Goal Setting vs. Time Boxing: Why One Sucks

Goal setting: write a good comment.

Time boxing: write comment in 5 minutes (3 minutes for research/thinking up a comment, 2 minutes for writing).

I would argue that neither approach is optimal. Making up good goals is super hard. Pure time boxing, while great for managing time, is not that great at getting things done.

However, consider this mixed approach:

1. Write out a broad goal and start with an hour of exploratory testing. Come up with some short goals with deadlines.

2. Work on short term goals, time box them if necessary.

3. Take some time to review accomplished goals and time it took. With that information, review how accomplished short term goals helped you along the way of a broad goal. Adjust timelines accordingly.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Ever since I was first exposed to the idea of setting goals as a kid, there was a voice in the back of my head telling me something was missing. I didn't understand what it was back then.

But basically, it pretends you have perfect, god-like knowledge. You don't really know whether you want that Project Manager more than anything or not. You don't know for sure, up front, what it will take, and you also might wind up finding out that you're not happy in that new Project Manager job.

Goal setting says, "Screw all that uncertainty. Let's pretend we know we want the job, that it will be worth more than it costs, and let's go all out for it."

That is a process of willfully adopting an irrational stance. More precisely, it calls for you to irrationally increase your level of confidence.

Still -- it is often a very effective thing to do. It transforms you from a parked car to a guided missile, and it makes it possible to bring about great changes in a short period of time. It's something like a blitz attack in which you burn the ships.

It's really not something to do lightly. We probably way overuse it. But sometimes it's a very powerful thing to do.

That's timeboxing? He defines timeboxing has having an alternative plan if you fail to meet your goal. ("..think of goal setting but with 2 additional branches after having reached or failed at reaching the goal.") That doesn't sound like timeboxing to me.

Timeboxing is, you do what you can within a fixed time limit. So you're more inclined to rigorously prioritize, stay close to a shippable state and reduce scope if you're running out of time.

This seems more like playing with the definition of words more than anything else. I never understood goal to mean "work tirelessly on one approach to reaching your goal until you achieve it or die trying".

Part of the reason to set a goal is to see if your path is working. Want to get 1000 sign ups by the end of the month? If it's the 15th and you have 50 sign ups, you can see that the campaign might need reworking.

One problem with time boxing is that it isn't the actual terminal goal - when trying to be self-motivate, there would be an extra level of abstraction between effort and reward, as you'd now be self-motivating to timebox, rather than to do anything inherently useful.

Besides, it fails the "too good to be true" heuristic. If it actually persistently improved productivity in a meaningful manner, you'd expect it to have been better adopted widely by now.

There is literally no motivational mechanism with as much research to support its efficacy on behavior as there is for goal-setting. The SMART criteria is fine I guess, but it's missing one thing: make your goal behavioral. Further, if your goal is distal (e.g., lose 15 pounds), then supplement it with proximal (e.g., eat salad for lunch three times this week) goals.

Goals work. Goal-setting works.

I don't totally follow his methodology for "time-boxing", it seems like goal-setting with a time for evaluation and course-correction, which is something all goals should involve anyway.

Time-boxing as I've heard and used it before is a working style, similar to a scrum sprint, where you have a set of goals and a limited set of time, so you force yourself and team to prioritize what fits. The team then constantly re-evaluates what fits and takes a hard realistic look at the goals that have to be done at the end of the time-box vs. those that can be changed/cut.