4 weeks for people is usually where things get interesting. That’s when you have to go back to square one to figure out what you should do. Sometimes it’s pretty easy because you’re just done working on your project. Other times it’s almost as complicated as if you were building a house.
4 weeks is where you go back to square one to figure out if you should just do another day of work or if you should throw in the towel and go home. You should never go back to square one.
I can imagine someone looking at a 4-week project and saying, “okay, this is good. I want to get started on this.” But they’ll have to go back to square one to figure out if they should continue or if they should give up on the project.
4 weeks can feel like an eternity for many projects. But there is a way to get 4 weeks to fit into your day and still be productive and in one piece. Even though starting and finishing a project can be a huge challenge, there are specific ways to break it down and still get something done. In our company, we give people a deadline, like a calendar, to work on a project, and we call it “time-boxing.
Time-boxing is basically a method of splitting the project into smaller chunks, like a project board, and then putting those small pieces together into a larger whole. The idea is that you are breaking the project down into more manageable pieces and then putting it back together in the right order.
Time-boxing sounds like a simple concept, but it’s actually one of the most complicated processes we do. We do this all the time, but it’s often one that is only useful when there are a lot of little pieces to the larger whole. The more pieces that are put together, the harder it is to tell why one piece is a part of the bigger whole, but the more time-boxing you do, the easier it is to see why.
Time-boxing is when we put together a bunch of small pieces and then go back and put them back together in the right order. It is an important part of our process because, when you have too many little pieces to fit together, you have to figure out why things are connected the way they are.
It’s important to remember that time-boxing is the process that links things together. It is the process that allows us to see that there are connections between all of these little pieces. For example, maybe you’re a little skeptical about the first part of “when does 4 weeks for everybody come out” because it seems to me like it’s a stretch just to have 4 weeks. Maybe it’s more like 2 weeks and a day.