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Comment by erikstarck | Hacker News Reader

Timeboxing is so powerful, done right.

You can do it all the way down to Pomodoro-like work chunks counted in minutes, up to long term strategic goals and have things like quarterly OKRs and Scrum-like sprints in the middle.

The best entrepreneurs naturally think and act like this, from Elon Musk to the late IKEA-founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is quoted saying:

“You can do so much in 10 minutes time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”

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> Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.

Sounds like hell. I am not a robot. And how am I going to do it. Take an hour before work to plan 48 10 Minute sessions for the day. What if something important comes up? Or take a 1 minute block every 10 minutes to figure out what to do for the next session? God forbid I have to take a call, take a p*ss, or my noodle pot boils over while I wfh.

With smart planning, you could clean up the noodle bowl and take a piss in the same 10 minute chunk. And with enough practice you could have a few minutes to spare for something important to come up.

I agree that scheduling your entire life in 10-minute units with no space left for just living sounds somewhat hellish, but I like the core concept of being conscious about what I'm doing with my time. I would look at it more as not just defaulting into meaningless activity, but making a conscious decision that it's what you want to be doing for a while.

I'll now make the conscious decision to stop posting on Hacker News and go do something useful!

I don’t think this is meant to be taken literally.

The point is to use your working time productively. Figure out the most important thing you can be working on, time box it, then reassess.

That process has served me well for the last 10 years.

Whoops, I just continued reading into an emotional strawman argument derogating a transnational CEO's time management strategy.

Not going to do that for the next eight minutes, I'm too busy dividing the rest of my life into annotated 100ms segments so I can get some real work done.

I don't think there's any reason to assume that a "transnational CEO", whatever that means, is any worse or better at time management than other people.

And if they are, there's no reason to assume that their "strategy" will work for others. A lot of CEOs are workaholics. What works for them won't help a healthy human.

It means that becoming the CEO of a transnational corporation is a pretty strong filter for effectiveness, and the comment I replied to is probably not in the spirit of their advice.

It's ironic that Ingvar Kamprad said that and then optimized IKEA stores for spending as much time walking round looking at everything before you get to the shop bit as possible.

Maybe he should have added "... and don't let anyone else steal your time units from you." at the end.

Interesting; at my local IKEA, the warehouse bit is on the ground floor, and while the normal path is through all the showrooms, there's a shortcut right by the entrance straight to the warehouse. Additionally, there's various shortcuts throughout their showrooms. I wonder if that wasn't in all their stores?

All the warehouse should have these shortcuts due to fire hazards and emergency policies.

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