I Can Save You 5000 Hours Per year. Guaranteed… (Not!)

I recently decided to sharpen up my focus on  certain kind of customer / reader here at 2Time Labs and MyTimeDesign.

I’ll use the headline of this post to explain what I mean.

My Time Management System Can Save You 5000 Hours Per Year. Guaranteed.

 What’s your reaction?

  • I’m intrigued!
  • Bull&%$#!

This may sound ridiculous, but the first group is the one I intend to ignore.

And it’s not because I am aligning myself with the cynics in the world, against those who are open-minded.

The distinction I’m trying to draw is more of the “bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you” variety. The second group knows that the flaws in the headline of this post run deep, for a number of reasons, starting with these two:

  1. the promise cannot be verified scientifically due to problems in establishing proper measures.
  2. professionals operate at different levels of skill, and such a promise assumes a world of universal mediocrity that, thankfully, doesn’t exist.

The second group is often insulted by time management trivia that does little to inform, and makes no difference other than to provide a cool distraction. Lists of numbered time management tips leave them cold.

Instead, they would find company in others who know that improving one’s time management skills is a difficult business. As Steve Pavlina puts it on his website, Personal Development for Smart People, “Personal development is hard work.”

Anyone who is looking for a fast, easy shortcut to better time management skills hasn’t learned the truth that, I think, can only come from real-world experience. That’s a fancy way of saying that they haven’t failed enough to know enough.

In the time management business, I can’t compete with those who write soft articles that speak to this first group. They make outrageous promises and offer over-simplified answers to tough questions and there are a lot of them who believe that an article urging people to “spend more time on stuff that’s important and less time on stuff that’s not” is a brand new message that deserves to be disseminated widely to professionals who have never heard it.

They are the ones most likely to believe that there’s a time management system that fits every person on the planet, and that you should find the best time management system and just follow it.

What I do know for a fact is that for the second group I described, that does indeed know much, much better, there is little that’s being written. Maybe 5% of the new time management articles being published address their experience and knowledge. Probably less. I curate hundreds of posts, videos and audios on time management each week and I can attest – the number of quality articles that try to speak to the second group is small.

We can blame this state of affairs on any number of people, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll focus on getting more content out to a greater number of people that actually makes a profound difference. Doing so is much, much harder… and I love it.