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It didn't just catch on there. In 2022, an enterprising TikTok creator made a video espousing the benefits of the method and featured my article. Within a few weeks, it amassed ten million views. The response to the video provided further evidence of substantial interest in what timeboxing has to offer.

I knew that hundreds of thousands of senior managers already employ personal assistants to timebox for them every day, managing their calendars and increasing their levels of output, comfort and happiness. Many of the world's greatest achievers—Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Mary Callahan Erdoes—have employed some version of the practice too.

It seemed that the concept had extraordinarily broad appeal, from Gen Z TikTokers to busy parents to business execs to some of the world's leaders and iconoclasts.

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Every single weekday morning, a billion or so knowledge workers wake up, gravitate towards a pixelated screen and process information for 8 hours or more. The work is endless. The choice of what to work on is endless. And then there are all our non-work tasks and responsibilities—with their own levels of urgency and importance—which need, somehow, to be juxtaposed and squeezed in.

At any and every given moment, then, we are faced with a sea of non- trivial choices. This causes us to suffer in several ways. We're fatigued by so many always-on options and this diminishes our ability to make the right decisions. We've developed a fear of missing out on all the things we could be doing that pop up on social media. Insidious, unseen algorithms determine much of the quality and nature of modern-day experience and just when we break free, untimely, unsolicited notifications draw us back in. We fail to make space for the habits and activities that will lead us to what we truly long for: self-development, a successful career, fulfilling relationships, good health—a happy, intentional life.

Many of us are therefore more perplexed, bewildered, frazzled, anxious or depressed than we should be. This is the condition of the most privileged people on earth.

In response, thousands of books and articles about productivity and time management have been written. Each has its own angle, often intersecting with some of the others: habits, checklists, focus, flow, energy, prioritization, the promise of doing more with less, anti-procrastination measures, mental health and spirituality. Several of these books offer powerful methods and have become bestsellers: Deep Work, Indistractable, Four Thousand Weeks, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, Eat That Frog! and Atomic Habits, to name just a few.

And yet none of these books offers a sustained and thorough guide to timeboxing. All six of the aforementioned bestsellers, for example, acknowledge the practice and agree on its potency, but devote just a few paragraphs or pages to it.

So, it seemed that there was an opportunity and responsibility to bring the method and mindset to many more people. This book reveals timeboxing as the fundamental time management philosophy, ripe and ready to help the billions of us weighed down by choice every hour of every day.

Ripe and ready to help you.

WHY IT'S FOR YOU

Let me guess.

You're busy. You often feel overwhelmed. You live many hours each day digitally, in front of a screen. You own and use several devices that tether you to this digital world. You pick up your phone within minutes of waking up. Your phone charged overnight, next to you, as you slept. You have flexibility in your day, possibly about where you work and probably about what you work on at any given moment. You'd like to develop your skills, to learn, much more than you do. You often find yourself working on several things at once, usually unaware of how that happened, and not feeling good about any of them. You find it hard to keep up with email and messaging apps, often leaving messages unreturned. You don't read as much as you think you should. You carry work worries home and home worries to work. You're often stressed. You don't see the people you love anywhere near as much as you'd like, and you're not fully present when you do. You've tried several productivity techniques and none has worked and stayed. You're dissatisfied with your work-life balance. You're tired. You suspect social media takes more from you than it gives, yet still, you scroll.