Category: Research

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Update on Dezhi Wu’s Research #2

I’m still working through the first chapter of Dezhi Wu’s book “Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management,” but it’s already leading to some interesting places.

She used four criteria to characterize individual time management quality:

  • planning
  • meeting deadlines
  • sensing a lack of time control
  • engaging in procrastinating

She found great differences between good and bad time managers in terms of these characteristics, and the way they used “temporal structures.” These are essentially blocks of designated time set up by either society (public holidays,) groups (Happy Hour) or individuals (designated gym time.)

“Effective time managers demonstrate more skill in capturing and using their temporal structures than ineffective time managers.  Current information technologies do not provide much support…”

To that end, she has a chapter focused on the shortcomings of calendars and schedules:

“This chapter also discloses users’ difficulties with current electronic time management tools. In essence, users’ complaints can be transferred to a whole set of desired tool features, which are (1) better integration with other existing tools that they often need for their jobs, such as project management tools and organizational calendaring tools, (2) flexibility for scheduling more complicated activities, as there is no flexible template in the existing tools for setting up and modifying a series of events easily, (3) better synchronization with different devices, especially for travelers who often have to install different operating systems and calendar software for their mobile and their desktop calendar tools, (4) more user-friendly calendar interfaces (e.g. the stylus used in small devices is difficult for seniors and visually-impaired people), (5) truly built-in time management features (e.g., the ability to assess a person’s time management quality, and to advise how to enhance personal time management practices). In other words, the current electronic calendar tools do not behave intelligently enough to meet users’ time management needs, and (6) more convenient collaborative calendaring features for more effective team scheduling. ”

Wow.  This summary of Chapter 11 makes me want to jump straight to that chapter because these are some of the very issues we are tackling here at the 2Time Labs.  I hope that some software company out there is reading this book and planning for the next generation of scheduling tools.

 

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Possibly the Best Time Management Research Ever Completed. Period.

I am reading through the first chapters of a book written by Professor Dezhi Wu entitled Temporal Structures in Individual Time management: Practices to Enhance Calendar Tool Design.

It’s a seminal work.  But I am a bit biased as I have been lamenting the lack of proper research in this important area of professional life, so maybe I am a bit easy to please.  She makes the same point, and explains that it comes, in part, from the time needed to do thorough research in this area.  I remember from my days as a graduate student that “getting out” was a high priority, and I certainly was not interested in doing the kind of work that would prolong my stay. Kudos to her for not only doing the work, but for also turning it into a book that is… sorta kinda readable for the average graduate student!  LOL

The purpose of the book is described here:

The focus of this work is to provide solid evidence that can be used to design better electronic calendar systems that support the creation and sharing of organizational temporal structures, both as a knowledge capture for the organization and as a handy tool for improving personal time management. This empirical evidence consists of two sets of intensive field interviews with busy professionals and a large survey with over 700 subjects. The study findings demonstrate a real need for improving current electronic calendar systems through incorporating temporal structure features.

I’ll be reading and updating the blog on my progress through its chapters and hopefully will report some interesting findings along the way.  Stay tuned.

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Living a Life Filled with Experiments to Improve Your Productivity

In case you haven’t noticed, or are new to this website, I am not a fan of the quick fix.  When it comes to time management, I simply don’t believe in them.

Genuine upgrades take work, whether you are a world-class athlete or a working professional looking to be more productive or reduce your backlog of email.

Matthew Cornell is a very interesting blogger and management consultant who recently made a radical change in his public writing.  He’s no longer writing much about time management and productivity, and has instead shifted his attention to doing life-experiments.  His blog is called The Experiment-Driven Life.

Fortunately for us, he’s saying some great things.  Unfortunately, he’s one of the few saying these things, and very few seem to be listening.

His thesis is simple enough.  If you want to get better at anything in life you need to learn how to conduct effective experiments.  In other words, you need to do research.

Not the kind of research that we like to do when we do a Google search.  He’s talking about PhD level work that starts from the ground up, but instead… done by the common man.

Here is a link to his cornerstone post:  How to Experiment

The reason that his blog is of such interest to me, and the work at 2Time Labs is because it echoes the approach that we advocate in Time Management 2.0.  If you agree that each of us needs a custom time management system (for any number of reasons) then designing one that works involves a major sequence of trial and error.

It’s much better to use good research principles than to flounder around wasting time without the right kind of objective data, and Cornell’s point is that this data can be quantitative or qualitative, and be drawn from the very day to day activities that make up your life.

I might be quite biased, as I taught an MBA school research course, and also has degrees in Operations Research.  However, he’s going much further than anything I ever taught or learned in driving this kind of “hi-falutin'” thinking into everyday life.

It’s exactly the right mindset that we all need to adopt when we attempt our upgrades, and the more rigor we bring to the experiment, the less time and effort we’ll spend on them.

Take a look at his site, and understand why I want to create a community of self-experimentation.

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1999 Email Research is Still Timely and Relevant

As I dug through academic papers on the topic of time management over the past few days, I came across a journal article that was simply amazing in its prescience.  It was written by Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner of Lotus Development Corp (now part of IBM.) It was published in 1996, and they also happen to be the authors who coined the term “email overload.”

In their paper entitled “Email overload: exploring personal information management of email” they quite rightly take note of the fact that professionals around the world are using email Inboxes to manage what their tasks: what we at 2Time call “time demands.”  They start off the article with a major assertion in their Abstract:

ABSTRACT
Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet
devised. Our empirical data show however, that although email was originally designed as a communications application, it is now being used for additional functions, that it was not designed for, such as task management and  personal archiving . We call this  email overload. We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information management: users often have cluttered inboxes containing hundreds of messages, including outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads.  Furthermore, user attempts to rationalise their inboxes by filing are often unsuccessful, with the consequence that important messages get overlooked, or “lost” in archives. We explain how  email overloading arises and propose technical solutions to the problem.

What is amazing to me is not the point they are making, as it’s one that’s been echoed here at 2Time many times, especially in my posts suggesting ways to improve Outlook.  Instead, what’s startling is that no-one seems to have paid any attention.

Not only have Outlook and other email management programmes failed to offer anything new, Gmail didn’t even exist at the time this article was written, and it committed the same design mistake by not recognizing that existing email management software isn’t fashioned around its most common use — task and time management.

As I have mentioned before, there is lots of room for someone to create a breakthrough software product that changes a users relationship to to the tasks that come at them each day — many of which come at them via email.

This article certainly points solidly in that direction, as does my own research and intuition.  let’s see who gets there first!

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The Best Source of Time Management Research in the World

In a prior post I shared a goal of mine, formed after hours of searching the Internet for relevant research on time management.

It took way too long, and too much effort to accumulate.  I want to make things easier for anyone who wants to repeat the research I have performed thus far, and in so doing, make this site the best source of time management research in the world.

To become that useful, I’d have to provide an easy way to find the best academic research that I can, so I have decided to share the list of files that I have found.  Each of these can be Googled and downloaded as pdf’s.  There are some reals gems, partly because of the foresight they demonstrated back in the 1990’s when email was just becoming popular.


It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but I have tried to find the articles that apply directly to time management that are useful, and have something important to say.  Please let me know of other academic articles that you are away of, and that the public can access.

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A Bittersweet Day

It’s been a bittersweet day.

I have been listening to Steven Levy’s book: “In the Plex” and am finding it a fascinating and inspiring read. A part of what has inspired me is the clarity and simplicity of their purpose: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

I felt challenged by it, and how big it is, and I was reminded of the days when I started writing about time management back in 2006. I actually called my first WordPress.com blog an “open-source” site for ideas and thinking about time management as my goal was to find others who were willing to do more than superficial thinking, and share some breakthrough ideas with them. I never intended to earn any revenue, or even teach a class.

I  naively thought it would easy to find others who were thinking along the same lines, and that we’d have fun making time management better. Strangely enough, it’s been easier to find the revenue than find the others who are willing to collaborate!

Yes, there are authors out there, but none has seemed to be willing to engage in questioning  the core ideas that underly their thinking. Some go so far as to say that nothing can be done to improve the systems described in their book!

So, I just kept writing and developing, driven by the idea that something was wrong about the limited options that were available to working people who wanted to get better. I was pissed at the one-size-fits-all credo, fueled to no small degree by the fact that I had recently moved to Jamaica, and become acutely aware of the cultural assumptions that were built into the materials I had read.

It’s all too easy to write a book that you think is for everyone, but is actually only for people just like you, in circumstances that mirror your own. Instead, there are huge differences in the way we manage our time depending on our:

  • profession
  • training
  • experience
  • national culture
  • environment
  • age and stage of life

I was appalled that after doing critical work on my own time management skills back in 1999-2003, that the field had made little or no progress, and offered no assistance to people like me who needed custom help. This emotion got me writing with a vengeance, but I realize looking back that I was actually on a mission, motivated by the kind of help I thought everyone should be able to access.

Now, a few years later, I am more clear on what that is:

To make time management improvements easy for people everywhere, forever.

Discovering this mission made up the sweet part of the day!

The bitter part came when I heard that Eli Goldratt had passed away that morning. He is best known for his Theory of Constraints, and his book: The Goal, which I read as a graduate student at Cornell, during my first summer at AT&T Bell Labs.

I literally could not put the book down, as it offered a compelling glimpse of the real world of manufacturing that my professors had been unable to approximate, in spite of numerous opportunities. I got more from reading that book than most of what I had learned in class.  In fact, I re-read The Goal recently in preparation for writing my own book – using his powerful business fable as my inspiration and role model.

And now he’s gone, but he left behind a host of admirers who helped make his books some of the most popular in the business-world. I can only hope that my book does something similar, and makes a contribution to accomplishing the mission I have set for the work here at 2Time.

To that end, today I set some big, hairy audacious goals:

  1. To offer the very best on-line time management training made possible by the latest technology.
  2. To enable coaches and trainers anywhere in the world to use Time Management 2.0 principles in their work with clients
  3. To give every working professional the idea that they can upgrade the way they manage their time whenever they want, regardless of changes in work, personal life or technology.
  4. To develop the 2Time site be the best single source for time management research, ideas and breakthrough thinking gleaned from all corners of the world.
  5. To find and work with the best minds in time management, and have fun coming up with new stuff!

As I read the tributes to his live and work, I suspect that Eli Goldratt would support these wholeheartedly.

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Hard Thinking in a Busy Schedule

I found another of Cal Newport’s gems that fits quite well into the 2Time way of thinking.  Getting Creative Things Done: How to Fit Hard Thinking into a Busy Schedule.

In this post he makes the point that the best way to get quality, creative work done is to set aside dedicated time in one’s schedule, which is the equivalent of 2Time’s Orange Belt level of skill in Scheduling.

The only difference of opinion I have with this excellent article is that it’s not only about hard, creative work that academics do.  Business professionals at all levels aren’t simply paid to do something without thinking.  Instead, managers hope that they are also working on their job, not just in their job… improving it, streamlining it, cutting costs, etc.

This kind of continuous improvement comes from using the kind of techniques he describes, which means that this skill has much wider implications on professional productivity than he indicates.

Here it is again:  Getting Creative Things Done: How to Fit Hard Thinking into a Busy Schedule

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More Than a New Tag-Line

I have a new tag-line at my site:  “The World’s Best Resource for Time Management 2.0”

It struck me a few days ago as I was looking around for resources to recommend for a class I’m teaching, that I had nowhere on the Internet to point them to better than my own site.  I don’t mean to brag, but the fact is I seem to be aggressively hunting down, processing and writing about the topic of time management at a pretty hot pace, perhaps as fast as any PhD student might do in the early phases of their research.

It’s not that I have all the ideas, even though I do have a long list of items that I want to address in new posts.  Instead, in the past few months I have found myself delving into the academic research and finding some good/bad news.  There’s some good thinking, but the bad news is that there has been little or no momentum or continuity of thought in the field.  It’s as if one or two papers are written by an author in a 3 year period, only to have them go off to do something completely different and unrelated immediately after publication.

It’s too bad, but I am determined to have this site become the single best source of time management research, wherever and whenever it’s been done in the world.

But I just don’t want a lot of depth for it’s own sake.  My eye is actually on the conversion of good ideas into upgraded habits that better the lives of working professionals around the world.  My mission is to solve the problem of unnecessary time-stress once and for all, and to bring the kind of peace of mind that we all want, in spite of having full lives, busy jobs and active families.  Fully committed, but balanced.

One thing you won’t find here… tired ideas that are repeated on hundreds of sites, buttressed by worn out cliches and superficial thinking.  There are lots of “top 10 tips for time management” floating around that say nothing new, leading many to think that they have already heard every useful message on the topic, and that there’s no need to continue listening.

All I can say is “stay tuned,” as there’s a great deal of work for us all to do to stay ahead of the increasing demands on our time, new technology and inevitable life changes.  It’s a time to pay more attention, not less, to this important aspect of our lives.