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The Challenge of Developing Time Management Skills in College

 

 

How is it that the above graphic encapsulates the past few months I spent writing Perfect Time-Based Productivity – A Professional Approach? (The book is 90% complete and will be released in September on Kindle.) This graphic is a perfect example of some of what I had to do to bring it to this point. It shows:

  • How I filled some huge gaps in knowledge that counter the prevailing wisdom. For example, college students arrive on campus with skills they are already using to manage their time, yet the majority of orientation programs designed to help them skip over this fact, leaving them with little or none of the specific assistance they really need. Researchers aren’t clear on this point so I had to push the issue in my book – arguing that if ALL the research showing that incoming freshman have some skills, and NONE of the research showed they lack all skills, that many researchers were simply incorrect in their starting assumptions. Of course, students know that they wouldn’t be in college if they didn’t have some productivity skills. Duh.
  • Why people are so confused, and give confusing advice in the area of time-based productivity. Search YouTube for videos on “Why time management doesn’t exist.” This year alone, they have been rolling out one after another emphasizing a fact that many already understand, including many incoming freshmen. People who try to manage (or control) time fail from the start – just try to video someone “managing their time,” show it to another person and ask them what’s going on in the film. Instead, we need to shift our attention to managing a psychological object I have labelled a “time demand.” Once you get the hang of seeing them, the confusion lifts.
  • The value of scientific research. I have researched a number of universities and their time management websites designed to help students. They are a bit embarrassing on a whole. They simply haven’t kept up with the most recent books on the topic which don’t happen to come from academia. Within academia there have been some fantastic insights published, but they happen to reside in numerous fields. Psychology. Industrial engineering. Management. Adult Learning. Philosophy. Multidisciplinary research is very hard to conduct within university environments. A college adviser who needs to pull together some time management content for incoming students simply doesn’t have time to read 100 papers. Instead, they’ll just visit another college’s page and do some linking. (The Stanford page on time management for students is quite popular.)

These are just a few of the concepts I have wrestled into my book. To sign up for early notification including free launch bonuses, visit my book’s website and join the list for further information.

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Upcoming Changes to the 2Time blog

You’re likely to notice some changes in the format of this newsletter as I head into the last stages of editing my new book: Perfect Time-Based Productivity. It’s due out in a month or so, but its content is causing me to make some big changes to my blog and also this newsletter / ezine.

The reason is simple: I am determined to honor and share the research findings I uncovered while writing the book, which is the best way to acknowledge the scientists who have worked quietly behind the scenes to further our knowledge.

As you may know, I havea library of over 120 time management research papers, most of which are peer reviewed. However, to complete the book, I had to go much further afield due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field. I saved over 400 papers, and reviewed many others, from fields such as psychology, adult learning, child development, industrial engineering, process management and brain science. Each individual paper I read seemed to contribute a small piece, but not very much by itself. I had to read lots of source documents to pull together a coherent picture.

To my knowledge, the book is the only one that brings together these many points of view. While they all made a contribution, I had to leave a lot of good ideas behind – there was simply no space in the book to include them all. One example is the concept of a “goal intention” – the commitments that lie behind the activities you undertake each day.

These ideas deserve to be aired, shared and debated, using more than anecdotes. For example, in my book I address the fact that “time management” doesn’t exist – and the research behind that assertion. At the same time, there are a number of recent YouTube videos which say the very same thing. The difference is that these videos are based on anecdotes – not one mentions the research that’s actually been done.

It’s a good example of what’s missing in this field – a solid link between people doing actual experiments, academics who have completed studies over the years and professionals who are looking for a solid foundation on which to make real improvements. This foundation needs to be made up of more than a bunch of interesting stories and “just-copy-what-I-do” exhortations.

This is why I’d like to take the blog and ezine on the 2Time Labs website to a new place, distinct from the past in which it’s been more of an all-purpose blog. Now, I’ll be narrowing it’s focus down to be just a source of applied research ideas, inspired by the following websites which I think serve similar goals:

Kathryn Welds – Kathryn Welds Curated Research and Commentary

Eric  Barker – Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Once the book is available to the general public I can relax a bit – there’s no need to repeat its contents and I’ll be free to build on the tapestry of ideas it represents. I will assume (rightly or wrongly) that a blog post reader has already read the book, then build from a common point of understanding to go more in depth, into new territory.

I’m excited about what I can accomplish in this new format, because there are a lot of ideas I’m eager to explore, including one very basic notion – “Does time exist?” (My search for experts willing to speak to this particular has been unsuccessful.)

The 2Time Labs podcast  will follow along the same lines, as I seek out researchers and authors who can move our collective knowledge forward (i.e. and not just repeat the usual anecdotes, stories and lists.)

What if This Isn’t For You?

It’s likely that there are some subscribers who aren’t interested in the depth of time-based productivity. If that’s the case, I have a solution. My subscribers over at my book’s website – http://perfect.mytimedesign.com – are going to also enjoy a revamp. I’ll be creating a new ezine or set of updates that is intended for immediate application, as if you were in one of my classes.

Once again, my book will be a useful starting points, as it includes all the forms I use in my live and online training programs plus summaries of all the core concepts. Anyone who has read it, will find that the website’s mailing list will be an invaluable way to learn how to implement the plans they developed while reading the book.

It’s goal is to be practical and down-to-earth, but based as much as possible on the studies shared in book and on the 2Time Labs website. I’m hoping it will provide some relief for those who want to implement new practices immediately, but want to know that there is something behind it other than the author’s personality.

For Those Who Are Experts – or Aspire to Be Experts

Of course, I’ll still have the website for those who are time advisers (trainers, coaches, consultants, professional organizers) at http://mytimedesign.com. I have also opened up a new content oriented mailing list for those who are bloggers, authors or researchers. It’s a way for me to to give pointers to research that I’m not using – breakthrough content that can be turned into blogs, white papers, podcasts and more. More information on that list can be found here.

For Everyone Else

Of course, I’ll continue to update Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest but these are more “by the way” channels than essentials to the direction in which I’m headed. You will receive updates as usual.

You may be someone who decides it’s not for you at all and unsubscribe, which I understand. Thanks for being a reader or subscriber!

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Here’s a Researcher Who Spent a Year Tackling One Productivity Technique Per Week

ne new techniqueThe ultimate Lifehacker is not someone who scours the Internet looking to find random tips, tricks and shortcuts. Instead, we should all take a leaf out of Melanie Wilson’s blog, in which she conducted a year-long experiment in 2013, tackling and implementing one new improvement technique each week.

Her approach was simple. Each week she singled out a popular or well-defined productivity hacks and tried to make it work, faithfully reporting the results back to her readers. By the end of the year, she’d tackled 46 consecutive hacks, ending the year with a multi-week experiment: writing a nonfiction book in 21 days.

The list of hacks she tested read like a who’s who of guru-driven advice ranging from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, to Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow to a number of others that you probably have never heard of, such as “David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner,” “The Time Warrior” and “Gamification.” While she does have affiliate links set up with a few of the products she’s testing, she’s hardly advertising.

Instead, she breaks each post into the same four sections, as she did in week 2 when she assessed the “Covey’s Quadrants” technique. In that week the first three sections were captioned:
– How Covey’s Quadrants Saved My Sanity This Week
– How The 12 Week Year Made Me Crazy This Week
– Did Covey’s Quadrants Help Me Get Things Done?
In the fourth and final section she moved onto the next hack she planned to assess:

– The Productivity Approach I’ll Be Using for Week 3.

Here, she invited readers to join her in trying out the technique reviewed the following week. Her followers do make the occasional comment, but this is primarily a one-woman experiment, all based on her first-hand experience.

On a recent podcast in which I interviewed Melanie, I made the comment that it’s like watching a reality show, in which she unfolds a brand new episode each week. As I followed the course of events from one week to the next, I found myself with a nervous feeling of anticipation. Would she find the perfect technique that meets all her needs? Would she get to the end of the year and conclude that Lifehacking is just a self-indulgent waste of adult time? Was she going to refute everything I knew to be true from my own experience, invalidating a lifetime of personal lifehacking?

This is the power of doing real-life testing… on a real life. You’ll probably find yourself, like I did, flipping to the techniques you have known and and tried, wondering if her experiences matches up with your opinions. As she surprises you with some of her findings, you’ll find that it’s hard to argue with each post. Why? Because it’s factual. Like a good researcher, she doesn’t make leaps in logic, telling the reader that they need to follow the systems that she uses, or doesn’t use. She never concludes that her experience is one everyone should share – she sticks to the format you’d expect of someone who works in a lab every day wearing a white coat. Like Sgt. Joe Friday she’s just following the data.

This sets her blog apart from so many self-improvement, time management and productivity posts making their way around the Internet. Many of them consist of no more than untried, untested and un-researched opinions in which authors don’t bother to provide any evidence for their suggestions. They just repeat the stuff once read in a book or blog, without offering any new perspectives, content or information. After they are done, others reply with their opinions, leading to a round of lightweight dialog or heated disagreement, after which everyone gets tired and goes home, none the better.

The lifehacking community needs more people to do what she’s doing – basing their advice and conclusions on empirical data. Whether the data comes from the researcher herself, or from other trusted fieldworkers, we need to be informed by more than the amateur blogger who wakes up in the morning with rehashed and random ideas for improvement.

This would take us out of the rut we’re in at the moment in time-based productivity – where the over-abundance of Top Ten Lists are choking a readership that’s becoming tired of seeing the same old tips repeatedly recycled. Her blog is a sparkling example of what can be done with some hard legwork, which is where all breakthrough thinking originates. I hope she helps take Lifehacking back to a time when it was about sharing stuff that works based on factual experience, rather than empty suggestions designed to do little more than generate SEO traffic, Likes and Re-tweets.

Visit her blog, Psychowith6 and listen to her interview after you have viewed some of her posts from the past year. Prepare to be engaged by the vitality of a real-life, first-hand experience.

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Writing the Next Book

I’m in the process of writing  my next book and once again, I’m enjoying the process.

Whereas my last book was a novel, forcing me to learn how to write an interesting story, this book is a traditional how-to: something you’d expect in the genre of time-based productivity.

In some ways it will encapsulate almost all the information I present in my NewHabits and MyTimeDesign training programs. However, I’m learning that writing a book is quite a different way of getting across training content. In the live training I’m there to emphasize and repeat, but in a book I can say things only once or twice for emphasis, in different ways.

Also, there are certain soft spots in my ideas that I can gloss over in my training that I must address in the book. Some of them require a return to the research I used to develop ideas and corroborate hunches. This has been exciting as several insights come together to generate new distinctions altogether.

Coming out on June 1st – Perfect Time-Based Productivity. (The name might change, and the cover is just a mockup.)

perfect 3d short

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CEO’s and College Students – Do They Manage Their Time in Similar Ways?

It’s an intriguing thought. Are there similarities in the ways that CEO’s and college students manage their time?

It’s a topic that I’m giving some attention to due to some research that I uncovered while reading an article about the ways that law students manage their time.

My first effort to delve into this topic came in the form of a recent article I wrote for the Jamaica Gleaner – How to Manage Your Time Like a CEO.

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Solving Scheduling Problems – Summary of Our Findings

There are a handful of working professionals who have chosen to use their calendars as their hub for all their planning activity.

The challenges they run into are only rarely mentioned in time management and productivity books, programs and websites: the overwhelming conventional wisdom states that it’s impossible to use a schedule in this way, and that one should only use lists. Unfortunately, these statements (so far) remain empty assertions, without the backing of either academic research or recent, direct experience by the author.

This leaves the working professional who has decided to use this technique without help… until now. Here are some of the articles we have written and research we have found to back up our central hypothesis: it’s possible to execute either a list-based or a schedule-based strategy successfully. Our additional hypothesis is that, in general, schedule based strategies are more suitable for handling large numbers of time demands.

The Benefit of Developing Advanced Scheduling Skills – this article compares Listing and Scheduling directly.

Videos based on the work of Dezhi Wu – her research shows the superior results gained by those who maintain electronic schedules.

Student Time Management Video – watch as a student as she develops her weekly schedule and you will notice some of the challenges she has that you might share.

We have trained hundreds of people in the use of these techniques and often provide the following specific advice, which will become the topic of future posts on this blog:

  • Make sure to leave sufficient time between scheduled activities. Leave buffers in each day of unscheduled time so that you account for surprises.
  • Be willing to juggle your schedule at a moment’s notice. This activity has everything to do with real life demands, which change on a dime.
  • Don’t turn your calendar into a source of guilt. It’s meant to be a powerful guide, not a rigid, Nazi-like ruler of your life.
  • Use your schedule to help get into the Flow State.
  • Use a smartphone and/or tablet to ensure that you have a schedule with you at all times.
  • Audible reminders are a great to alert yourself that a new time demand is about to start.
  • Balance supporting lists with your schedule.
  • The point of using this technique is to achieve peace of mind, which means that you must b aware of the times when you are trying to schedule too much.
  • For an in interesting story of how to navigate a few scheduling problems, read my book – Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure.
  • Another point of using this technique – to move your schedule from your mind and into a calendar that’s in front of you (we used to say, “on paper,”  but that’s clearly not the case
  • Speaking of paper- forget about trying to manage lots of time demands via a paper calendar, for multiple reasons.
  • You can actually use the way you language a time demand as a source of motivation e.g. instead of “goto gym” you might write “dropped 10 more pounds by the wedding”

Update: Much of the discussion on schedule usage has been moved to ScheduleU.org.

 

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Solving the Problem of Getting to Work on Time

Tourists love Jamaican culture for its laid back attitude and easy vibe. That is, until the guy who is supposed to check you out of the villa shows up to work late, causing you to miss your flight… in that moment, there’s not much to love.

In this article, I address a problem that shows up in the Caribbean workplace – lateness. There’s a lesson here for all managers – never assume that your employees know how to undertake a practice that you have mastered, such as getting to work on time. You have probably forgotten what it took to learn the micro-habits needed to achieve mastery and if no-one spells them out, it’s likely that they’ll never be learned.

Here’s the article from the Sunday newspaper in Jamaica – How Hard Is It to Come to Work on Time?

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The Final Post in the New Lifehacking Series

The seventh and final post in the series: The New Lifehacking came out yesterday. It addresses the reasons why we should be wary of new technology and new ideas – before rushing to incorporate them into our individual time management systems.

The entire series lays out a pathway for continuous improvement that replaces the random search for tips and tricks that most of us rely on. Instead, it calls for a systematic effort that builds on an understanding of the time management system that we self-created and now use every day.

The New Lifehacking #7 – Why You Should Be Open to New Stuff, But Wary About Using It.