Applied Research in a World of Increasing Time Demands
Most of us make either mental, written or keyed in plans each day, and unfortunately we make the mistake of telling ourselves to do too much with too few hours.
Address the problem today by changing your scheduling skills, and use the latest research from the best time management researchers, who don’t just make stuff, but use actual data to draw conclusions.
Check the video to learn how to make more realistic plans here.
The Randy Pausch video on time management is famous for several things. One is his emphasis on committing to big goals, broken down into everyday steps.
I thought I’d update his ideas with some of the newest research which shows that these small steps need to be included in our calendars – which is a one of the hallmarks of an advanced time management system.
Click here for the original video on Making Big Goals: http://www.youtube.com/embed/PMci0lYCqIk
For a long time, there’s been a school of thought that says that you should only use your schedule for appointments. The latest research shows that there are better ways available to us to be more productive, especially when we move from using paper calendars to electronic ones.
In this video, I talk about the benefits of making the switch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOms6wHZHdQ
For some strange reason, the world is conspiring to keep us in a constant state of digital distraction. It affects our productivity, and ruins our peace of mind… while robbing us of that great feeling that comes from knowing we had a great day, in which we got a lot of good stuff done.
Solve the problem with the latest ideas in time management that get all the way down to the ways in which you manage your smartphone, tablets and other gadgets.
As I shared in the prior series of four posts on this topic, Dezhi Wu’s book “Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management: Practices to Enhance Calendar Tool Design” is a breakthrough piece of research.
It’s the dawn of a new age, I hope — time management researchers are actually tackling the problems that ordinary people people face when they try to improve the way they manage their time. New tools, gadgets and software are coming out every day, but they all miss the point… and Dezhi’s research is essential to putting them back on track.
Listen in as I summarize one of her key findings – it’s my final summary of her book for the time being (until I schedule time to read it again!)
or click: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp3t4iJPUdk&feature=colike
A recent Gallup poll revealed 11 areas of dissatisfaction in the US workplace, and 3 of the areas had a direct connection to time-stress.
Number 11. Flexibility of Schedule — employees abhor the rigid and arbitrary nature in which their employers enforce the “rules” around working hours
Number 6: Amount of Vacation Time — This might be a survey of the US in which the least number of vacation time is granted.
Number 1: On the Job Stress– Most of us have jobs in which meeting deadlines is critical. They are part and parcel of being a working person who must deal with hundreds of email messages each day.
In a number of posts, I have written about the need to upgrade your scheduling skills when you hit “a certain threshold.” Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to guide us to the precise point in time when this shift should take place.
Instead, I find myself coaching clients in programs from a bit of a vacuum. I know what worked for me, and a few others, but I can’t back it up with proper research. Which I hate.
At the same time, I do have some guiding principles. You should probably upgrade from keeping multiple lists to managing a single calendar when:
These aren’t fool-proof tests by any means, but it’s important to note that they might be precipitated by a life-change of some kind that brings an instant flood of new time demands. These are the moments in our lives and careers when we need to be vigilant, because we might notice some of the above events, which never used to happen, taking place for the first time.
The combination of the life-changing event, and the symptoms listed above, are a good sign that something needs to change, and that it needs to happen quickly.
I plan to make it easy for anyone who wants to make this kind of upgrade. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be initiating the next 2Time Labs Open House. During this time, our doors will be open to anyone who wants to take one of our free training programs. The registration period will be short, and hopefully we’ll be able to fill the class before the doors close. Stay tuned, or visit http://mytimedesign.com for early notification. (For those who have been tracking carefully, you may have noticed a shift in date. We simply bit off more than we could chew and put in too much new stuff to hit the original deadline.)
We’ll also be promoting our paid programs during this period to anyone who wants to take things a step further, deeper or faster.
I recently put together a video describing some of the benefits of the free program that I’m about to offer during 2Time Labs’ upcoming Open House. In the middle of editing the recording, I felt guilty and a little ashamed. After all, I was telling the world how weak we as a people are in this area, and it felt as if I were washing my dirty linen in public.
Then I read this article published recently based on a speech given by Bryan Wynter, Governor of the Bank of Jamaica, which is our Central Bank (the equivalent of the Federal Reserve.) The article said:
Total factor productivity, which captures the overall efficiency of production, has declined at an average rate of 2.1 per cent every year over the period 1990 to 2010. Similarly, labour productivity, which measures output per worker, contracted at an average rate of 0.5 per cent per year over the same period,” he noted.
He also observed that Jamaica’s labour productivity has lagged behind its major trading partners, as well as a number of emerging market economies.
“Against this background, Jamaica’s annual economic growth over the past decade has averaged 0.8 per cent. This is in contrast to average economic growth of 2.6 per cent per year for our Caribbean neighbours,” Mr. Wynter pointed out.
The Central Bank Governor identified a number of factors which have contributed to Jamaica’s low productivity over the years. These include: deficiencies in human capital; high levels of crime; fiscal distortions; and a poor work ethic.
What I know from living and working in the U.S. for over 20 years is that Jamaican workers who migrate are just as productive as anyone else. The right environment makes all the difference. Part of what originally got me inspired was a need to replace the excellent mentors, role models and coaching that I observed in the American workplace with something quite different that could be used anywhere – a pathway that anyone could take to improve their time management and productivity skills.
It was the spark that led to 2Time Labs, MyTimeDesign, and NewHabits-NewGoals, which was fueled by the further insight that I had… everyone who wants the benefits of greater personal productivity eventually runs out of others to copy and imitate and must find a way to teach themselves a method that works for them.
So, it might be strange to take a time management program designed by someone living in Jamaica – we are more known for being very, very fast, and very, very laid back (some contradiction)! We’re not so well known for our productivity, which funny enough, is exactly why I have been so inspired.
P.S. Update on the timing of the Open House. In the middle of migrating to the new version of MyTimeDesign it dawned on me that there are a lot of upgrades I want to make… so rather than rush them, I’m giving myself a bit of time to migrate from 1.0.Plus+ to 1.1.Plus+. Stay tuned…
Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits has come up with an interesting and provocative post: “Why Productivity Should be Tossed Out.”
His idea is right in line with a lot of the themes he focuses on in his popular blog, which offers tips on how we can simplify our lives and return to a more basic set of habits. That’s a hard job to undertake in the times in which we live, unfortunately! In his post, he argues that productivity advice should be tossed out, at least according to his definition:
“the advice is wrong for a simple reason: it’s meant to squeeze the most productivity out of every day, instead of making your days better.”
What he doesn’t leave room for is the fact that people have different goals, and that these goals change from one phase of life to the next. Their definition of “productivity” evolves and needs to be used as the yardstick for whatever improvements they contemplate. The same change might have very different effects depending on what the user wants at the end of the day, including simple decisions such as “whether or not to work this weekend.”
He makes the mistake that many in the productivity and time management field make, which is to assume that we should (or do) have the same goals. While this assumption is arguably a reasonable one to make, simplifying people’s goals isn’t the same as simplifying their habits.
When he gets into the “7 Tips” that make up the meat of the article, his broad strokes turn into broadsides, as he recommends that his readers not measure anything, not have goals, not focus their work, not plan to do more than one thing per day, not make plans for time spent waiting in the dentist’s waiting room, and even not get organized.
If he were to add that these recommendations are some fun variations from the unquestioned routine we find ourselves in at times, that would be one thing. But his words appear to be stronger than that and sound prescriptive.
Here’s the contradiction: I imagine that he wrote his article on a computer and shared it on the Internet. It’s a mistake to think that the technology that allows his message to reach his 200,000+ readers takes place without a lot of people committing themselves to mastering complexity and doing exactly the very things that he is advising people not to do (it could be that he’s only writing to his core constituency, but the article makes it seem as if his one size “should” fit all).
It’s a bit of over-reaching on his part.
He does, however, end the article on an interesting point:
You shouldn’t be forcing yourself to work hard on something you dread doing, and then take a break to reward or relieve yourself from that dreaded work. You should work on stuff you love, so that you can’t wait to do it, and taking a break is just a matter of enjoying something else (maybe a nice walk, a nice book, a nice conversation with a friend). Life where you work hard in bursts, with some breaks, is dreadful. Life where you’re always doing something you love is art.
Apart from the part where he’s telling everyone what they should do, he paints a great possibility: it’s possible to get to the point where we don’t shun the stuff we dislike, but instead we prefer what’s happening at any moment, simply because… nothing else can be happening, and we are at our best when we accept what is.
That would make for a helpful article, but the doctrine of simplifying everything doesn’t seem to be the answer that would make a difference.
A long time ago when I was a young consultant at AT&T Bell Labs I remember reading and then advocating the ideas of CK Prahalad, the recently deceased professor, thought leader and management consultant.
He shared some of his interviews before his death in Strategy and Business, on the topic of thought leadership and the source of new ideas. Not surprisingly, it echoed some of the 2Time Labs discoveries around building competence slowly, via deliberate practice. He also says:
I was very keen to write. I found writing was the best way to clarify my own thinking. When you talk you can be vague, and the English language can be delightfully vague. When you sit down to write, you see whether you can express your ideas clearly or not. That habit has stayed with me. When I think I have an interesting idea, I try to write it down for myself first.
…it takes time to develop a new idea. If you are a writer, like me, then what you write on any given day may be only a fragment of what you know or what you believe, because you may not be ready to write down everything you have to say. There are breakthroughs, but they happen over a long period of time.
To me, the problems of greatest interest are things that you cannot explain with the current prevailing theory.
In developing all of these ideas, I learned not to start with the methodology, but with the problem. A lot of times, research tends to start with the methodology. I prefer to start with a problem that’s of interest and apply whatever methodology is appropriate.
Every one of my research projects started the same way: recognizing that the established theory did not explain a certain phenomenon. We had to stay constantly focused on weak signals. Each weak signal was a contradictory phenomenon that was not happening across the board. You could very easily say, “Dismiss it, this is an outlier, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But the outliers and weak signals were the places to find a different way to think about the problem.
If you look historically at the strategy literature, starting with Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise [MIT Press, 1962], the most powerful ideas did not come out of multiple examples. They came out of single-industry studies and single case studies. Big impactful ideas are conceptual breakthroughs, not descriptions of common patterns. You can’t define the “next practice” with lots of examples. Because, by definition, it is not yet happening.
For example, with the “Twenty Hubs and No HQ” article [which described a proposed structure for multinational companies], we didn’t prove the value of this system through examples, because we didn’t have examples. But we laid out a logic about how it might work, connecting the dots, showing a new pattern. I believe that conceptual breakthroughs come when you see a new pattern. And you use stories or companies’ work as examples and illustrations of the concept, not as proof of good practice. In The New Age of Innovation, for instance, I write about Aravind’s remarkable cataract surgery practice, but I use it as an example, not as proof. I never say, “Because of Aravind’s example, we know this should work.” Current practices, however successful they are, may not be robust enough to stand the test of time.
Of course, we all invented our own terms. Indeed, the biggest impediment in the growth and strategy literature is that, unlike in the financial literature, there are no standardized terms. There is no organizing thesis and principle. My bottom of the pyramid becomes someone else’s “base of the pyramid.” What’s the difference? There’s not even agreement about appropriate units of analysis. Is it one person? A team? A division? What is the fundamental building block of HR?
Over the next year, I came to the conclusion that it would be very easy to stay on course and keep mining these ideas and writing more about them — but then I was likely to write a mediocre next book. I think many writers fall into that trap. So in the late 1990s I started looking for the next big idea.
This perfectly encapsulates the reason why I share ideas here at 2Time Labs. When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs, we published Technical Memorandums and Internal Memorandums in order to disseminate ideas, get feedback and bring some order to jumbles of ideas. That’s apparently what Prahalad used to do also.
What he says about “weak signals” is quite important to the work we do also. There’s not a whole lot of evidence for many of the popular theories in time management, but there are certain patterns that can be seen, and they go well beyond today’s cliches. Time Management 2.0 is made up of such patterns, and there is scant evidence of their truth… at the moment. Emerging research by experts such as Dezhi Wu is confirming these patterns, but it might be a while before they are accepted as everyday, obvious truth.
I love the warning at the end, and in fact, the article revived an idea I have had for some time that connects the dots between strategic planning and time management. In our firm, we have been showing our clients how to craft 30 year strategies and it’s something I haven’t written much about since Amie Devero, a former partner of Framework Consulting, made note of the technique in her book, Powered by Principle.
All in all, I was deeply inspired by his example — and his passing was a great loss.