Blog – Page 62 – 2Time Labs

January 26, 2008

Post-Pilot Analysis (2) – New Equipment

During the recent pilot of NewHabits-NewGoals (the course built on the concepts of 2Time), it struck me that every professional has their own home-grown time management system. They developed it in a trial-and-error fashion, mostly starting when they were in their early teens, and picking up bits and pieces from people they admired along the way. These included people they know in person, as well as those who may have written books outlining one person’s particular approach.

However, they didn’t develop it in a systematic way. They didn’t know the fundamentals. Without the fundamentals, they could not develop a complete system or innovate within the boundaries of the discipline in way that made their life easier, rather than harder.

Technology has only made their homegrown systems more susceptible to failure. Email is a great idea. Sending email from a Blackberry in the middle of a meeting is a bad idea. Continue reading “Post-Pilot Analysis (2) – New Equipment”

January 23, 2008

Post-Pilot Analysis (1) – Overcoming My Worst Fears

The first pilot program using the ideas in the 2Time Mgt Blog was completed last week with a hardy, challenging group of 13 professionals.

It was a great learning experience all around, and I learned a lot from exposing people to the ideas from this blog for the very first time. My wife has been the one who has born the brunt of the ideas I have come up with, and I have pretty much worn her out with all my ideas on this topic.

The biggest fears I had were not realized:

Two days seemed to be enough to get the ideas across.
The participants liked the blend of lecture, questions and practical hands-on work.
The idea of developing your own system made logical sense (Thank God!). Continue reading “Post-Pilot Analysis (1) – Overcoming My Worst Fears”

January 21, 2008

No Such Thing As a Prodigy

This article, entitled “The Myth of Prodigy and Why It Matte rs“, is such an inspiration.

It essentially makes the case that what we think of as genius, merely comes down to persistent practice, even in the cases when we think that the age of a prodigy “means” that they must have been born with their gift.

The article, taken from the Association of Psychological Science, is based on research done by Malcolm Gladwell that shows that diligence and discipline are much better predictors of future success than early talent.

This is good news for professionals who are committed to improving their productivity skills. It is never too late to learn and increasingly master the fundamentals of 2Time, or any other hard-to-learn discipline. All it takes is practice.

January 18, 2008

Interview in the Press

Last Sunday, the Jamaica Gleaner carried an interview I conducted with one of their feature editors.

Interestingly, the interview was conducted via Skype.

January 17, 2008

2Time for People in Transition

I just finished leading the pilot course based on the 2Time principles. The two day session conducted here in Kingston, Jamaica seemed to go well, and I learned a lot from the participants and how they worked with these ideas.

One lesson that came home clearly is that professionals look for a new time management system when they are in transition.

For example, when a college student gets their first job, or an employee is promoted or receives a new area of responsibility or gets married or has a baby, life changes. All of a sudden, the volume of time demands that they are committed to completing increases, and overwhelms the system they had before. Continue reading “2Time for People in Transition”

January 14, 2008

Making Habit Change Easy

This is quite a good article entitled Installing a new habit and breaking an old one by Stephanie Burns on the practice of changing habits.

In 2Time, all progress hinges on a keen self-knowledge of how to change one’s habits. We are all different, and respond to different sets of stimuli. What we all need to do is to know ourselves so well that whenever we want to change a habit, we can. This is where her article is quite useful.

Here is an excerpt that focuses on making it easy to do the new habit, and hard to repeat the old one.

Strategies in action – here is how it works

You want to start carrying a bit of cash and not using your credit card.

Make it hard to do. Freeze your credit card in a block of ice.

You want to walk or jog each morning to start your day, but by the time you get up and move around you don’t feel like it. Continue reading “Making Habit Change Easy”

January 11, 2008

ChangeThis.com Manifesto Accepted

I got some good news this week from the folks at ChangeThis.com, which was that my proposal to write my manifesto had been accepted.

In prior posts, including this one, I mentioned that I had written a proposal to write a manifesto for the website.

My proposal, which is described here, did quite well, receiving some 460 votes, more than twice the second-place proposal, and more than any other proposal since.

That was back in October, and I have been waiting and wondering… what next? A few emails weren’t returned, until finally the word came back that the invitation was being extended, and that a typical manifesto could expect to be downloaded some 20,000 to 50,000 times.

Well.

That got my attention!

January 9, 2008

The Four Hour Work Week: Forget About Time Management

I have just finished listening to the audio book “The 4-Hour Work Week” which I enjoyed immensely, even as I disagreed with some of the points made by the author, Time Ferriss.

One chapter is entitled “The End of Time Management”.

He argues that one should forget all about time management!

Of course, this is more of a fancy title for a chapter than anything else, as he is mostly focused on doing the right things, rather than merely trying to maximize output or efficiency. He pooh-poohs the idea of trying to be more efficient, and looks back at his days when he was focused on working harder and harder, on God-knows-what.

But the truth is, he must have the same problem that the rest of us have, in the 11 fundamental elements. Even though he may only work 4 hours per week, he must still Capture, Empty, Schedule, Toss, etc. because he is subject to the same physical rules that we are, and has the same memory constraints that we do (or soon will, given a few more years of age). Continue reading “The Four Hour Work Week: Forget About Time Management”

January 7, 2008

The Problem of Not Scheduling

Many professionals only maintain lists of items to do, and don’t actually schedule anything other than appointments into their calendars. In the language of 2Time, they may be Green Belts at the skill of Listing, but Yellow Belts at the skill of Scheduling.

A typical professional’s schedule is below – let’s say his name is “Sam”. He is attending both meetings with Bob, his boss.

Sam’s Schedule

Why can this approach create a problem? After all, most of the time management systems that exist only address using the schedule in a basic way. GTD® takes it another step and advocates the scheduling of “contexts”, or in other words groups of activities such as:

@home
@computer
@meeting with Bob
@driving

These are pretty basic appointments that one has with oneself. Incidentally, I have noticed that there is no word in the English language for “an appointment with oneself”. At different times in this blog, I have used different words to describe the whole genre of scheduled activities, including both appointments with others as well as oneself. In this post, I’ll use the word “engagement”.

The problem with only having a list (or lists) of activities is a simple one – it is too easy for a list to grow out of proportion to the time that one has available when it’s not scheduled into a calendar. Continue reading “The Problem of Not Scheduling”

January 4, 2008

Multi-Sports and the Inescapable Fundamentals

I happen to be a part-time, amateur, middle-of-the-pack triathlete.

Since 1997 I have been competing in races that involve a swim, bike and run at a variety of distances, the longest of which was an iron-distance race I did that included a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and a 26.2 mile run.

In this sport, like any of the multi-sports such as the pentathlon, duathlon, biathlon, or decathlon, the athlete comes to learn rather quickly that that there are certain fundamentals that must be mastered.

In the triathlon, an athlete must swim, cycle, run and “transition” (from one sport to another on the fly). In most races, depending on the length, an athlete must also drink and eat.

That’s it for the fundamentals. They are, in 2Time language, inescapable. Continue reading “Multi-Sports and the Inescapable Fundamentals”