Time management glossary

24 terms, defined plainly. Each one also says where the popular version of the idea is wrong, because a definition that only flatters the concept is not much use to somebody deciding whether to adopt it.

Time blocking

Time blocking is the practice of giving every piece of work a specific slot in your calendar, rather than keeping it on a list and hoping for a gap. The calendar stops being a record of meetings and becomes a plan for the whole day.

Also called: calendar blocking, time blocking method

Timeboxing

Timeboxing is fixing how long you will spend on something in advance, and stopping when the box ends whether or not the work is finished. The limit is the point: it forces a decision about what good enough looks like.

Also called: time boxing

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique breaks work into fixed intervals, traditionally twenty-five minutes, each followed by a short break. Francesco Cirillo named it in the late 1980s after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used as a student. One completed interval is the unit of work, and you keep a count of them.

Also called: pomodoro, the tomato technique

Auto-scheduling

Auto-scheduling is letting software place your tasks in your calendar for you, around the meetings already there, and move them when things change. You supply the work, its priority and its deadline; the tool decides when each piece happens.

Also called: automatic scheduling, AI scheduling

Deep work

Deep work is professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. The term was coined by Cal Newport in his 2016 book of the same name, which argues the ability is becoming rarer at the same time as it becomes more valuable.

Context switching

Context switching is the cost of moving between unrelated pieces of work. The time lost is not the seconds spent switching but the minutes spent rebuilding the mental state the previous task required, which is why an interrupted hour is worth less than an uninterrupted one.

Also called: task switching, switching cost

Buffer time

Buffer time is deliberately empty space left between commitments, so that one thing running long does not push everything after it. It absorbs the difference between how long work takes and how long it was expected to take.

Also called: breathing room, slack time

Focus time

Focus time is a block held in the calendar for concentrated work rather than for a meeting. Its function is defensive: it occupies the slot so that scheduling software and colleagues see you as busy.

Task batching

Task batching is grouping similar work so it is done in one sitting: all the email at once, all the calls at once. The saving comes from paying the setup cost of a kind of work once instead of six times.

Also called: batching

Day theming

Day theming assigns each day of the week a kind of work: Mondays for planning, Tuesdays for building, and so on. It is context switching avoided at the scale of a week rather than an hour. Jack Dorsey is the most frequently cited practitioner.

Also called: theme days

The planning fallacy

The planning fallacy is the reliable tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, even when you have done the same task before and know it took longer. It was described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.

Parkinson's law

Parkinson's law is the observation that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It was written by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist in 1955, as satire about the British civil service rather than as productivity advice.

Eat the frog

Eat the frog means doing the hardest or most avoided task first, before the day fills up. The phrase comes from Brian Tracy's 2001 book, and the frog is whatever you are most likely to put off.

Also called: eat that frog

Most important task

The most important task, usually shortened to MIT, is the one thing that would make the day worthwhile if nothing else got done. The practice is to name it before the day starts and protect time for it.

Also called: MIT, daily highlight

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done, or GTD, is David Allen's system for capturing every commitment somewhere outside your head, clarifying what each one requires, and reviewing the whole set regularly. Its central claim is that unresolved commitments consume attention until they are written down.

Also called: GTD

Kanban

Kanban makes work visible by moving cards across columns that stand for stages, from waiting through in progress to done. It came off Toyota's production lines in the 1940s and reached software through David Anderson in 2010. Capping how many cards may sit in a column at once is the mechanism, not the board itself.

Also called: kanban board, personal kanban

The PARA method

PARA files everything you keep into four buckets according to how actionable it is: projects with an end date, areas you maintain indefinitely, resources you might want later, and archives of everything finished. Tiago Forte introduced it as the organising layer of Building a Second Brain.

Also called: PARA, projects areas resources archives

The weekly review

The weekly review is an hour set aside to go back over everything you have committed to: emptying the inbox, seeing what slipped, and deciding what the coming week is actually for. It is the maintenance step in Getting Things Done, and David Allen treats it as the one habit the system cannot run without.

Also called: weekly planning, weekly reset

The Eisenhower matrix

The Eisenhower matrix sorts work into four boxes by urgency and importance, on the principle that the important and non-urgent box is the one that gets neglected. It is named after a distinction Dwight Eisenhower quoted in a 1954 address.

Also called: urgent important matrix, Eisenhower box

Objectives and key results

Objectives and key results, usually shortened to OKRs, pair a stated goal with a few measurable outcomes that would show it had happened. Andy Grove built the format at Intel in the 1970s and John Doerr took it to Google in 1999.

Also called: OKRs, OKR framework

SMART goals

A SMART goal is written to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. The criteria come from a 1981 management paper by George Doran, and the acronym has drifted since: the A and the R stand for different words depending on who is teaching it.

Also called: SMART criteria, SMART framework