Here at 2Time Labs, one of the distinctions that we made have between different levels of time management skill has to do with the skill/art of using a schedule to manage your daily activity, rather than either a group of lists or one’s memory.
Recently, I noticed that two books have echoed this idea; one of the few books to represent the more modern point of view about this critical skill.
18 minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distractions and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman.
A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance by Daniel Markovitz.
They take a similar point of view that we do at 2Time Labs. Using a single calendar instead of multiple lists allows one to manage more time demands.
However, they also make the mistake that other books commit. They each imply that their system is so great that it deserves to be a “one-size-fits-all” solution. They also don’t do very much to help the reader implement the changes they recommend, nor do they help the reader understand their current time management system before making any changes.
In other words, even though they have some sound ideas, they hardly use Time Management 2.0 principles, which is too bad, as it would strengthen their theses.
Here at 2Time Labs we have discovered that there’s room for an infinite number of methodologies, except for those authors that insist that they have discovered the Holy Grail.