What is Time boxing?
Time boxing is a strategy that I learned from a manager at Amazon where I dedicate a fixed amount of time to trying to solve an issue and if you still cannot figure it out then you need to reach out to someone. This prevents a dev from getting siloed and too focused on one particular issue which could cause them to fall behind on the overall project timelines.
Why is this helpful?
This is also useful for exploratory tasks because sometimes when there is not a specific goal, people can spend an unreasonable amount of time researching without actually starting work on the task. Time boxing is one of the essential skills that I had to learn in order to actually get stuff done as a developer but unfortunately it also prevents things like falling down long Rabbit Holes and getting distracted from the task at hand.