“How Did You Get Interested in Time Management?”

The above question came in from a reader, and I answered it in this way:

letter2.jpg“Dear reader”,

Thanks for the kind words… they are much appreciated.

I can tell by your domain name that we are already of like mind!

I am an industrial engineer by training, although I don’t do much of it anymore. Industrial engineers are geeks who love efficiency, optimization, and cutting waste… so I have been thinking about this kind of thing since then.

I read all the books I could find on the subject, until they stopped saying anything new. Then I was trained to teach a course called Mission Control, before stumbling into GTD®, which I loved and which seemed to be the source of many of the ideas of Mission Control.

Sometime last year, when I was blogging about mastery on my main business blog, Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle, it struck me that people here in the Caribbean could use neither system, for various reasons.

I figured that there must be a better way and I realized that I could find no “basic structure” for people to learn, and that each of the gurus were only selling a milepost, rather than a path.

And mastery is about the path after all… not any one guru’s destination.

Hence, the belt system, the 11 fundamental components, the idea of personal practice and the notion of designing one’s own way, and one’s own rate of evolution over time.

Phew — maybe I gave you more of an answer than you wanted!

How did you come across my site? I’ll be visiting yours in a few minutes.

Francis