An Amazing Time Demand Tracker… It doesn’t exist… so don’t go looking for it… but if it did, it would be a gadget used to track individual commitments.
Backing up a bit… A time demand is defined by 2Time Labs as an individual commitment to complete an action in the future. It’s a discrete, mental creation that disappears once the action is complete and is usually made up of a provisional action, duration and likely start time.
The problem is that time demands are hard to track. People who capture with high skill immediately record them in a safe place, such as a paper pad, smartphone or program like Evernote. From there, the time demand is acted upon in one of several ways once it’s emptied from the point of collection. It’s tossed away, acted on immediately, stored, scheduled or added to a list.
The challenge is that no-one (to my knowledge) has ever tried to track time demands. No tool exists to answer even basic questions such as:
– how many are created per day on average
– how long they sit in a capture point before being emptied
– how many end up being disposed in each of the different ways I listed above
The right kind of device would need a human interface due to the fact that time demands enter our lives in different ways, some of which are mental in nature e.g. during a dream.
There ARE studies, for example, of email flow, but this is too imprecise – some emails are filled with time demands while others require only one – “delete it immediately without even reading.” Too many time demands are simply made up in response to an arbitrary, unrecorded stimulus.
If this device existed, it would open up the doors to all kinds of research, and experimentation that could change the way we think of time management. Perhaps there is someone willing to invest?