Category: Theory

I was listening to a time management audio-book today with some interest, as the author was delving into the frame of mind a good time manager must have to be effective, at the very beginning of the book.

I wondered about that.

In sports, while I know there is a place for “sports psychology”, in the most effective athletes, it is never a replacement for practice in the fundamentals.

However, in the practice of time management, it seems as if professionals are left without a proper starting point, because they have no idea what the fundamentals are. Continue reading “Psychology… But After the Fundamentals”

I am on the search for thought partners for this whole field of time management.

Interestingly, I finally found some research in the area of time management, but it hardly is a fount of new ideas. Instead, it is an empirical study of whether or not time management provides any benefit to the user, in very broad terms.

While this may seem like a common-sense question, I imagine that the author, Brigitte Claessens, who did this research for her thesis, was forced to answer such a basic question because there was so little scholarship on the question to begin with.

While I hope to contact her to find out where the cutting edge of the research might be, I wonder why there isn’t at least an online forum to discuss the ideas at the heart of time management. If it does exist, please let me know!

Submitted by akalsey on October 11, 2007 – 5:52 p.m.

There’s a story that says Einstein was once asked for his phone number. He walked over to a phone book and started to look it up. When the questioner expressed surprise that someone so smart wouldn’t know his own phone number, Einstein said he didn’t want to clutter his mind with information he could easily look up.

This echoes the idea inherent in 2Time that the mind is a terrible storage device and that the function should be outsourced to more reliable, electronic devices.

Laura sent me the following question, which made me stop and think, and to attempt an answer in just a few words. Thanks to her for asking. Laura, by the way is the author of the blog: http://simpleproductivityblog.com – which I strongly recommend.

I really like your idea of taking these ideas of self-management (because it really is more than managing your time) to people who are not already inclined to adopt them. I was thinking more about it, and while I understand the “belt” analogy, if you really want to reach the non-users of other management systems you might want to consider a different term, one that would be more approachable than a martial arts one. The martial arts one conjures up ideas of discipline and toughness. That might scare most non-adopters off.

Good luck!

LJ

On 10/19/07, Francis Wade <[email protected]> wrote: Continue reading “Reader’s Questions”

While I originally came up with the name “2Time” as a place-holder, it does have some logic to the strangeness.

At the time, it seemed to make sense to say that there are 2 kinds of time that professionals consume:

• Type 1 is the time spent doing, while
• Type 2 is the time spent planning what one is about to do. Continue reading “The Point of the Name: 2Time”

I once completed an IronMan triathon. The next question most people ask is “How long was that?” I respond – “a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile ride, and a 26.2 mile run.” They then ask “Over how many days?”

No-one believes me when I tell them that the biggest issue in completing an endurance event is not fitness, but time management. I then silently think to myself that they could do one also, with the right habits.

Another fact they are unaware of is that ultra-distance sports require an ability to manage several disciplines at once, in addition to the more obvious running, swimming, cycling and transitioning. Continue reading “Following the Fundamentals”

There are some different ways in which I have been trying to compare 2Time to other ways of trying to improve productivity. When compared to other “systems” I think of the guru-driven systems as particular destinations on a path to greater productivity. 2Time is an attempt to describe the path, without saying that any one destination is better than any other.

Each system has its followers, from Covey to GTD® to others. They happen to attract (and keep) the users whose habits are probably most compatible with the system. Continue reading “More on 2Time Analogies”