Want a productivity hack that will change your life? Kelly connects with Marc Zao-Sanders, the co-founder and CEO of filtered.com to discuss his new book "Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time."

I want to clear up the idea around multitasking – because Timeboxing is very much about doing one thing at a time.

“I think there are certain combinations of tasks you can perform. If you're really familiar with one of them, you can do a second task, and it's not a problem. So, you know, I'm not absolutely dogmatic that it needs to be one task. But, if you're cooking a dish that's familiar to you and you want to listen to a podcast, that's absolutely fine. Knock yourself out. The idea really is, if it's a cognitively difficult task with a brand-new task, then it's probably best for you to do just that one thing and timeboxing is in favor of that. ”

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You talk about our need to be intentional with our time.

"Being intentional, it's a bit of a cliche. What do we really mean? I would say that if you sit down in a quiet moment and think about what's most important to you? What is a good use of time? We all have a pretty good sense of what that is. So, that might be meditating, and it might be reading; it might be exercise, learning and self-development might be spending time with friends or family; it might be something else. Right? But what happens is that we don't find as much time as we should for those things, because it gets crowded out by the pushes and pulls of other people on our time, and very often, actually, that device in our pocket - you know, the smartphone with social media apps that that are on it. I mean, it's also cliche to say, but of course that is a real time sink.”

I especially like the idea of sharing your calendar with coworkers so they can have a more empathetic understanding of how much work you are doing in a day.

“Collaborating more harmoniously and with greater efficiency is one of the many benefits that you get from timeboxing. And putting it into a shared calendar that others can see as well also signals transparency and your confidence to show how you’re spending your time. Maybe some of the appointments you’re going to make private, because they are private. But in general, I'm happy for people to take a look at what's going on in order to make a judgment as to whether to rope me into this meeting, or bring me into this piece of work. I think it's a modern way of going about things.”

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