Francis Wade – Page 46

April 9, 2009

Multitasking Peaks During the Teen Years

This is a great article that makes the point that our ability to multi-task increases during our teen years before it starts a steady decline in our mid-30’s.

Interesting, because as far as I can tell, most professionals develop their first time management systems during that time.

This might explain why White Belts proliferate in most companies, and get into real trouble when they either get older, or have to deal with a rapid increase in the number of time demands that they must manage.

There are some other cool links at the site, including a reference to a series on Multitasking recently broadcast on NPR.

Here is a link to the post: This is Your Brain on Multitasking.

April 8, 2009

Why Outlook Needs Industrial Engineering

It just struck me that the basis for almost all the thinking I have done on this blog lies in the fact that I was trained as an operations researcher / industrial engineer (OR&IE).

As OR&IE’s know, there is no training in time management at the majority of schools of higher learning, perhaps due to the fact that most of what’s taught is academia is about learning to think, rather than do.

In fact, the field of time management belongs to no discipline that I can readily discern. It falls neatly into a huge crack between engineering schools, business schools and now schools for IT.

I suspect that the reason this is the case is because anyone who claims to be an expert in time management would have to demonstrate superior time management skills. In the real world, this is obvious, but in academia, it’s deemed to be irrelevant.

The few studies I have seen might be useful to someone who is seeking to complete a PhD, but they are useless in helping someone who is actually interested in improving their skills. Part of this comes from the distance that academics try to maintain between themselves and the subjects they are studying.

In the real world, however, every single human being has a time management system of their own, including the researcher. The one who stands out and claims a breakthrough in this area should be prepared to demonstrate that their research results are being applied in their own life to good effect. Otherwise, their findings are likely to be ignored.

Frankly, it’s a lot easier to study a factory or distribution system, where it’s simply a lot less risky.

The fact that this is one field that blurs the neat distance that scientists like to keep from their subjects keeps it from being studied, in my opinion.

Also, the academics I have met and worked with seem fond of idiosyncratic and unproductive habits. One professor I had at Cornell who taught optimization liked to pretend he was not in his office during office hours, for example. I’m not sure what was being optimized…

I imagine that he would also complain that he didn’t have enough time just like the rest of us!

Unfortunately,the lack of proper research has left us with some gaping holes in our current understanding of time management, and a lack of common definitions and basis of measurement.

Having said that, I had a lucky insight helped me to come up with the 11 fundamentals. So far, I haven’t seen it repeated in too many other place, but from an OR&IE point of view, I now see it as a foundation unit of understanding.

From the outset, industrial engineers and operations researchers are taught to think in terms of factories and widgets. In time management, and here in 2Time, I discovered that it was useful for me to think in terms of “time demands.”

An Analogy In a manufacturing process, raw materials are provided as input to a process of some kind, and they are acted on by machines, transport mechanisms and other physical objects so that they are transformed into some kind of output.

In time management, time demands are created by a user’s commitments. Once created, they are then transformed by the fundamentals to produce a very different kind of result — peace of mind.

Microsoft and other software companies interested in creating time management systems would do we to place industrial engineers and operations researchers alongside software developers, business- people and psychologists to work on the next generation of time management tools. They’d just need to be careful to arm them with the right distinctions, so that they could be effective.

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April 2, 2009

Don’t Buy a Gadget, Change a Habit

I wrote another article for the Stepcase LifeHack website with the above title.

I also called it: Putting the “P” in PDA Productivity, and it’s based on my encounter with a guy using the urinal at Laguardia while using his Blackberry.

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April 1, 2009

Outlook’s Shortcomings 5 – Scheduling

Scheduling is one of the more difficult practices in time management for a user to master. At the same time it offers one of the most important opportunities to professionals who are trying to ensure peace of mind as they tackle an increasing number of time demands.

As I have mentioned in other parts of my blog, the skill of Scheduling ranges from White Belts who barely keep a schedule, to Green Belts who work with schedules that describe most activities in the day, and who are careful even about the language they use within their schedule. As I mention elsewhere, I don’t advocate one level over another, and it’s important that a user find the level that allows for the greatest peace of mind as they define it.

However, in doing so, they should be aware that Outlook-driven scheduling is actually designed for the White Belt, and not the Green Belt.

The traditional appointment calendar probably grew out of the tool used in doctor’s offices. White Belts think of their Outlook calendar as something used to plot meetings with other people. For this purpose, a paper calendar works well enough.

However, professionals who deal with a great number of competing time demands each day can easily get confused when they try to maintain a complex daily schedule in their minds. Many fail to adequately juggle the 10-15 time-based activities they want to accomplish each day by just trying to remember what they think they decided to do early in the morning.

It doesn’t take much for a mental schedule to fall by the wayside in the middle of the crisis that breaks at 10:15 pm. At 6:00 pm when it’s finally all over, it’s hard to go back to figure out what exactly was planned between 10:15 and then. The inevitable happens — lots of time demands fall through the cracks.

Millions of users would be helped if Outlook were to to re-designed as an activity calendar rather than an appointment calendar.

What would that take?

Solo Scheduling In the first place, Outlook could be made to recognize the difference between an activity that involves other people, and one that involves only the user. When a schedule is made, a user could tell the program the difference between one kind of activity and another, and when it comes to creating the schedule for the day, it could prevent users from mistakenly scheduling themselves from being in two places at the same time.

Also, it would understand that when a user changes time-zones, that meeting times would need to change accordingly, but other solo activities “work out at the gym” would not change. The fact that all items change times (even all day events) is further evidence that the designers of Outlook are in the mindset of giving the user a neat “appointment tool”to go along with their “email tool.”

Contextual Scheduling Also, the program would give the user the flexibility to do more than schedule tasks, but also to schedule what David Allen calls “contexts.” These are no more than logical, or physical locations that allow a user to do certain kinds of tasks e.g. “at home” is a context that is quite different from “at the pool.”

While the program would be instructed to prevent anything from being scheduled during the “at the pool” context, it would be allowed to schedule activities within the “at home” context.

Strong and Weak Alarms The program would also know how to distinguish between the times the times when a weak alarm is due (with a sound) and the times when a strong alarm is given (by a phone call or flashing screen.)

Also, instead of just being the option to dismiss the scheduled item in Outlook, user could have the option of deferring the item, because the reminder the appointment can safely be re-scheduled for later.

These are just some initial ideas that come from a very different place from the one in which Outlook’s calendar function was conceived.

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March 27, 2009

Outlook’s Shortcomings – Part 4

So far in this series, I have addressed the idea that Outlook could be improved by re-building it around the fundamental practices of time management. The fundamental, Emptying, is the most important one for many users, and it also could be improved in Outlook if it were redesigned.

In this particular fundamental, a user goes through each of their capture points and moves each item to a different place in their time management system. The word “Emptying” is used because that is it’s goal — to leave behind an empty space in each Capture Point that allows it to accept new items.

There are several ways that Outlook could facilitate this practice as it pertains to email.

One is to prevent the user from reading an email and leaving it in the Inbox. Outlook could force an opened email to be placed elsewhere, and offer the user a software-assisted means way to Empty with ease.

Also, while Emptying is occurring, the user could be given the option of turning off the receipt of new email, in order to focus the activity.

Another would be to prompt the user to check other Capture Points once the Inbox has been emptied. These could include the voicemail inbox, a paper pad and incoming paper mail that all represent new time demands.

As Emptying is being done, Outlook could make it easy to decide what to do with a piece of email by presenting a standard set of options that correspond to the choices that they have when they Empty, according to the 2Time approach. When an email is read, the program could ask the user how to dispose of it, giving a list of options such as the following:

1. Delete It?

2. Store It?

3. Take 5 Minutes to Act On It Now?

4. Schedule It in Calendar?

5. Add It to a List?

These are all actions that are possible to accomplish in Outlook, but they are all hidden way in the program’s functions rather than given a prominence that underlies the fact that these are the ONLY options a user can exercise at that moment of decision.

Microsoft designers might argue that they don’t want to constrain users. Perhaps, what they fail to realize is that the current design actually already prompts the user to do what most do, most of the time — which is to leave their email in the Inbox. While this may seem like an innocuous option when it comes to managing email, from a time management perspective it’s the start of real trouble.

When Emptying is not done effectively (i.e. frequently and completely) the eventual result is an overflowing Inbox — the greatest complaint that email users have world-wide. The fact is, Outlook’s design makes it easy for this outcome to occur — call it an unintended by-product of its design. It contributes to a user’s feeling of overwhelm that hits them when they open their Inbox and have the thought that “something isn’t right” when they see the number of items they have sitting in various states.

In the future, it would be powerful if Outlook could become the single location for all Capture Points, but the technology isn’t advanced enough for that to occur. It would mean routing voicemails, faxes, incoming mail, email plus all the items written in a paper pad to one grand Capture Point in the program. At the moment, that’s not easy to do.

Until then, one of the major changes that Outlook could make is to facilitate the user’s process, or workflow.At the moment, Outlook offers no interface that acknowledges that most users follow a set pattern of activity each day. It also fails to help users to create patterns for themselves that optimizes their flow of activities.

At the moment, the way that Outlook is designed is that it “prompts” users to use it as an email-retriever. When users open Outlook, they are directed towards their Inboxes. Regardless of the number of items they contains, read or unread, the system leads them to download more email.

As users sit, their system pulls down every piece of new email, regardless of whether they have 1 minute, or 100 available at that moment to deal with them all. It’s no surprise that many feel a growing sense of overwhelm. Outlook’s design as an email management program inadvertently produces problems in the area of time management, and this is especially true when the goal of a time management system is to maximize peace of mind.

If Outlook’s interface were re-designed as a process, or wizard, it might take a user through a series of screens, with each on representing a phase.

If I had the freedom to design a series of screens to represent my regular start-up activity, it might look like the following:

Screen 1 — Clean up from yesterdayTake out items from yesterday that have not been processed. Some might be in my inbox, or sitting in my calendar. I’d be discouraged from moving to the next screen until I’m done with the first.

Screen 2 — Download emailBefore downloading, the system would tell me how many unread emails I have. I’d tell it how many to download, in order to balance the time I have available with the number of emails I choose to work through.

Screen 3 — Process Email to EmptyOn this screen, I’d be prompted to dispose of each item in the way I described above. At the end of my processing, the Inbox would be empty once again, apart from those I have not yet read or clicked on.

Screen for Tossing — this might just be a prompt to make sure I want to delete the item
Screen for Storing — this would offer me a set of folders in which to place the item
Screen for Acting Now — this would just be a timer that pings at the appropriate time interval
Screen for Scheduling — the calendar would be immediately offered
Screen for Listing — a screen showing the user’s lists would be offered as a starting point

These choices would be ideal, and would allow me to balance incoming email with the time I have available to process.The result might be a greater peace of mind, and all it would take is a reshaping of the Outlook interface. Of course, this new design could be applied to any time management software, and I strongly believe that the first software company to build proper time management software could produce an iPod-like winner.

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March 26, 2009

Understanding Emptying – The Story

For some time, I have played around with two ideas.

One is I to teach the 2Time principles in the form of a story (or stories) rather than a set of abstract theories and principles, such as the ones I have used in this blog. The first business book I ever read written in this format was “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt in 1989 or so, and its impact on me as a young professional was profound.

The other idea that I have had is that I should write a book as a way of reading a wider audience.

Putting the two ideas together yields the obvious — a book on Time Management 2.0 principles that describes one person’s journey as they learn the 11 fundamentals, the latest habit changing technologies and some of the basics of the approach I lay out in the MyTimeDesign and NewHabits-NewGoals programs.

I decided to spend some time drafting a single chapter, to see what the results would be like. As a result, the first draft here online, with the hope that I’ll learn that if I’m making a huge mistake that I might find out earlier than later!

The truth is, I learned a lot from writing this chapter on Emptying.

In it, I tried to chronicle the process I went through as I learned this fundamental practice that is probably the most difficult one to master out of the 11 practices described in the 2Time approach.

At the end, I discovered that it revealed a few aspects of Emptying that I doubt that I would have discovered if I hadn’t tried to use this approach.

The chapter is still in need of a good editor, but I’d like to hear what readers are able to learn from reading it, even in its current form.Click here to access the chapter:

Emptying Chapter(v4)

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March 25, 2009

Outlook’s Shortcomings – Part 3

In my prior post I brought up the notion that Outlook was designed to solve user’s problems with email, rather than the bigger problem they have with time demands.

I also mentioned that the company that understands this shift would be able to produce radically different software. Not just different, but better. It would help users do the job they are really trying to perform.

I would call this a change in “philosophy,” and not just clever marketing or repackaging.

Having a philosophy about how people manage time, and how they learn time management skills is also important, because this also influences the way software is designed.

For example, in the 2Time approach, there is a clear path that users take as they advance from one skill level to another (as measured by belt levels.) One skill that changes over time is the way that the practices of Listing and Scheduling are used, with the higher belts doing much more scheduling than the lower belts.

A decision to develop software that reflects this progression in skills would have to contend with this particular philosophy, and not just for intellectual reason, but for practical reasons.

The current philosophy that underlies Outlook seems to be “more features are better than less.”

I’m not a software expert, but I suspect that the reason my Outlook 2007 runs so slowly is because this philosophy has run the show for too long.

An unfortunate by-product of this particular design decision is that a White Belt is given the same interface as a Green Belt, even though they use the software differently. It also has meant that the interface is cluttered with bells and whistles that a user must navigate, and always be selecting from.

Many of them have nothing to do with time management, making the interface (to repeat the mantra) a clumsy one.

Perhaps a better philosophy might be “give the user only what they need to manage their time, and produce peace of mind.”

My point here is not that this particular philosophy is better, but it IS that Outlook seems to have stumbled into becoming a time management tool with the addition of lots and lots of features. For all I know, it may have stumbled into other things as well (a dashboard, contact manager, etc.) but I am convinced that a different philosophy would yield different (and better) design.

This much I know — starting with a particular, and well-defined time management philosophy would help Outlook to become a better tool for time management.

I think Gmail’s success has not come because Google employs smarter people, but instead it comes from teams working with a different philosophy about email. (Plus, they were able to start from a blank sheet of paper.)

I suspect that a company that does the same for time management will also produce a breakthrough of sorts.

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March 23, 2009

Advanced Interruptions

In the 2Time Management system, there is a fundamental practice called “Interrupting” which is essential in helping to bring a user out of the Flow state when it’s time to move on to the next time demand, or it’s time to attend to an ermegency of some sort.

An article from 2008 in the New York Times entitled “Meet the Hackers” looks at some sophisticated ways to think about interruptions. Here is an excerpt:

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

The article is worth reading, even if it is a bit outdated. One scientist is researching the effect that Windows has on people’s productivity, which made me wonder if the tail wasn’t wagging the dog.

In other words, shouldn’t they be studying how people work, and then build software to help them accomplish the job they are trying to do?

I do hope that Microsoft and others are doing that kind of research.

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March 23, 2009

Outlook’s Shortcomings – Part 2

A program that is built for time management purposes would assist a user in executing the fundamentals, but also allow him/her the freedom to use its features to support their particular time management system.

Ideally, a user should be presented with as clean an interface as possible, with unnecessary features hidden away from view, so that they provide no distractions.

The purpose of such a system could be stated as “assisting users to manage their time so that they experience peace of mind.”

What needs to be understood at the outset is that “time management” is code language. While it’s actually impossible to manage time, all that can really be managed are habits that are related to one’s daily activities. They all, of course, consume time. Having said that, the system needs to help a user to make it easy to follow the actions that comprise their time management system.

Here in 2Time, we say that every time management is made up of 11 inescapable fundamentals.

The word inescapable is used quite deliberately to indicate that professionals around the world, regardless of industry, job or position, must undertake the same set of fundamentals to get their work done.

For example, the fundamental practice of capturing is one that everyone must undertake in order to allow new time demands to enter their system.

Outlook and most other programs like it are built around a single capture point — the Inbox that contains email downloaded from a remote location.

I used the word “clumsy” in a prior post to describe Outlook’s design, and its disregard for what users are trying to do with the program nowadays.

The design of the Inbox is an example of the inelegant design for those users who are trying to manage their time.

Why so?

By definition, Capture Points are the locations where time demands enter a professional’s time management system. Example include the following:

email inboxes of all kinds
memory
post-box or equivalent
voice-mail box on our phone
pager or cell-phone for text messages
paper in a pad in our pocket
stack of Post-It notes
Twitter updates
Facebook message Inbox

The items that enter our Inboxes all have one thing in common — they have the potential for taking time out of our day. They are meant to act as staging points for the rest of a user’s time management system. As such, they are meant to be kept clear, and when they aren’t, a time management system can collapse entirely.

The perfectly designed Capture Point would have the following characteristics:

it would be reliable, and hardly ever fail. There would be some kind of backup available
a user would have control over its use, and have the ability to turn it off and on as needed
it would be designed with a way to prevent it from being overfilled
it would make it easy for the user to move time demands to other points in a user’s system
it would encourage the user to keep it empty, or very close to empty

The Outlook email Inbox is a Capture Point that is not designed as such. Instead, it’s designed as a place to receive email.

If it were designed as a Capture Point, it might have the following:

auto-backup to a secure location outside the program
the ability to limit its size, and to issue warnings depending on how close the size is to its limit
built-in warnings regarding items that have spent too much time in the Inbox
a default setting that forces the user to accept email only on-demand, or at least on a daily schedule
appointments would be easier to make from incoming emails
there would be statistics that measure how well the Inbox is being managed
allow Twitter updates
the program would offer incentives (via games or visual cues) to encourage users to empty their Inboxes
a different location for the Inbox, pulling it out of the list of folders where it is visually lost, and given a huge icon that is more in line with its status as a major entry-point into the time management system

These are just preliminary ideas, and I am sure that there others. One that I am fond of is a dashboard that shows the current state of a user’s time management system. One very prominent indicator of good health is the state of a user’s Inbox — it’s a little like peering into someone’s eyes with a microscope to get a glimpse of their overall health. On the dashboard would be a large graphic of the Inbox.

I imagine that there are many other ways in which the Inbox could be understood as a Capture Point — the only folder in Outlook that plays that very special role. The key change in thinking is the new understanding that we now have — it’s more important for us to track time demands than it is for us to track emails.

This is especially true now, in 2009, when we know that not all email is useful, and for most professionals most of it is useless. Instead, we have learned that time demands are much more important, and it so happens that quite a few incoming emails contain future time demands that must be carefully managed.

To be clear, the critical unit is not an email message, but a time demand.

The first Outlook-like program that is designed around time demands rather than emails will have a chance of bringing some much needed elegance to these programs.
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March 20, 2009

Software Managed Interruptions

As I mentioned in prior posts, it’s quite important for a user of the 2Time approach to appreciate the goal of getting into the Flow state as often as possible.

This requires a minimum of interruptions, and luckily for us, there are some companies that are thinking about ways to manage email so that only the most urgent messages are presented as interruptions to whatever task we are doing. For example, I am writing this article and don’t want to be interrupted, unless an email comes in that tells me something that requires urgent attention.

(Although, honestly, it would have to be life-shattering to stop me from completing this task.)

This line of thinking is shared in the article I found at BusinessWeek entitled May We Have Your Attention Please?

Soon, however, the same kinds of social networking software and communications technologies that make it deliciously easy to lose concentration may start steering us back to the tasks at hand. Scientists at U.S. research labs are developing tools to help people prioritize the flood of information they face and fend off irrelevant info-bytes. New modes of e-mail and phone messaging can wait patiently for an opportune time to interrupt. One program allows senders to “whisper” something urgent via a pop-up on a screen.

Hmmm…. that sounds promising.

It sounds like a big challenge, and I think these scientists are headed in the right direction. After all, they are implicitly acknowledging how important it is to preserve the state of flow, and are trying to find ways to preserve it as much as possible.

However, I don’t know it if it’s more valuable than teaching a user to be more disciplined, and all the reasons why. After all, users need to understand why Flow is important, and that it’s more efficient to check email a few times each day rather than every few minutes. An effort spent to teach discipline would probably do more than new software would, especially as a user can ruin all the benefit of this new software with bad personal habits.

In other words, software might fix a problem that users have in the future, but it’s better to focus one the fact that they don’t understand the problem they have now.
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