Category: Scheduling

Posted on

How to Use Dezhi Wu’s Time Management Research to

As I shared in the prior series of four posts on this topic, Dezhi Wu’s book “Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management: Practices to Enhance Calendar Tool Design” is a breakthrough piece of research.

It’s the dawn of a new age, I hope — time management researchers are actually tackling the problems that ordinary people people face when they try to improve the way they manage their time.  New tools, gadgets and software are coming out every day, but they all miss the point… and Dezhi’s research is essential to putting them back on track.

Listen in as I summarize one of her key findings – it’s my final summary of her book for the time being (until I schedule time to read it again!)

or click:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp3t4iJPUdk&feature=colike

Posted on

How to Know When to Upgrade Your Scheduling Skills

In a number of posts,  I have written about the need to upgrade your scheduling skills when you hit “a certain threshold.”  Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to guide us to the precise point in time when this shift should take place.

Instead, I find myself coaching clients in programs from a bit of a vacuum.  I know what worked for me, and a few others,  but I can’t back it up with proper research.  Which I hate.

At the same time, I do have some guiding principles.  You should probably upgrade from keeping multiple lists to managing a single calendar when:

  • You find yourself using multiple lists and hating the required activity of reviewing them frequently.  After you make the upgrade, you’ll only have to check the ones that fall within a narrow time period, e.g. that day, yesterday, and tomorrow.
  • You find time demands falling through the cracks.  You want to be sure that the cause is related to this upgrade, and not another cause, or your upgrade won’t work.   When you do make a successful upgrade, it’s harder to lose time demands because you are focusing on a handful, rather than tens or thousands.
  • You find yourself running late often.  Once the upgrade is made, you’ll find that you can schedule reminders, buffer times, and travel times, delegating the job of remembering when to leave to your calendar, rather than to your memory.
  • You feel stressed from using a mental calendar.  Having a calendar fully worked out in front of you and available at all times requires less energy, attention, and effort than trying to keep one in your head.

These aren’t fool-proof tests by any means, but it’s important to note that they might be precipitated by a life-change of some kind that brings an instant flood of new time demands.  These are the moments in our lives and careers when we need to be vigilant, because we might notice some of the above events, which never used to happen, taking place for the first time.

The combination of the life-changing event, and the symptoms listed above, are a good sign that something needs to change, and that it needs to happen quickly.

I plan to make it easy for anyone who wants to make this kind of upgrade.  In a couple of weeks, we’ll be initiating the next 2Time Labs Open House. During this time, our doors will be open to anyone who wants to take one of our free training programs.  The registration period will be short, and hopefully we’ll be able to fill the class before the doors close.  Stay tuned, or visit http://mytimedesign.com for early notification.  (For those who have been tracking carefully, you may have noticed a shift in date.  We simply bit off more than we could chew and put in too much new stuff to hit the original deadline.)

We’ll also be promoting our paid programs during this period to anyone who wants to take things a step further, deeper or faster.

Posted on

Why You Need to Take a Multi-Calendar Point of View

I just completed an article for Stepcase Lifehack that was picked up and expanded on by the LifeHacker website.

The idea is a new one:  the time is fast approaching when your time demands will sit in the cloud, and not on your desktop, smartphone or laptop.

Furthermore, the way you look at your schedule will also change when you get used to the idea of looking at your calendar from different points of view, each of which hides the stuff that you don’t want to see.  The benefit?  Being able to track more stuff with less effort, and making it easier to get to the point where your calendar replaces your list.

Here’s the original Stepcase Lifehack article: How to Use 6 Calendar Views to Be More Productive

And the follow-on Lifehacker article: Use a 5-Calendar Setup to Avoid Cluttered and Confusing Schedules

It’s my first time being published on the Lifehacker website — so this is a happy moment!

Posted on

Dezhi Wu on the Calendar Tools We Really Need #4

A major focus of Wu’s research as outlined in Temporal Structures in Individual Time Management: practices to enhance calendar tool design, is on the paucity of tools that exist to manage our schedules.

She decries the fact that electronic calendars do little more than mimic paper calendars, and offer little functionality in important areas.  She states: “the porting of the paper-based calendar to its electronic cousin, in our view, suffers from a lack of vision.  The electronic version is a replica of the paper version with… fast search capabilities.”

“Builders of electronic calendars could have examined how users think about and construct their schedules.  … they would have run into thinking about how to build tools that allow users to capture the more esoteric and complex temporal structures affecting their time coordination.”

She writes that the current tools offer no support for automatically changing scheduled activities.  For example, in planning software like Microsoft Project, a change in the final due date can automatically cause all the dependent tasks to shift their due dates in concert.  In Microsoft Outlook, no such capability exists.

Also, there is no way to download a project’s individual commitments into one’s calendar.  Instead of manually entering the tasks required to complete one’s taxes, an entire sequence of events could be downloaded that reliably produce the end-result, if followed.  It would allow us to see more clearly what happens when we commit to play a role on a new project, for example, and more realistically deal with the time it will consume.

She gives the example of airlines that allow passengers to download entire flights directly into their calendars.  A smart calendar would incorporate the time it take to get to the airport from the office, and block that time out also!

She also talks about the need for working groups to make their norms that require calendar space more explicit, such as the fact that that the group has a mandatory lunch discussion each Friday and a meeting with the Vice President every last Wednesday of the month.  New members could immediately download these structured commitment upon joining, and observe the impact on their overall schedules.

One of the major complaints from the most effective time managers is the fact that they have to do so much manual work to set up effective schedules that cover the temporal structures mentioned above.  An intelligent auto-scheduler would know to never set time aside for a trip to the grocery store at a time when it’s closed, for example, on a holiday.

Lastly, it should be easier to coordinate schedules.  A project manager should be able to “see” a view of a person’s calendar to determine whether key action items need to be changed in keeping with events happening in other calendars.

Wu mentions a particular intensity around these complaints, and I take that to mean that the opportunity for a significant product innovation exists.  Companies that make electronic scheduling tools could be producing much, much better products, a point that I make here at 2Time Labs.

She obviously has some insight into what an effective user-design might look like, and if game-changing software were to emerge, it would probably sweep into the lives of working professionals at an awesome pace.

Posted on

Dezhi Wu’s Game-Changing Research on Scheduling #3

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been immersing myself in Dezhi Wu’s book “Temporal Structure in Individual Time Management: practices to enhance calendar design.”  It’s a book based on the research she did over 5+ years and her empirical findings have put to bed some of the questions I have been exploring here at the 2Time Labs.

Here’s a summary of some of the findings as they pertain to a topic I have been exploring in depth.  In it, she uses the term “temporal structure” to mean “a time representation indicating how (people)…. capture, manipulate, and manage … time -related structures… in order to find out the best way to manage their time.”  In an earlier paper she states that a “temporal structure is defined as patterned organization of time used by humans to help them manage, comprehend or coordinate their use of time.”

In other words, temporal structures are the items that you put in your calendar, ranging from birthdays, study schedules, meetings, appointments, project work, exercise time… pretty much anything.

The best time managers use calendars to schedule their tasks.

This finding was unambiguous, according to the following excerpts:

“effective time managers demonstrate more skill in capturing and using their temporal structures than ineffective time managers.”

“better time managers (in terms of how much they accomplished in their work and how busy they were) were more likely to have intricate use of temporal structures as part of their scheduling behavior.”

“time-urgent individuals have a tendency to schedule more activities and are capable of fitting these activities more comfortably into time slots.”…. “They are more capable of completing more work within the same time… and have a tendency to be good time managers.”

“Effective time managers who exhibit less procrastination are found to use…. (and create) …significantly more explicit temporal structures in comparison to time managergs who procrastinate.”

“Time managers who meet more deadlines exhibit significant differences on the use of explicit temporal structures”

“there is a significant correlation between meeting deadline and creation of temporal structures.”

“Within the set of respondents were individuals who complained less about the difficulty of managing their time and who also had more time for personal activities and additional achievements. …. they were better able to estimate the amount of time a task required…  They created their own temporal structures to manage their life… they allocated units of time for specific types of repeating activities.  These better time managers also recorded more of the external temporal structures affecting their time usage in their electronic calendars. In contrast, another set of respondents, who complained about a lack of time for accomplishing anything significant, were much less likely to record and manage their time in a calendar system…. They were relatively unproductive… (and) produced less work product.”

Her research involved over 7,000 respondents and took place in a variety for forms, including surveys, in-depth interviews and a survey of existing time management research that must be the most comprehensive of its kind.

What does this all mean for the average professional?

Well, it casts into doubt the assertions made in many time management and productivity books that state or imply that it’s too difficult to keep a calendar of tasks, and that instead one must revert to using lists.  In all the research I’ve done, I’ve never seen any data to back up these statements, or even a single author who has stated that they tried both methods and have first hand experience that compares the use of lists to electronic scheduling.

Wu’s research backs up my own findings: there are many professionals who manage their tasks in schedules, and they tend to be the more productive as a result.  In numerous posts on this website, I have made that point, but here is the first empirical evidence that backs up my observations, and my own experience in moving from an electronic calendar, to lists, and back again to a calendar.

There are other findings I’ll share in future posts having to do with the paucity of tools at our disposal, different time management types and the reason why there is so little research.  None of it contradicts the 2Time Labs concept that each user needs a system that is customized to his/her needs, and habit pattern, and that it’s simply invalid to state that one size fits all.

If you liked this post, take a moment to download the 2Time Labs Special Report, and also to follow me on Twitter or Facebook using the links in the right-hand column.

Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Further Evidence that Lists Are Limiting

In recent posts, I have been making the point that time management systems that rely on keeping track of time demands on lists vs. schedules are limited, and become a problem when the total number increases above  certain threshold.  Lists are simply too hard to review, as they demand at least a weekly check of every single item.

GTD® is no exception, as evidence by the feedback they recently received on their Facebook page.

Here is the question that was asked:  What’s been the easiest thing about implementing GTD for you?  What’s been the most challenging to make a habit?

The responses to the second part of the question can be broken down as follows:

25 Total Responses /15 mention the Weekly Review directly – 60% say that this aspect is the most difficult to master.

As I implied, there are a great many people who have no difficulty with the Review, but there are a significant number who are challenged by its demands on their time and energy.

They may need an upgrade from having lots of stuff on lists to having a single schedule.

 

Posted on

A Manipulate-able Calendar

In earlier posts, I stepped into the future and imagined what it would be like to have a calendar that sat inside your watch, and projected a calendar in front of you in the form of a virtual touch-screen that you could manipulate at will.

It would require a skill that I define as an Orange Belt skill in scheduling:  changing or re-scheduling the segments in your calendar over and over again.

Well, here’s a calendar tool for the iPad that makes it a much easier task than I have ever seen.  It’s not a projector that sits in a wrist-watch, but moving around the segments in a schedule in this manner seems to be just as easy as I had imagined.

Here is the link to Muji Apps Calendar.  (Thanks to the alert reader who noticed that this was missing…!)

Posted on

A Circular Schedule

This is something new.

Most of us think of schedules in linear terms, the way we think of calendars and diaries.  Along comes the Muji Chronotebook to change all that, with the first circular daily schedule I have ever seen.

It’s based on the face of a clock, and the 12 hours that it represents.  Each activity looks like a slice of a pie, and it seems deceptively easy to plan a full day using a layout that looks like the analog clocks that most of us older folk grew up with.

It’s whimsical, traditional and nostalgic, and the fact that there is no software or app that uses this concept, means that it’s all about pen/pencil and paper.

Read all about one person’s experience here: The Daily Rind, a Better Way to Plan the Day.