re not just saying no or just saying yes, you’re doing so on the basis of what you’ve got on your plate. It’s something that you can point to, point your boss to, or point colleagues to. So, just saying no is, it goes very, very nicely hand in hand with timeboxing, just like so many of the other items on the list.
I’ll give you just one other example as well. âEat That Frog,â the Brian Tracy idea of, you know, do the most difficult thing at the start of the day. Well, again, it’s not like timeboxing is saying you should do the most difficult thing, but if it suits you as a person, then here’s a system where you can put the most difficult thing at the start of the day, again, just completely, consistently, and to support that system that Brian Tracy came up with or popularized.
But also, if you’re the opposite, if you’re someone who needs to slowly, slowly build momentum through the day and start with some smaller tasks, which suits certain people better than it does the Brian Tracy method, that’s also consistent with timeboxing because here’s a system where you can build up slowly with some easier, smaller tasks at the start.
So, my point is that, yeah, timeboxing is very flexible with, it was number one itself, but it’s also works, so nicely with virtually every other time management technique.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then we say there were timeboxing a lot. Can you lay it on us? What exactly are we talking about here?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I’ve got a definition, but maybe it’s better to describe it in terms of what I do at the start of the day. I’ll come back to a definition after that. So, I wake up, I get dressed, I brush my teeth. And then the very first thing that I do is spend 15 minutes thinking about my day and how I should spend my time. So, those 15 minutes are definitely the most productive of my entire day.
I couldn’t really, now, I can’t really imagine not using them like that. I don’t need more than 15 minutes. I do normally need 15 minutes because sometimes your emails have come in overnight, an idea has occurred to you overnight, and you need to take that into account along with other entries in your calendar. So, it’s a little bit of work, but just 15 minutes.
And then those 15 minutes lead you to have a day where it’s full of what you really wanted to do, what really mattered, what you intended to do. This is what I mean by intentions, giving yourself the space to become aware of what your intentions are, what’s important to you, and then having a system for making sure that they happen. So, that’s what it is, you know, that’s sort of my experience of it. I do that each and every day. I do it in the morning. Some people do it the night before.
But in terms of a definition, which, it’s probably slightly less useful, but I’ll give one anyway. So, I described in terms of what, when, one, enough. What I mean by what is deciding, giving yourself the space to think through what is most important. And then when is deciding when it should start and when it should finish, not being too ambitious, but being ambitious enough with those timings.
One means doing, is single tasking. Just do that one thing in that slot, nothing else. And then enough is doing it to a good-enough level. You’re not aiming for perfection here. Perfection doesn’t really exist for any of us. Do it so that it’s good enough that you can share with others and move things on in your workflow or in your life, whatever the context happens to be. So, yeah, that’s kind of how, that’s the lived experience of it as well as the definition.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that seems pretty simple, and yet, in your experience and that of luminaries throughout history – Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, etc., – it’s revolutionary, you say.
Marc Zao-Sanders
It’s revolutionary in that anyone who wants to achieve a lot and feel good about doing that needs to really use their time well. And I think there’s just something very fundamental about timeboxing. It is working out what’s important, setting a time to do it, not being distracted by anything else, and doing it to a good-enough level.
I mean, it’s very hard, I think, to launch an argument against that. I’m going to invite you to do that, Pete. And, actually, I wanted to ask you if you timebox.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, challenge accepted.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so go ahead. I mean, which of those elements, which of those four elements of the definition would you say, âEh, that’s actually not that importantâ?
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no. I suppose, I don’t think that it’s not important. I just think we can come up with lots of excuses for why, âOh, that’s a nice view, Mark, but I don’t think that’ll quite work for me,â or, âYeah, that sounds cool, butâŠâ so I think there’s a lot of buts that it might be worth our time digging into to a few of those.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Of course. I mean, some people will see that and then not act on it. I mean, of course that happens. It does require a little bit of discipline, and anything that requires even a modicum of discipline can be ignored, and some people will take the path of lesser immediate term resistance.
Pete Mockaitis
âNo, Marc, instead, I’m just going to get this cool app. That’s going to fix my time management problems. This fun little app instead.â
Marc Zao-Sanders
So, yeah, I mean, there are some apps that will do some of this for me and for a lot of people. It’s connecting with your intentions and making sure that you’re doing the things that you want to do at the right time, requires a little bit more of yourself. So, yeah, sure, you can have AI just arrange things for you, but then are you going to be happy with the order of them?
And even in the processing of you’re putting these tasks into your calendar, your brain starts to think about, you know, starts to problem-solve. So, you’re making a little bit of progress with each of them, even in the act of doing it. So, yeah, there are apps and there’s AI, and that’s fine for some people. It’s not for me. It’s not the method that I advocate.
I’m a little bit more old school. So, while I advocate having a digital calendar and making that sync with your various devices, rather than a sort of paper-based system, AI is not something that you need for timeboxing. Not in my view.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, certainly. Well, so then I suppose, with regard to discipline, for folks who think, âOh, that sounds cool, Marc, but I just couldn’t even do that because I’m a creative, flexible, fluid kind of a personality. I don’t really do well when I’m tied down,â what do you think of that?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so I hear this, obviously, sometimes, âThey just wouldn’t work for me. Well, it wouldn’t work for me.â Okay, so, I mean, a few things to say. But the first one that occurs to me is like, even if you’re a creative, you’re already timeboxing to some extent because you’ve got meetings in your calendar, right? That’s unavoidable. And however creative or uncreative those meetings are, you’ve got those meetings.
And you have to have some sort of timekeeping system to make sure that you attend those meetings more or less on time. I mean, even if you’re five, 10 minutes late for most of your meetings, as some creatives might be, the meeting is there and it is important and you’re probably annoying some people by being a little bit late.
So, it’s not like this is a brand-new system that I’m suggesting you sort of foist-force into your life. We’re all creative or non-creatives, and also, we’re all creative in some respect. But all of us are using our calendar to spend time specifically, at the very least, with meetings. What I’m saying with timeboxing is let’s extend that a little bit further so that we also do it with some of the work that we do on our own so that we can achieve more and actually, with creativity, specifically, achieve more creatively.
You’re much more likely to achieve the state of flow and get to what Cal Newport and others call deep work, scale the heights of our capability if you remove all of your distractions, if you get to a period of time where you’re just working on one thing. So, I would say that it actually, I mean, genuinely, I think that it supports creativity. It doesn’t stifle it.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to discipline, if folks think, âBoy, Marc, I just don’t think I have that level of discipline. That sounds really hardcore. That sounds Navy SEAL-esque to go from thing to next thing, to next thing, to next thing with perfect rigid execution. That sounds beyond my meager willpower capabilitiesâ?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. If someone said that, if you said that, for example, I would say, I mean, first of all, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be rigid. It also doesn’t need to be productive thing to productive thing. One of the productive things might well be having a break, might be lying down, might be having a cold shower, might be taking your dog for a walk. It’s just positive, intentional activities that you know, by the end of the day and even actually during the day, are going to be really, really good for you.
The other thing I’d say to such a person or, you, potentially, Pete, is, well, like I said, you’re already doing it to some extent. And then also, well, why don’t you just try it? For tomorrow, you could put into your calendar right now, I mean, actually, if you’re listening to this, or watching this right now, anything you could do to get started is put a 15-minute time box, just an event, into your calendar for tomorrow morning at a time that suits you.
I mean, obviously, you need to be awake. You need to be awake enough to get it done. And in those 15 minutes, plan out some of the rest of your day. I will plan out a lot of the rest of my day because I’ve been doing it for 20 years now. But do it for a couple of hours or three hours or four hours.
And once you’ve tried that for a few days, and I imagine you will achieve some success and you’ll get into a snowball effect, a virtuous circle, you’ll be doing it some more. And if it really doesn’t work for you, well, then stop, but give it a try.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. So, we don’t need to start with the entirety of the day that, indeed, could feel intimidating. Understood.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t let perfection or completion be the enemy of the good here. Get something done. And I’m a big believer in 80-20 and pretty good and doing a decent job of things rather than sort of Navy SEALs perfection, anything like that. I don’t come from that background. I don’t have that in my locker. I’m just a regular guy.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so let’s talk about, it sounds like the hardest part of all is we’ve got dozens, hundreds of options, things that have landed in our to-do list with varying levels of seriousness, urgency, importance. How do you begin to decide, âAh, yes, this is, in fact, the thing that goes on today’s calendarâ?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. So, first of all, what you’ve just described is exactly the reason that timeboxing is important. Most of us knowledge workers, at any given moment, could be working on 20, 30, 40, maybe 100 things. They would all be somewhat legitimate. And the existence of so many different things that we could do is stressful in itself. So, you’re doing one thing, and two or three or five or 20 of the other things occur to you. That is so stressful. And that stresses me out every single day.
So, that’s the reason that, the main reason I would say, that timeboxing is important, it kind of pushes all of those other things away and focuses you on a single thing. So, that’s why it’s important. If you have 100 items, though, and how are you going to decide, I’ve got a trick which is very concrete, very tangible, very easy.
So, let’s say you’ve got a to-do list, Pete. You’ve got 100 items on it and you don’t know where to start. Some of those things are going to be very important. Some of them less so. It’s probably accumulated over weeks, months, maybe even years. I would say grab it, put it into a spreadsheet, go down the list, and just score them very roughly on a of an approximation of both urgency and importance. Just sort of, you know, merge the two together, give them a score between zero and 10 every single one.
Now, look, even if you’ve got 100, it’s going to take a little while to do it, but it’s not going to take you more than 10 minutes. This is not a huge, huge task. So, you score them all, zero to 10, and then you sort it on the score that you’ve given it. So, most the highest numbers will go to the top. And then as soon as you’ve done that sort, you will see immediately there’s a group of tasks at the bottom that you really could just delete.
And that is hugely reassuring, gratifying. It’s such a relief to see the list look like that. And then there are tasks at the top that really will be super important because you’ve given them an eight or a nine or a 10. You might want to do some further ordering of those. And that’s also a huge relief because those big important items that you knew were lurking in your to-do list are being surfaced properly. So, they will get your attention.
So those, you know, three, four, five, 10, whatever it is, items that you really had to do are going to make their way into your calendar and get done. And that is so, I mean, it really is about control, like taking control of your life by having a system to understand what is most important, and get it done. This is a specific tactic for dealing with a long to-do list.
And then you can do that even every so often when you’ve only got 20 items, it also works. It sounds, I don’t know, maybe for some people it sounds a little bit much to put into a spreadsheet, but much better that than just leaving it there to gather dust and bother you every so often.
And, occasionally, you’re going to be getting fines because you haven’t dealt with some tax issue or responded to some letter. So, I mean, it’s literally costly, financially costly, to not address it and not address it in some kind of systemic positive, repeatable way.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I love that so much. And you mentioned 80-20 and so much of what you said there, I’m vibing with a ton. And the phrase âsomewhat legitimate,â I think is, oh, so perfect for the items that hang out in our to do this.
Marc Zao-Sanders
At the top that weâve got.
Pete Mockaitis
They are somewhat legitimate and, yet, Vilfredo Pareto would say they are not the vital few of the 80-20 rule.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, find the vital few. Find the vital few and do those.
Pete Mockaitis
And it is such relief, you’re right, to see a huge list and to see many of them drop off. It’s like the fastest way to get something off of your to-do list is to decide thoughtfully, thoroughly, not to do it, âHey, that’s off my to-do list and legitimately so.â
Marc Zao-Sanders
Exactly. Yes, it’s basically pruning. And there is no more efficient way of pruning a list than via a spreadsheet. So, the spreadsheet is not officially part of timeboxing. It is a very effective method for, yeah, for getting to the vital few, as you put it.
Pete Mockaitis
So, I would like to hear a little bit about some of those questions by which we might use to determine what is calendar-worthy. And so, vital few, 80-20 type things suggest that vital few activities produce 16 times the output per unit input than trivial many items. So, there’s that. I also love the ONE Thing question. We had Jay Papasan on the show earlier.
What’s the one thing such that, by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary? So, that’s a huge win in terms of a prioritizer. We had Greg McKeown talking essentialism, in terms of like raising your standard, like cleaning out your closet, not from, âMight this someday be useful?â âNo, no, low standard,â to, âDoes this spark joy?â Marie Kondo style, high standard.
So, any other sort of uber powerful questions that are super handy in the universe of prioritizing?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, well, the main one for me is actually the emotional response you have to a specific item. So, as you’re going through the list, you will feel stressed or you have some sort of emotional response to some, and to some you just will have the absolute opposite.
What I’m suggesting is that, where you have a stronger emotional response, in general, you’re going to want to action those. So, I think that’s a proxy for importance for what matters to you that comes from your soul, actually. You don’t really need to ask any other questions. It’s just what is your response to this particular item.
Pete Mockaitis
And when you say strong emotional response, is it either positive or negative? Is a go signal for action?
Marc Zao-Sanders
No, definitely. It might well be negative. I mean, look, for example, let’s say a tax return. A tax return, for most people, is not going to be hugely positive, but that doesn’t mean that you leave that and let’s find the good stuff. No. What I’m saying is that any kind of strong response probably means that either, you know, because you really want to want to do it because you’re enthusiastic about it.
In general, we don’t need help with those sorts of tasks. So, it’s actually more the ones where you have some sort of negative response. And to just dwell on that particular example, because that’s something that a lot of people feel when it comes to that time of year, getting something like a tax return back to whoever needs to see it.
The problem with not addressing it is that you just die a thousand deaths instead. You will need to do it in the end, and maybe you incur a fee as well if you go beyond whatever the deadline is. But even if you hit the deadline, if you worry about it 17 times before you submit it, well, why have you done that? Much better to confront it, be front-footed, and get the thing done on your terms proactively.
I use the term. I use the word agency a lot with timeboxing. It’s taking back your agency. You be in control. Don’t let the world happen to you. You decide what needs to happen and when it’s going to happen and get it done.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, ooh, die a thousand deaths, or sigh a thousand âUgh.â Like, âUgh, maybe tomorrow.â
Marc Zao-Sanders
Or, timebox instead.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so we got some thoughts on how to choose what goes in on this day’s calendar. Do you have some pro tips on how do I think about how long should that thing take? How long should I work in a bout of work, rest, breaks? What are some of the pro tips to designing a day to be a masterpiece?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. Well, exactly, it is like that. It’s sort of like you’re an architect, you’re designing, you’re like an alchemist of the experience that you’re going to have that day, and the ordering matters. I mean, if you think, let’s say you’ve got to write, I don’t know, a summary of a podcast, right? That’s one of your tasks. And you also want to go to the gym.
Now for some people, it will make a lot of sense to go to the gym first and then do the write-up. And for others, it will be the other way around. It really depends on how your brain works, how your mood is, what energy you have, maybe some of the logistical, the contextual elements of your day, but, really, the order really matters.
So, yeah, build in breaks. Consider that the order matters. I mean, for me, for example, when I’ve got difficult things to think about, I like to have some exercise built in to give me a chance to think about them in a diffusive way. So, I can just be a little bit more relaxed and have sort of answers come to me while I’m doing some hard or semi-hard exercise.
So, yeah, build in some breaks, build in also some slack. If you don’t have any slack and you go, like you were saying earlier, Pete, from thing to thing to thing, if anything breaks or anything takes a tiny bit longer, and you haven’t responded to it, then you can have a cascading, a negative cascading effect. So, build in some slack, build in some breaks.
I mean, to be a little bit more specific, okay, it varies from person to person, but for me, every couple of hours, I will need 10, 15 minutes, normally 15 minutes of a break. And that could be anything. Just get a drink, take the dog for a walk, have a shower, meditate, close my eyes. There are a lot of ways of having a break that aren’t just to default to the canteen or the kitchen and eat something that’s not that healthy for you.
So, with breaks, there’s a bit of an art to it as well. And think a little bit more about what’s going to refresh you and give you energy. But I would say that there’s no hard and fast rules about how much time or how many breaks you should take. It’s really, just coming back to that word intention, what works for you. Think hard about what works for you.
You can take as a guideline, you know, how I spend my day. And in the book, I’ve got some screenshots of how that is, but that won’t necessarily be that way, done that way, it won’t be for everyone. The point is to have a system, like timeboxing, which is super flexible and can accommodate different attitudes to different needs for taking breaks and having slack and what you do in those times.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. And then when we’re actually doing the calendaring, do you have any pro tips in terms of 15-minute increments, or color coding, or anything that makes this go better?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Both of those, for sure. So, I mean, 15 minutes, so I have three sizes of timebox. And, again, other people can take a different view, and it is flexible to having different denominations. But my denominations are 15 minutes, 30 and 60. It’s nice and easy, there’s only three sizes so I don’t have to spend long thinking, âIs this a 48-minute task or a 17-minute task or whatever?â It’s just, like, a small, medium, large. And I know what small, medium, large are.
They also stack nicely up to an hour. There’s obviously 15s, you know, go into 60, so does 30. And then you asked about color coding. Well, I do color code my calendar, and this is to get a handle on, I mean, quite literally, get a view, a literal view of the balance of my life. So, I have five different areas of my life at the moment. So, there’s one business that I advise, another business that I advise, things that are for me to do with my soul and my wellbeing. And then there’s speculative activities as well.
So, I’ve got a few different categories of my life that I’ve deemed to be important for me right now. Okay, so if I color code the items as they go into the calendar, I can see at a glance at the end of a week, how much time I’ve spent on each of these areas. And, actually, the way that both Google and Microsoft do calendars now, they’ll toss it up for you.
So, they’re telling you, âWell, you’re spending 30% of your time on yourâŠâ as I put it, ââŠsoul. Well, is that good or not good?â But if you have the data, then you can make a decision about adjusting it up or down. So, color coding sounds a little bit trivial, I mean, almost absurd, but there’s actually a very good reason for doing it.
I also, Pete, use emojis in my timeboxes. Why do I do that? I mean, probably not for a very good reason. It just gives me, I see timeboxing as sending your future self a message, a little bit of guidance, so that when that future self is distracted and stressed by the inevitable difficulties of a working day, you have that line back to, when you were in a calmer moment, when you were a bit wiser, when things were more still, âOh, yeah, that’s the thing that I should do.â
How’s that relevant to emojis? Well, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek. It’s a little bit, like, I don’t know, like a wink or a hug. It’s an affectionate message from my former less-stressed self to my later more-stressed self. And so, I put them in. That it definitely is an optional feature of timeboxing.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And what’s cool about emojis is they can be right in the line of the text as opposed to a separate image thing, which is all weird and complicated and hard to shove into a calendar software.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, definitely. And it is for me. It’s right before the text that I put it. Yeah.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m also a fan of the Unicode symbol for a checkbox in the calendar. That feels nice. I just have that copy-pasted like, âOh, and then that happened. Mission accomplished,â because that’s one of the most satisfying things about a to-do list is the checking them off. I can still have that in my calendar too.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, exactly. So, it sounds, Pete, like you timebox and you are using some of the higher arts of timeboxing, as we speak, as you live.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, higher arts. Well, Marc, tell me, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Sure. I mean, well, okay, a couple of things that occurred to me. One is just the word time itself. So, this is a not very well-known fact, but time is the most commonly used noun in the whole of the English language, but not just the English language. If you look at Spanish, if you look at German, if you look at Chinese, I think, as well, and many others.
So, it’s super, super common. And it’s not like I was saying at the top, at the start of our conversation. It is surprising that people don’t give it even more time and attention than they do. So, that is just a factor I’ll sort of park with people. The other one I want to say is there’s a, yeah, sometimes you’ve got a plan with someone, like a dinner, and then the dinner gets cancelled.
And there’s nothing nicer than that feeling when you suddenly have some time in your calendar, but it’s very easy to waste, especially with your social media and our phones and what have you. There’s a mnemonic which has really gone down. Well, actually since the book came out. This isn’t even in the book, but it’s Mr. Elf.
So, the M is for meditation, R is for reading, E for exercise, L for learning, F for friends and family. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a very, very useful list to just run through. If I’ve got a bit of time and I want to use it well, here’s a reminder of some of the things that are probably going to be important, could well be important to me. And why not do that with your time rather than Netflix or Instagram or Snap or whatever it is? So, yeah, I want to get Mr. Elf into the ears of the people that are listening and watching.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Marc Zao-Sanders
There’s one from Lady Gaga that I really like and speaks to, I think, what’s the most important about, one of the most important things about life and about this system.
So, the quote is, âI am my own sanctuary and can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.â To me, it’s about agency and hope and truth. And while it’s nice to be quoting Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche in the book, too, it’s also nice to give Lady Gaga some extra attention, too.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?
Marc Zao-Sanders
There was a study into what’s called implementation intentions. If you just Google implementation intentions, you’ll see. What these basically said was that if you decide when you’re going to do something, what you’re going to do, and when you do it, you’re two and half times more likely to get something done. You’re something like 90% likely to get it done versus 30-something percent.
It’s been replicated more recently in studies. And, of course, that kind of encapsulates exactly what I’m trying to get at with timeboxing. And, actually, when you were asking me earlier, âWell, what about the people that are just aren’t going to do it?â Well, the studies say that you really are two and a half times more likely. So, I probably should have said that back then. It basically says that timeboxing works.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?
Marc Zao-Sanders
I mean, the book I’ve read the most frequently is Lord of the Rings because it’s just enjoyable. A book that moved me more recently was The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand. I enjoyed that very much. That felt a lot about freedom and, again, agency. So, that resonated and was enjoyable as well, and it’s quite a different style to Tolkien’s work.
Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I mean, in making decisions in business, or in life, actually, the two-by-two matrix is one that I default to pretty frequently. You’ve got an issue, you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it, think about two of the factors involved that are distinct, and then you look at high, low, or yes, no for each of them. You put that onto a two-by-two and, just almost immediately, almost every time, things clarify somewhat. So, yeah, the two-by-two matrix is a really useful one for me. I love the thing.
Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks, a Marc-original soundbite?
Marc Zao-Sanders
So, this is about, timeboxing is mostly an in-day activity to help you make the most of that day. But the point is if you keep doing it, that adds up to a whole life of intention and purpose and meaning and what have you.
So, the quote is, âThe practice of daily intentional activity will eventually yield what almost every human being wants most – a chosen cherished life.â I think that’s very nice and just touches on, like I said, meaning, something that’s sort of deep. Deep and important.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Marc Zao-Sanders
I’m on LinkedIn. You can just put my name in. I accept requests, generally, there. I also have a website, MarcZaoSanders.com, from which there’s a monthly newsletter, and you can email me and get in touch by just answering, that it’s a Substack.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to be awesome at their job?
Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t just let life and your job just happen to you. Rediscover what you want to do, what your intentions are, and find a way to bring them into being, into your work, into your life.
Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Marc, thank you.
Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, thank you.