The "Box" Method of Time Management

In March 2024, I decided to start tackling the pervasive feeling of overwhelm I’ve had since…forever. I could not tell you exactly what part of life I was overwhelmed by. Just…everything. I knew that “everything” would be an unhelpful answer if I did decide to seek help, and so I did the first step of any budgeting project: I started tracking my time. I used the toggl app (not a sponsor), which allowed me to quickly “time in” and “time out” of any given project.

This time tracking led to time budgeting, which led to a weekly project that, though rigorous, is working for me. I can’t remember the last time I spiraled into tears because of an overwhelming task list and an inability to prioritize it in the moment. For me, this is huge. This change is not because the task list has gotten any shorter, or because I’ve found a way to make more time. Neither is true, and I have a long, long way to go in protecting my calendar. 

Here are the solutions my method provides for me:

• Quickly determining what to do when I find myself with “free” time
• Effectively balancing my time and energy across multiple priorities
• Setting reasonable goals for myself in a given week so that the task list feels do-able

It’s also important to note what things this method is less good at:

• Accomplishing deadline-driven work; this requires some extra care
• Any notion of chill; there are multiple spreadsheet tabs involved

If the spreadsheet comment didn’t turn you off, and you’re curious, let’s walk through what I do in a given week. I’m not posting because it’s particularly magical; but I’ve been asked a few times about my system, so I figured I would document it once and for all.

Disclaimer #1: This method did not appear overnight. I hope this blog post is cohesive, but the process of putting it all together certainly was not.

Disclaimer #2: This method works for my brain. I am under no illusion that it will be universal; in fact, I suspect that in its entirety, it may be unique to me. If any part of it is useful to you, that’s a bonus.

Disclaimer #3: I’ve left out some minutia that aren’t relevant to this blog post, and I’ve changed some terms to be more relevant and less “Melody shorthand.”

Prelude

This system involves three main components:

• The journal, which is what everybody sees
• The spreadsheet, which includes the following important worksheets:
• My entire task list (yep, this is where it lives)
• A new worksheet every week for that week’s planning
• The toggl app (still not a sponsor)

Let’s talk about what I do on the toggl app real quick, and then we’ll spend a lot of time on the spreadsheet. The journal will be last.

Throughout the week, I track time using the toggl app in the following Categories. I’ve included the average time spent in these Categories just in case you’re curious.

• Chores (2.6 average hours/week)
• Community (14.2 average hours/week)
• Health (2.4 average hours/week)
• Ministry (10.3 average hours/week)
• Pets (1.7 average hours/week)
• Rest (2.5 average hours/week)
• To-Do (2.9 average hours/week)

Okay, time to talk about the spreadsheet.

Planning the Week

Every week, I sit down and spend just over an hour on the following tasks, more or less in order. Sometimes I light a candle or make some tea, and that adds some loveliness to the process.

First, on last week’s worksheet, I log the time spent in each Category against what was expected in each Category. This is mainly for archival purposes, though it sometimes helps in predictions.

This is the completed worksheet for the week of June 1, 2025. In the Expected row, you see how much time I planned for each Category. In the Actual row, you see how it turned out in reality.

Then, I create a new worksheet for the coming week and enter the expected time for each Category. For scheduled things (like Community or Ministry), this is pretty straightforward; I just sum up the hours on the calendar. Chores and Rest vary little from week to week--though either may get trimmed if the overall schedule is full--and I’ve come to be able to predict Health and Pets fairly quickly. (Yes, I’ve made little spreadsheet functions for those too, so I can quickly get a number based on how many runs I’m planning, or whether the dog is getting a bath.)

Tasks are where the real work begins. A task can be in any Category: there are Community tasks, Ministry tasks, etc… A task in the To-Do Category is probably what you’d expect it to be, everything from the regular washing of the water bottle to organizing the tea shelves to decorating for summer to going over last month’s expenses to upgrading my computer software…

I have a spreadsheet tab dedicated to the task list--yes, this is where my task list lives--and each task (row) includes the following details (column):

• Task name
• Task Category (Community, Ministry, To-Do, etc…)
• Deadline
• Time estimate (in hours)
• Month the task was added to the list

Note: Not everything has a deadline. For things that don’t, the idea is that they will be slowly mixed into the deadline list based on their “Month Added.”

The last column on this worksheet simply says, “This Week.” And when I plan the week, I put a “Yes” in that column for every task I’d like to work on.

The spreadsheet is set up so that on the worksheet of the upcoming week, it sums the time of all the tasks in their respective Categories. And then I can see exactly how much time I will spend doing all of the things I’ve said yes to!

• Chores: Same every week, unless trimmed for a busy schedule
• Community: Predicted duration of scheduled events + time of any Community tasks that I’ve marked as “Yes”
• Health: Predicted duration of routine and scheduled events + time of any Health tasks that I’ve marked as “Yes"
• Ministry: Predicted duration of scheduled events + time of any Ministry tasks that I’ve marked as “Yes”
• Pets: Predicted duration of routine and scheduled events + time of any Pets tasks that I’ve marked as “Yes”
• Rest: Same every week, unless trimmed for a busy schedule
• To-Do: Time of any To-Do tasks that I’ve marked as “Yes”

I typically start the planning process by saying “Yes” to every task that has a deadline before the end of the coming week. Perhaps you see the danger here, and yes, you are correct: there are far too many tasks, and choices must be made. This is what takes the most time every week: evaluating all the tasks with past-due and this-week deadlines and choosing the ones that simply must get done. And often trimming that list down as well. Eek.

I do this trimming every Sunday so that what’s committed to in the upcoming week fits into the time available. Sometimes I’m trimming other Categories, too (Chores and Rest most often on the chopping block). It’s not always the most encouraging experience; there are a lot of tasks and not a lot of time.

However. The question of what is most important must be answered. And if I do not take a few minutes of candle-lit time on Sunday, I will be trying to evaluate this on a Thursday afternoon, after a full workday, with 20 minutes before dinner. It does not go well for me in that moment. It is better to come to terms with the tradeoffs over a cup of tea on Sunday than to wax hysterical over the failure to complete all 171 tasks (decorate the laundry room and season the cast iron and order return addresses and clean out the pantry) that week on Saturday night.

But how do I know how much to trim? Well, I have to trim it down to equal the time I have in a week. But how do I know that number? I’ll admit I’m still figuring out the best way to forecast this. If I knew every week exactly how much time I’d spend in all these Categories--time not spent on spontaneous activity or unexpectedly needed rest--well. It would be very accurate but not very human. However, because of toggl, I have the data to make decent predictions. And that’s the best you can do, really.

Once the total amount of time planned in all the Categories matches the total amount of time I have (predicted), the planning is complete. Now for the writing, which is what makes it into the pretty dot-grid journal that most people see on my counter and think of as my system. (Yep. We haven’t even gotten to the journal yet.)

Using the Journal

The journal is what people ask me questions about. What is this pen-drawn tracking and prioritization system? (Oh, now we’re getting somewhere with the fancy words!) It looks like this:

The result of the previous step--the saying ‘Yes,’ the trimming--is that I now know how much time I want to spend on each Category in the coming week. I convert that into a number of 15-minute increments per week. (For example, if I want to spend 3 hours on Community, that’s equal to twelve 15-minute increments.)

Note: This is a good time to mention that I do not include events in the journal. Going to church, meeting someone for coffee, or visiting a doctor are factored into the overall time predictions for the week…but they’re not relevant to my journal use because they’re going to happen anyway. I don’t need to prioritize them. For the journal discussion, the time expected for these events are subtracted out.

In the journal, each Category is a row.

Back to the 15-min increments. Each 15-min increment becomes a “box” on the journal page, which is how this whole thing got its name. To help myself stay balanced across the Categories, the boxes are different sizes across Categories. 

For example, the Community Category may have 8 increments (8*15min = 2 hours) and the Ministry Category may have 2 increments (2*15min = 1/2 hour). The Ministry boxes will be larger than the Community boxes, but there will be a lot more Community boxes (8) than Ministry boxes (2).

What happened here? A: I forgot to fill out the rest of the row; I fixed it later. B: I messed up once and counted one instead of two, which threw off the rest until I noticed it. I fixed it, but it required me to remember later which lines were “real.” I thought about capturing a flawless version for you, but honestly I've never made one perfect from the get-go.

The purpose of the boxes is to help with prioritization. I live in a world where everything is important all the time. Everything is overdue. And many things never really end…housekeeping is cyclical. You don’t really hit a point where you can say you are done, which means…it always needs to be done. How do you prioritize in a world where everything needs to be done always?

This is the problem that the boxes are trying to solve. The varying sizes of the boxes bring balance because they reflect the prioritization decisions made on Sunday. By shading in boxes throughout the week, I can ensure in real-time that my efforts are balanced across the Categories. Maybe no Category makes it to 100% in a given week…but also no Category gets ignored and left behind completely.

Throughout the week, I shade in a box for each 15 minutes spent in that Category. (Remember, I track the time in toggl, so that is how I know. This also means that though the boxes are a nice tracking visual for tracking during the week, I don’t use them for tracking in the long-run; that’s what toggl is for.)

At any given moment, I can see what percent of the Categories (by time spent) are completed. And then I don’t have to deliberate: whatever is most behind, do that. As I complete the boxes throughout the week, the row starts to fill up.

When I find myself with five minutes, I don’t need to panic about which Category deserves that moment. I look to see which row is the least filled, and then I do that. If there are multiple Categories tied, I roll a dice to pick which one. Again, I’ve only got five minutes, and I don’t want to spend it trying to decide which is more deserving of my time. I already did that on Sunday.

If your eyes are crossing, there are two core ideas here:

• Each “box” is a 15-min increment
• The least-filled-in row is the one to work on next

I use one page of the journal per week. The rest of the page is dedicated to listing out the tasks I plan to accomplish. This is nice because there is a finite list of tasks instead of the 171 aforementioned. And in theory, it is finishable - I sometimes reach the end of the list, and that’s that. Done for the week for that Category. In a world where nothing is ever done, I have created an artificial done-ness, and this is good for my mental health. Here’s what a final page looks like, ready for the week:

I get a lot of questions about the colors. The colors are almost meaningless. I used to just fill the whole thing out with black ballpoint pen. The point is how full the row is compared to other rows. But at some point I figured a little color would be nice, so now I use a different color every day for shading. It’s a nice visual of which days were the most productive, but it’s not tracking new information; that data is already in toggl and with more detail, too.

Postlude

This brings me back to the “Prelude” section we started with. All week, I track what I’m doing in toggl. Not every waking moment, but definitely the stuff in these Categories. And so it goes, week-by-week.

Is it a lot? Yeah. It takes me 1-1.5 hours every Sunday to get it all together. But it is so, so worth it to me. Since I implemented this structure, I rarely have a meltdown about “what to do next everything is so behind!” I can’t even remember the last time that happened. Whenever that anxiety rises, I just go to the journal, look at the least-filled-in row, take a deep breath, and take the next step. Since in-the-moment decision-making derails things for me, I’ve outsourced the decision-making to my Sunday afternoons, Atomic Habits-style.

Is it excessive? Overly rigorous? I don’t know, maybe. So far, I haven’t figured out another way for myself, but I hope you can glean something for yourself from this extensive blog post. I enjoy exploring creative ways to approach time management, and I’d love to know what ideas this inspired for you! :)

And if you're curious: it took me 5 hours and 6 minutes to get this blog post out the door.