If you use Scrum or any other iteration-based approach to your work, the team plans in batches for that next iteration. The iteration is a timebox. The batch is the amount of work the team thinks they can do in that timebox. If the batch is sufficiently small and your cycle time is sufficiently short, that can work.
However, planning for a batch of work is push-planning. When teams push work into an iteration, they often plan too much, especially if they use relative estimation. Too often, all that “too much” rolls work over to the next sprint.
That doesn't help anyone finish. All that work creates a reinforcing feedback loop that progressively makes life worse and worse for the team. (See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers.) Instead of push-planning, I now recommend pulling work instead. (See Three Planning Ideas to Support Your Future Decisions.)
However, I still find short timeboxes useful in these two ways:
- Make visible progress on a large project.
- Finish some (relatively small) piece of work.
I'll start with visible progress.
Use Timeboxes to Make Visible Progress
I have a variety of larger work:
- Books, fiction, and some blog posts (the ones that turn into series)
- New workshops
- Presentations
- Client work, which can vary from proposal to implementation and back again.
While I can write a short story in a day, I don't very often. That's because my workday is a lot like yours, with meetings, phone calls, and the never-ending stream of email.
For all of this work, I need to set aside time to make progress. While I'm discussing short timeboxes to make progress, I leave the work clean when I'm done with. See Context Switching vs. Multitasking: Postpone Clean Work vs. a Messy Mind.
Short Timeboxes Require Minimal Planning
I “plan” for this work by:
- Listing all the work somewhere visible, often on paper or on a paper kanban board. These are my options (not commitments) from which to pull work.
- Creating the user journey for the books, workshops, and presentations. (I never plan fiction. I only write into the dark and surprise myself.) Remember, a journey is not an outline.
I get to choose (rank) which item is first.
How I Rank My Work
Since these are all large-for-me projects, I get to choose which work to do first. I often use excitement or nervousness. Sometimes, I use Cost of Delay.
For example, I'm writing a book and creating a workshop now. I can't do both at the same time. But I'm at the point in the book where I just can't wait to write the next few sections. That's excitement. And while I have a zeroth design for the workshop, I will still need to wrangle it into the next iteration of design.
Today, I chose the book first. And since it's a 15-minute timebox (and I was so psyched, I did two timeboxes), I know I will have sufficient time for the workshop.
When I have a client proposal as part of the day's work, I use Cost of Delay to do more of my little timeboxes.
When the timebox is over, I'm done and the work is clean. Now, I can choose what to do next. (I often mix fiction writing into my day, but that makes me an outlier among my writer friends.) This means I always have time to take a quick break and stand or walk before I move to the next piece of work.
Rotate Through the Work Where WIP Always = 1
Notice several things: I work on one item at a time, so my WIP always =1. Even if I move between two or three items, I only work on one at a time until the timebox is up. I don't allow the other work to interrupt me when I'm working on the one item right now.
That allows me to make progress on “everything.” Since I learn as I write, this works particularly well for my new, innovative work because I don't have anyone else to work with. (If you track my 60 Seconds of Writing WIP, you can see how I make small progress every week on a book or a story.)
Collaborative teams might choose a longer timebox, such as a day. (See the pairing, swarming, and mobbing post.) However, their WIP is also 1 and they can see progress, too. I strongly recommend product development teams use Cost of Delay to rank the work.
The timebox allows me to see visible progress on that piece of work. But that's not the only way I use timeboxes. I also use them to focus and finish a specific piece of work.
Use Timeboxes to Focus and Finish a Specific Piece of Work
I tend to use short timeboxes for business-y kind of work:
- Accounting and financials.
- Organizing my upcoming store.
- Managing my website.
I hate doing my monthly and quarterly financial work, so I use a timebox to start and finish it. In the same vein, I would rather do almost anything other than cleaning my office, so I timebox that work, too.
Because I know I'm only going to spend 15 minutes on that business-y work, I can set a timer and do it.
Short Timeboxes Help Me Start and Finish
While my timeboxes might be “equal” in duration, I think of them differently. I want to make visible progress on longer work, even when I think I don't have time. And I want to finish work as often as possible, to manage my never-ending list of options.
That's because just like your organization, I add ideas to my options list. In addition, I delete ideas, either because I finished the work, or I put one idea on the parking lot, or I removed it entirely. The good ideas come around again.
I no longer use iterations at all, not even the one-week iterations I used to use. And given how fast things change for most of my clients, I rarely recommend iterations and batch planning to my clients. If you do choose to use iterations, right-size your stories. And then either count the stories you finish in a typical iteration, and/or measure your cycle time so you predict a little about the future.
You can still use Scrum and avoid push-planning, especially in the form of large batches. Instead, make work small and finish it. Consider timeboxes as short as 15 minutes or as long as an hour before you take a break. Then, go to the next item and finish that.