Applied Research in a World of Increasing Time Demands
It’s hard to help someone else improve their time management skills when all you see is “stuff.” Here’s an article I wrote about how an understanding of time demands can make a big difference: Coaching Amidst a World of Stuff.
P.S. I added a few videos that can help a coach, consultant, trainer or professional organizer do a much more successful job of producing results.
I just verified that this website, http://2time-sys.com, the home of 2Time Labs, is showing up on the first page of a Google search for the combination of terms – time + management + research. I discovered this fact here in Jamaica, and had friend verify it for the US, but I have no idea about other parts of the world.
Here: try it from your geo-location and let me know… Google search for time + management + research
There are all sorts of books, blog posts, white papers, YouTube videos and other sources that are claiming that time management as a discipline has become irrelevant. They are all dead wrong.
Usually the claim comes in the form of a statement;
“It’s not about time management…. it’s about ____________.”
What fills in the blank are things like energy management, life balance, prioritization, self management, etc.
The truth is, there is no such thing as time management in strict terms, due to the fact that time cannot be managed. It’s independent of our attempts to do anything other than observe it. What we commonly call time management is closer to “action management” in which we make decisions about what to do at any point in time. This is, however, beside the point.
The fact is, there is no escaping the management of ones actions in time. It’s a fundamental part of being effective as a working professional who has 24 hours each day, and more demands than can be completed in a human lifetime. Time management is part and parcel of producing results in business and its essential that professionals have the right skills in order to meet their obligations at each point in their careers.
To overlook these skills is to have tasks fall through the cracks, email Inboxes overflow, stress levels to build, physical clutter to accumulate, deadlines to be missed and meetings to start late. Dealing with these problems are mostly a matter of mechanics, which time management is uniquely equipped to deal with.
Michael Hyatt posted an interesting entry on his blog entitled “How to Create More Margin in Your Life.” In fact, it’s a summary of a book with a similar title by Richard Swenson called “Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives.”
I haven’t read the book, but it wisely advises professionals to create extra time, space, energy, etc. in daily life in order to avoid the risk of going into overload. It’s a great strategy, and one that Orange Belts in Scheduling employ to ensure that their days don’t become overbooked and therefore impossible to complete with peace of mind.
The authors make the point that its rare to find someone who schedules free time for themselves in their schedule – most people run at 120% rather than 80%, with predictable results.
He also makes reference to an “Ideal Week” which is a concept that’s the same as one that we discuss in MyTimeDesign and NewHabits training.
It’s a post that’s worth reading as it indicates the power of pre-planning what one’s week will look like, before the first email arrives on Monday morning.
I have adopted the practice of placing margin time twice in each day. When I have to delete these blocks of time in order to squeeze something in, I know that the day is at risk of being over-scheduled. Wherever possible, I try to move time demands into later time-slots in the week.
This technique could be overkill for those who only need Yellow Belt Scheduling skills, and can get by with an appointment calendar and one or more lists. (At the Yellow Belt level, ones schedule remains in ones memory, so it’s much more difficult to create a margin.) However, when the time comes for an upgrade, this is an essential practice.
Those of us who are older (over 40) have a hard time escaping the To-Do-on-paper mentality in favor of time-demand-in-the-cloud thinking.
In the old days, when you had something to do you added it to a list using a pen or pencil. That piece of paper/list was the point of storage for what we now call “time demands” here at 2Time Labs.
Nowadays, that same item might be stored in any number of places instead of a paper list, such as:
On the upside, the increasing number of electronic storage locations means that some stuff will be backed up and safe from being lost. The downside is that we often get confused if we don’t make the jump to understand the nature of time demands, and why we need to think of them as residing in the cloud.
To start off, a time demand is an individual commitment to complete an action in the future. It’s a mental creation, and it ceases to exist once the action is completed. Also, like physical objects in space, time demands accumulate in the mind, and create problems when their number exceeds a certain threshold.
An email that arrives in your Inbox may contain several time demands, depending on its nature. Once that email is read for the first time, it’s disposed of in a number of ways based on your methods. It can be:
We make the mistake of focusing on the object, like an email message, instead of the time demands which it includes. Email messages, text messages, meeting minutes, tweets, etc. are all variations of the same thing: containers or transmitters for time demands, much in the way that a mango skin is the the container for its pulp. (It’s mango season here in Jamaica as you can probably tell!)
When we try to “reduce the number of emails” we get each day we are barking up the wrong tree. 5000 email messages per day are not a problem if 4999 are spam. One email can contain 150 time demands.
Once we focus on time demands, it’s not hard to think of them as being stored in the cloud, and all we need is access to the handful we need at any time in order to do our jobs and make decisions. If the number is quite small, we can even manage them in their entirety, as a group.
Once the number grows, however, we get overwhelmed, and try to find ways to cut down the need to be looking at too many all at once.
The first attempt people make is to migrate from one single list to many lists. This helps a bit, and the technique works as long as the number of time demands remains below a threshold. What’s important to note is that a list or sub-list is just a particular view of all the time demands that exist. It might be a view of the tasks to do in the office, those that are urgent, those that require big commitments of time, etc.
When a user upgrades to a schedule, it’s an attempt to shield oneself from the onslaught of all the time demands at once, as they are spaced out over time. Once again, the schedule is just a particular way of looking at all the time demands that are in the cloud. It’s a more robust tool than a simple list; the fact is, a schedule is just a list enhanced with dates and durations, and sorted by the former.
In other words, it’s also a view of all the time demands that you need to complete. It requires more time to set it up, and more time to maintain, but much less time to review than simple lists when the number of time demands is below a certain threshold.
No single approach is better than others but it’s important that professionals understand that they have a choice, and that there is likely to be stress if their approach is not a sufficiently robust one.
I have noticed a wide and growing number of new iPhone, Android and laptop apps that attempt to improve a user’s personal productivity. They all seem to focus on the same thing: how to make better lists. In this post, I try to encourage developers to look at better ways of using a schedule instead of using a list.
It’s actually a bit disheartening, because our research here at 2Time Labs shows that lists work fine for a small number of time demands, but after a certain volume an upgrade is needed to managing a single schedule in order to remain just as effective. While many repeat the claim (without evidence) mantra that this upgrade “can’t be done” there are many who have successfully implemented this technique, and a whole lot more who are simply curious.
Some of the data comes from recent, high quality research conducted by Dr. Dezhi Wu. A great deal of the proof, however, remains to be established and while I’m hoping that another Dezhi comes along soon, let’s take our own closer look at the difference between the activities that take place when someone is using lists versus a schedule.
Linda with her Lists
Imagine Linda: a hard working professional who uses lists to manage her time demands. She’s in a meeting on Friday and her boss offers her an assignment – the Draft Report- that should take about 3 weeks to complete. Before she accepts, she needs to decide whether or not she can make a solid commitment.
Where does she look to make the decision?
Her schedule only tracks appointments and meetings with other people, so her determination comes from checking her memory. She must present the results of the assignment at a meeting on the due date, so she places that date in her calendar, but the 10 hours of activity that needs to be performed to get the task completed are all assigned to her memory.
She adds the item “start working on Draft Report” to the bottom of her list of around 150 items. (It’s actually categorized and broken down into a number of sub-lists.)
At the moment she adds the item to her list, she also mentally makes a commitment to complete the 10 hours of work that’s required. She thinks that Thursdays and Fridays are no good due to other meetings, so she must work on this report from Mondays to Wednesday. She’s fresher in the mornings, so she thinks to herself that she’ll rule out working on this report after lunch. She doesn’t think about the item again for the week.
The following week, on Monday morning, she starts the day by scanning her master list of 150 items. As she goes through, she makes a mental commitment to do things at different times.
After lunch, she re-scans the list to refresh her memory and to mentally rejigger her plan because at her pre-lunch meeting she had to commit to another 15 hours of unforeseen Beta Project activity in the same 3 week period. Also, 2 more meetings were added on Tuesday that might prevent her from following the plan she had mentally laid out.
She makes a mental note to pick up scientific calculator that she’ll need to complete the report that night, so that she can work on the Draft Deport on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, she discovers that her mental note didn’t work and that she can’t start the Draft Report without the calculator. She determines that she must try harder to remember, as she works through the items in the list, and once again commits the schedule of activity to memory.
She checks the list of 150 items a few times per day, and after every meeting, in order to refresh her memory of what is due when, and what sequence she must perform her time demands for the best results.
Suzy with her Schedule
Suzy is in the identical job as Linda and has the same commitments. She also has 150 action items (in fact she has more) but they are spread out in her schedule, along with the time that she thinks must be allocated to each time-slot.
Before she accepts the action item to complete the Draft Report, she checks her calendar (which happens to sit on her iPad.) She sees that she does indeed have enough free time, and immediately books time in her calendar for 15 hours of work, in order to get the report completed on time.
When she comes in on Monday morning, she scans the schedule for the day and takes a peek at Tuesday’s schedule. She makes a couple of adjustments and goes on her way.
She places are reminder in her calendar to bring the scientific calculator in to work and when the iPad beeps at 6pm that evening, she responds by placing the calendar in her bag.
During the day she actively juggles her schedule, even as she makes new commitments,and declines others, including the 3 week deadline for the Beta Project activity. She requests that it be extended to 4 weeks based on the commitments in her schedule.
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Some people fully believe that what Suzy is doing isn’t possible, and it wouldn’t be if she were trying to manage her schedule on paper. It’s not a problem with her iPad/iPhone combination, however and she uses her schedule as her roadmap for all activities that she does each day.
Linda on the other hand must use significant amounts of personal memory, and she’s essentially storing her schedule in her hind. This would not be stressful with 10 actions items on her list at any time, but with 150 it has become burdensome. Lists require constant checking, and that activity also takes a toll as she must constantly make critical decision with a schedule that she has attempted to memorize.
Linda needs to upgrade her skills to use her schedule as the central point of storage for time demands. Coupled with the latest technology, she can skillfully manage what is almost, but not quite, a real-time schedule.
The bottom-line is that for each of us, there is a point where we need to make the jump from using a list(s) as the central point for managing time demands, to the point where we use a schedule.
Now and then a book or paper comes along that supports one or more of the basic tenets of Time Management 2.0, the philosophy that underlies the work we do here at 2Time Labs. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review offers some similar ideas that we believe are coming from a very similar place.
The article, “Leadership Development in the Age of the Algorithm” was written by Marcus Buckingham and published in the June 2012 issue. It espouses the idea that leadership is a complex activity that cannot be reduced to a simple set of “best-practices.” It states the problem in this way:
As the personalization of content delivery becomes increasingly pervasive, it might even be that you begin to notice it most when it is absent–when there is a setting in which you should be identifiable as an individual, yet the information presented to you is strangely undifferentiated. I’ve noticed such a setting: your leadership development program.
Well, here at 2Time Labs have noticed another such setting: your time management / productivity program!
The article continues:
“Even a decade after leadership training began to recognize different styles and strengths, and even in organizations that have made cultivating high-potential talen a priority, the content served up is generic.”
Generic formulas are the bread and butter of all the time management books I have read up until now, hence the similarity between this article and what we have been saying. It’s only amazing that so few others are saying the same thing in a discipline (time management) that is much easier to quantity and observe than “leadership.”
Near the end of the article he says:
That old model of leadership development, the formulaic model, has an appealing simplicity, but it runs afoul of two realities: Each leder also leads differently, and the techniques used by one don’t necessarily translate to another.
(He calls this a problem of scale, just like we do.)
He imagines a future:
Soon there will be a place, somewhere in the cloud, that cotinually gathers the best techniques, tips, and pactical innvoations from high-performing leaders around the world; sorts them… ; feed you the techniques that fit you best… It will be your own personal leadership coach.
We can’t wait!
There are other points of similarity that he mentions and I strongly recommend the article if the ideas at 2Time Labs have resonated with you at all. Let us know in the comments if you get a chance to read the article, and what you think.
Our MyTimeDesign website that focuses on applications of the 2Time Labs ideas recently launched a training simulation for managers, coaches and professional organizers. It gives the learner the opportunity to help a fictional character, Wilma, navigate a consulting relationship with Adam, her client. She’s attempting to migrate from a focus on physical organization to one on time clutter / time management.
Try out this 15 minute learning opportunity here: http://icd.mytimedesign.com/wilma and leave us a comment on the page.
From a training and development perspective, you can see the direction in which 2Time Labs is headed, as we look to provide the very best online training in time management in the world.
Thanks to Trivantis and it’s Snap programs for helping to make these goals possible with new affordable technology.
I recently completed Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto” and thought so highly of it that I immediately changed my teaching materials to include the topic in every program that I lead.
He makes some powerful points about the need for doctors to take a leaf out of the book of pilots who make extensive use of this technique. He has been experimenting with checklists for some time himself, and found that they reduce the errors that surgical teams make, and he even shares mistakes that he has avoided by using them in his practice.
It’s compelling stuff, and in the world we live in a checklist is one way to reduce the complexity that we deal with every day. I have used one for some time at the start of each day, but didn’t quite appreciate the distinction “checklist” until I read the book and started to see places where I could implement them easily.
My first experiment was to set up a “sitting down to write my book” checklist. It has only 4 four items, but it worked just as Gawande predicted. I start my writing at 3:30am, and when I get to the computer in my office, my head is sometimes not at its sharpest. (No, I don’t drink coffee.)
My checklist has helped me to reliably complete a little pre-writing routine that I use to get into the right frame of mind. Without the checklist, I’ve likely to forget a few steps because there are too many things to remember too early in the morning, but when there’s only one thing, a checklist, I don’t have to think as hard.
I also noticed from the comments on Amazon, that reviewers were confusing checklists and To-Do Lists, so perhaps there needs to be some clarification of terms. Here’s the definition I’m using: A checklist is a repetitive list of actions that are initiated whenever a triggering event takes place.
For example, when a pilot loses an engine, there is a checklist to follow to ensure that all the steps taken to fly the airplane do, in fact, take place. The non-flying pilot is the one who goes down the list, which is stored in the plane’s computer as well as in a binder.
The book has led me to see all sorts of applications, and given my focus this year on assisting time management coaches, professional organizers, trainers and managers, I’m making checklists an important part of the process of consulting with a professional who is undertaking an upgrade.
P.S. There is an excellent summary of the book over at the New Yorker.