Category: Theory

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Crucial Moments in Time Management

Recently, I have been exploring a different way of looking at time management skills from the approach I have taken here at 2Time Labs so far.

The idea is simple: perhaps one’s skill level in time management has something to do with what happens on a habitual basis at particular moments throughout the day.  I imagine that for most adults these are unconscious practices that they learned long ago, and they are done in an unthinking way.

Moment #1 – New stuff you initiate
You decide to act, and create a new time demand by making a mental commitment to act in the future.

Moment #2 – Setting up an auto capture point
You create a new email address or voicemailbox and tell others about it.  New time demands start flowing into that capture point.

Moment #3 – Working through the time demands at a capture point
For an auto or manual capture point, you decide to address the time demands that have been sitting there for some time

Moment #4 – In the middle of working on a task you are interrupted by a reminder that it’s time to act on something new.

Moment #5 – You are at the natural end of a task, and are about to start a new one. You must decide what to work on next.

Moment #6 – The moment when it’s time to upgrade your time management system.  You notice that you are getting stressed at having too much to do too often, or that time demands are falling through the cracks.  These are 2 of the indicators that tell you that your system isn’t working as it should

Moment #7 – You look over your time management system with a view to making some kind of improvement.  You decide to change something and implement a new habit, or tool.

Moment #8 – When you engage in a task that matters, you take the necessary steps to immerse yourself in your most productive mode for its duration.

World-class time management comes down to mastering these 8 moments in a consistent and habitual way.  It’s easy to separate effective from ineffective time managers by observing what happens at these moments.

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The New York Times Gets It Wrong, but a Little Right

An article in the New York Times entitled 5 Easy Steps to Staunch the Email Flood seems to fall into the trap that most time management tinkers fall into.

An author shares a system of habits that works for them and essentially tells everyone else to “follow me” based on the evidence of a single success.  It then follows with suggestions that, honestly, fly in the face of accepted best practice such as “don’t treat your Inbox like a To-Do list” which the article heartily recommends.  (This approach works only under certain conditions, according to the research done here at 2Time Labs.)

The article does get one thing right, however, when it’s author, Sam Grobart states:

But the problem with a lot of organizational systems is that they replace one anxiety (“My stuff’s not organized”) with another (“My stuff’s not organized according to this specific system”).

Not to get too Zen here, but maybe the best system is no system. Or, put another way, the best system requires the least behavior modification. A few small habits may have to be adopted, but nothing as rigorous as GTD.

He’s a bit right here, and the point made about replacing one anxiety with another is well taken and related to his second comment. I would reword the sentiment.  The best upgrade requires the least behavior modification.

The problem with GTD® and every other static system is that they don’t attempt to meet the user where he/she currently is.  Most people find themselves:

1) in habit patterns that are far from ideal that they have practiced for many years

2) without a clue, let alone a plan, for how to bridge the gap to a new ideal set of habits

3) lacking any experience in changing complex systems of habits and therefore under-estimate what’s needed to make new habits stick

The result is frequent failure, and it sounds as if the author counts himself in that number.  But the answer is not to come up with a new set of guru-drive prescriptive behaviors, even if they do seem easier. Instead, it’s better to question the game, and then change it entirely.

What users desperately need is help to figure out what small behavior changes to make first, second and third.  And, they must figure it out for themselves as one-size certainly does not fit all when it comes to time management.

The good news is that MyTimeDesign 1.0.Free is about to re-open for registration and you can see exactly what I mean when I imply that the game can be changed.  Stay tuned., and in the meantime, if you are new to this website, see the About tab above for an overview of  Time Management 2.0.

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Is It Really Not About Time Management?

Poor, poor old “time management.”

It seems that it’s open season on the concept as writers and bloggers around the world take their turn in saying that whatever time management is, “it” is not about “that.”    What are they saying, and why is it that they have a point… but only a very, very small one?

David Allen weighed in on the issue with an article entitled “Time Management is Not the Issue” in which he argues that “GTD® is not about time management—it’s about how you manage yourself and your choices, within that time.”  He goes on to add that “If it were, just buying and using a calendar (and a good watch) would handle it.”

He concludes by saying: “When I ask people, “What’s the next action?” on big projects they’re procrastinating about, the answer is often, “Find time to….” Well, you won’t ever have time to change your corporate culture, write the book, or lose weight. Until you define the very next action, you don’t know how much time you really need. “Pick a date and email my assistant to set the senior team meeting about changing our culture” only takes two minutes—less time than it took to read this essay.”

I confess, that there are some statements in the above excerpt that are a bit puzzling, so I don’t really understand the point he’s making.  Before I make an attempt, here is what Tony Schwartz author of the Harvard Business Review Article “Manage your Energy, Not Your Time” has to say.

“Unless people intentionally schedule time for more challenging work, they tend not to get to it at all or rush through it at the last minute”

and

“As with all rituals, setting aside a particular time to do it vastly increases the chances of success.”

and

“__ There are significant gaps between what I say is most important to me in my life and
how I actually allocate my time and energy.”

I suspect that the point he’s trying to make (once you get past the misleading headline) is that both time management and energy management are important.

Elisha Goldstein picks up a similar idea by proclaiming that “It’s About Attention Management, Not Time Management.”  She says “What more and more business leaders are finding is instead of doing more things faster, you need to learn how to prioritize your attention and do the most important things really well. So whether you’re trying to be more effective and less stressed at your current job or schooling, or more effective at finding a job because you just got laid off, attention management is the key to being effective in today’s New Business World. In other words, the issue isn’t so much time management, but attention management in work and life.”

According to other authors, they agree that it’s not about time management, but it’s about something more important that they happen to be selling, such as “commitment management,” “time allocation,” “goal management,” “productivity,” “ego management” and “culture change.”

This might be a case of wanting to craft interesting, grabby headlines than gaining true understand –  I can’t tell, but I do wonder.

Many of these authors make the point that time actually cannot be managed.    Time passes, regardless of what we do or don’t do, much in the same way that the planets move around the Solar System without our opinions or actions being taken into account.

On this basis alone, it’s possible to argue that it’s never about time management, period, because it doesn’t exist.

Try to explain that one to your grandparents over a hot cup of  cocoa…

The fact is, the only thing we can manage is our selves, inclusive of our habits, practices and rituals. When we use the term “time management” here at 2Time Labs it’s not because we are committed to studying topics that don’t exist… LOL

Instead, there is a popular understanding of what time management is — which is closer to the definition of self management.  It’s the reason why people describe programs like GTD as time management, no matter how many times David Allen insists that it’s not.

When we manage ourselves, it always has a time impact.  When we manage our spiritual growth, health, weight or emotional well-being, there is also always a time impact to be considered.

While it’s not possible to manage time, it’s also not possible to live in the world and ignore it, which is what some of the gurus are trying to say… “forget about time management, and instead, focus on this thing instead…”

The idea that we should give up something we know in order to get something new makes for good marketing slogans, but it’s hardly a good strategy to lead one’s life.  It’s better to manage multiple aspects concurrently, and not try to drop any one thing in favor of another.

That’s an old idea that perhaps should be put to bed.

Instead, we should adopt the notion that it’s always about time management, and lots of other things as well.  They must all be carefully tended in order to live a productive life.

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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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Time Demand: A Confusing Definition Cleared Up

In different posts here on 2Time, I have defined time demands as commitments that we create to complete actions in the future.

They are created by the individual in his/her own mind.  While they are essentially inventions of the mind, they do accumulate in one’s memory, and they disappear or cease to exist once the action has been completed.

That definition seems simple enough, and I use it when I’m teaching a class to illustrate this important concept.  A simple example would be watching a television commercial that advertises a discount at your favorite restaurant.  You decide to visit before the offer expires, and immediately write down the day and time that you are thinking of visiting.

Where I’m a bit confused at the moment is what happens in the electronic world.

Does a time demand get created when you receive an email in your Inbox (without being aware of it) or when you glance at it for the first time and form an impression that there is something for you to do about it, or with it?

Is the fact that you have an email Inbox an open invitation to receive time demands?  Is every message therefore a time demand?

The answer to that seems to be “no.”  Just because someone sends you email doesn’t mean that it’s a time demand of any kind, any more than junk mail in your P.O. Box is a time demand.  Or a piece of paper that randomly blows into your yard, or an instruction shouted in your direction in a crowded subway.

Information in an email, or on paper, or in the sound waves only become a time demand when they are converted from words by a live recipient.  An instruction shouted at a group of people, for example, would only be a time demand for a few.

This might clear up some of my confusion when it comes to email.  I can see that email sent to you isn’t a time demand until you have read it.  The problem that many have is that they skim rather than empty their email Inboxes, especially when they don’t know what to do with an item once they have determined that it includes valid time demands.

However, does the fact that you have an email Inbox mean that you are inviting potential time demands, and therefore committing to process messages from everyone who send you  email?

I say not.  But I could be wrong.  Legally, a piece of mail that gets sent via registered mail must be accepted by a live person who accepts responsibility for it.  That’s not what happens with email.

There is no way to legally guarantee anything via email, even if the the sender hits the right buttons.

Someone who decides to set up an email Inbox and never checks it isn’t breaking the law by any means.  However, they are displaying White belt behaviors, and possibly allowing time demands to fall through the cracks.

I’d got a bit further and say that anyone with an email Inbox that’s used by the public is wise to treat any piece of email as a time demand in and of itself, whether or not it includes anything useful.  You are committing to spend even a fraction of a second reading, making a  decision and disposing of the message. This is true even for Spam that warrants a peek before permanent deletion.

Those fractions add up, of course, which is why many fear a buildup of email from being on vacation.

So, the best practice I’d suggest is to treat each piece of email as a time demand before it’s read, with the understanding that it might lead to even further time demands.

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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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New Terminology for Scheduling

Now and then I find that here on 2Time I am forced to craft a new word for a concept that doesn’t quite have the right definition.  For example, “time demand” is a phrase I had to coin in the absence of any other, to describe the basic unit of stuff that we deal with every day.

I need another term to describe a “booked” period of time in one’s schedule.

If you are new to this site, you may not know that a time demand is Captured and Emptied into one of several places.  A schedule is one possible destination for a newly Emptied time demand.

Once it gets placed in a schedule, it can either be “hard” or “soft” depending on what other time demands depends on its completion, and what consequences occur if the action fails to occur.  It gets transformed from it’s original status as a free-floating commitment, and now has the following characteristics:
– a clear description of the action to be taken (and hopefully a clear understanding of the outcome)
– a start-time
– and expected end-time (and therefore a duration)

These are the basics, but there are other important attributes that usually aren’t captured in one’s schedule, such as:
– dependencies in both directions
– other people who may be participating
– location
– importance
– dollar costs
– consequences if it’s not completed
– the degree to which the time estimate is unbiased
– the distribution of the estimate

The problem I have is I don’t have a name or word for a scheduled time demand.  Here are a few I have tried:

Appointment — this is OK for White Belts who only record meetings with others in their calendars, but it becomes a problem for Yellow and Orange Belts.  When they need to schedule a solo activity they are forced to talk about “appointments with themselves”… which simply sounds weird, if not a bit tacky.

Occasion — let’s see, where is my black tie?  This isn’t a bad one, but it sounds a little official, and doesn’t conjure up everyday time demands like doing the laundry, which definitely isn’t anything special.

Time-slot — a bit dry, I have used this term more frequently, even though it sounds as if some decision has been pre-determined to some degree.

Designated time / time period / time-gap — these all sound clunky and have a bit of the pre-determination that time-slot carries.

Space — sounds too much like something physical rather then temporal.

Segment — promising…  I am thinking of the term in radio or television terms, in which a certain period of time is used for a particular program.  The only part I don’t like is that the word “segment” seems to imply that the time-period it describes is being used for something particular, when in fact it might not be used at all.

The winner is… “segment.”  Unless someone can come up with a better term!  Let me know if you have a suggestion.

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Does Comfort Kill Productivity?

Here on 2Time I advocate the idea that one can move from one level of skill in time management to another, once the pathway is known.

I also add that it’s fine to decide to stay exactly where one is at the moment, and not have any interest in improvement.

However, I’m not sure that I support the idea of getting stuck at any one level because comfort is one’s goal in life.

This interesting article clarifies something that’s bugged more for some time… ever since a friend of mine told me many years ago that is goal in life was “comfort.”

What do you think: “Why Comfort is a Productivity Killer.”

It reminds me of that passage in one of my favorite books;  The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran.

On Houses

Then a mason came forth and said, “Speak to us of Houses.”
And he answered and said:
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger body.
It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? And dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But these things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?
Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron.
It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh. It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
And though of magnificence and splendour, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

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If You Can’t Get Everything Done…

It’s tempting for people who are “into” time management to claim that getting everything done is a sign of being productive.

Instead, I think it’s a matter of stifling your creativity.  What’s the connection?

I have noticed over the years of leading time management programs that bright, creative people are always coming up with new things to do.  Their minds are working non-stop – not out of any compulsion, but from a love or passion for what they do.  Their penchant for continuous improvement means that they are always working on ways to make their life better, and the more clear their minds are, the more good ideas come to them, and the more time demands are crafted.

Creative, committed people never stop coming up with new time demands, and expect to be on their death-beds thinking about new stuff that they could be doing if they weren’t busy lying down dying!

The fact is, if your mind is free it will always be coming up with more stuff to do than you can possibly fit into a day, month, year or lifetime.  If it isn’t doing so, then you may want to take a look at what might be blocking it from the natural energy that wants to be expressed.

For some, it’s a sense of suppression.  Others are bitter and angry.  A few stifle their creativity and lose their childlike sense of wonder at the world.  Many are going to work every day feeling overwhelmed and burdened.

Once you are free to create, however, there are no limits, and you must learn to let go of the expectation that everything you think you want to do will ever get one.  In fact, once you accept that everything isn’t going to happen in the time that you want it to, then you realize that choosing what to work on next also means choosing what to ignore.

Your perspective shifts…. being productive now means making smart choices about work that empowers the direction you want to go in. That’s a lot different than scrambling to get stuff done each day, thinking that one day your plate will be empty.

I have met some professionals who check email as soon as they awaken from sleep in the morning, and spend the rest of the day chasing after the hottest item that is tossed to them in each moment.  At the end of the day, they have done a lot, but accomplished little of value, and they are left with a feeling of guilt… as if they should be good enough to get everything done each day.

The guilt is unnecessary… simply give up thinking that your mind is limited, and surrender to the fact that you are a source of infinite ideas, and that it’s a bad idea to pretend to be otherwise.