What Happened to Smart Technology Choices?

Corporations making large-scale technology changes have learned over the years that it’s a big mistake to go out and buy the biggest, newest flashiest product available on the market without first doing a thorough study of the company’s needs.

In fact, there are procurement guidelines set up for precisely that purpose and best practices that govern the process so that all the right factors are appropriately weighed before a decision is made.  Some professionals make a career in this area, and have developed skills that are highly prized due to the critical nature of certain technology choices, and the high costs involved.

However, up until now, academics and corporate executives have focused on the purchase of single large, complex systems.  My research isn’t complete in this area, but I can’t find any critical thinking to help executives make another kind of technology decision that corporations make — the decision to equip their employees with individual, portable technologies like smartphones.

What are the differences between these kinds of decisions?

Purchasing a Single Large System
– the price per unit is high
– a failure is highly visible
– the processes and requirements are usually well defined before vendors are sought
– implementation, training and maintenance are seen as important elements of the process
– total-cost-of-ownership methods are used
– there is clear accountability for, and measurement of the business impact

Purchasing Smartphones
– the price per unit is low
– failures are almost invisible (such as a near-accident brought on by texting while driving)
– the processes that people use are not defined before vendors are sought
– no training is offered
– the cost of owning the gadget is seen as the price
– there is no-one accountable for the business impact, or any measurement

Here is an imagined “worst case process” that takes place when a company decides to make a smartphone purchase:

1.  The CEO or other executives fall in love with their new smartphones, as it enables them to communicate with each other outside hours, during vacations, weekends, sick days, holidays and from any point in the world
2.  They decide to make the units mandatory for all employees
3.  They offer no training, and no new company policies are crafted
4.  Anecdotal evidence floats up to the executive suite that the devices are being abused, and the CEO takes them seriously when he notices that his meetings at all levels are taking longer because at any moment, half the attendees are someplace in cyberspace via their smartphones.  Among his executives he seems unable to conduct a half hour conversation without someone stopping to answer a call, check email or send a text.  He learns that some companies are banning smartphones from meetings altogether, citing addictive behavior driving up the time spent in meetings
5.  He commissions a study which shows that among his employees, smartphones are being used in the following way:
– 85% are texting while driving
– 72% use their smartphones in the bathroom
– game playing and social networking are the most popular everyday use
– 80% use their device in meetings
– 28% are afraid that they’ll lose their jobs if they are not available on weekends
– 35% answer messages on sick days
– 45% check messages between 12am and 6am
– 70% believe that some overall productivity has been lost, even as 80% “enjoy” their device
6.  He decide to come down hard, and bans non-business apps from being used, blocks social networking and gaming websites and purchases a new technology to block internet access from smartphones within company vehicles, and meeting rooms
7.  The annual company survey reveals a new complaint — work-life balance is suffering as employees complain about being “always on” and required to be available to be at work even when they are trying to get away from work.  A quick check with IT reveals that the volume of email has exploded, driven by new messaging on weekends and holidays.  Also, they report that employees are taking inordinately long periods of time in picking up their gadgets for the first time, or retrieving them from the repair shop.
8.  The CEO establishes a joint team between IT/HR and Operations to look at the issue
9.  A followup study shows that 88% believe that overall productivity has fallen, and a mere 33% are “enjoying” their device
10.  The joint team recommends training for each employee, plus a raft of new policies about the company’s expectations of employees when they are not at work

If you can imagine this sequence of events, you can probably see that the initial error was to skip the customary needs analysis study that is required of large-system purchasing decisions.  The executive team, like many managers, made several assumptions about  their employees’ behaviors and needs.  What’s remarkable is that in this case, everyone is trying their best to save time and boost productivity, even as obvious mistakes are being made.

In most companies, however, a decision to provide employees with “time-saving technology” is made without a good understanding of the complexity of individual behavior in the area of time management.  They don’t take into account the fact that each employee has a unique, home-made productivity system that they put together for themselves as young adults or teenagers.

Employees lack the skill needed to evaluate their time management systems, in order to decide how best to affect an improvement.  That’s why so many unproductive, and unexpected habits cropped up in the “worst-case” described above.  The time-saving technology ended up affecting employee safety, productivity, etiquette and hygiene in negative ways.

Fortunately, there is a great deal that can be learned from the methods used to purchase large systems:
Lesson 1 — understand the current system to be improved.  In this case it means, bring every employee to the point where they understand their current time management system
Lesson 2 — help employees determine the gaps in their current systems, by giving them access to best practices
Lesson 3 — look for process changes that need to be made.  In the case of individuals, this translates into new habits, practices and rituals of time management
Lesson 4 — source new technology
Lesson 5 — train employees to use the new technology within company guidelines and policies
Lesson 6 — monitor the implementation and adjust as necessary

The case described above is not an example of one large mistake, but instead it involves a small mistake repeated many times.  The end-results are no different, but the lack of accountability for and measurement of individual productivity in most companies allows the problem to gain the momentum that it shouldn’t.

If there’s a place to start at a high level it might be to clearly assign responsibility for individual employee productivity to one executive, and give them the authority to decide on how best to use technology to make improvements.

P.S.  This is a new area of research for me, so I’d appreciate any related sources of information that you might know of.

Why New Employees Struggle with Time Management

In the area of time management, it turns out that some vital skills we picked as kids have to be un-learned, if we have an interest in being successful working adults.

Grade school and high school turn out to be nothing more than extended memory tests for many people.  A bunch of facts and techniques are thrown at them, and their challenge is to remember as much of them as possible, mostly in order to pass tests, quizzes and exams.  Good students are the ones who are able to recall this information when tested, and they come to take pride in their ability to remember even trivial information, such as the names of all the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period.

This ability to commit data to memory, and to recall it at will, quickly becomes a habit that they apply not only to factual information but also to their future commitments, such as “the meeting 2 weeks from Friday with the marketing department.”

Here at the 2Time website, we refer to the latter as “time demands” — commitments that ones makes to oneself to complete a task at some point in the future.  For example, a commitment to “pick up the milk on the way home” is a time demand, whereas the route to the supermarket is different — it’s useful, factual information.

It turns out that we humans relate to these two kinds of information – time demands and factual data – quite differently, which is a useful thing, because they are in fact quite different.

Factual information, such as the route to the supermarket, carries with it an objective quality that is unchanging.  Time demands, on the other hand, are individual creations that exist only in the mind of their creators.  They are ephemeral in the sense that they have a finite lifetime – they come into being once they are created, and disappear once they are completed.

When we die, of course, they all vanish.

At the same time, they are critical to human beings as they allow us to think about and plan future actions, even if they are never written down.  You can hardly think about tomorrow without surveying the time demands that you have created for yourself that you think you should complete in that 24 hour cycle.

In very early grades, we are taught to manage time demands by keeping a schedule of classes so that we turn up at the right place at the right time, and we are taught to write down our homework so that we don’t forget.

Smart students eventually learn to discard both practices as they get older, and instead use they learn to use their finely tuned memory to manage these time demands.  This works well for the most part because they have few time demands to juggle.  After all, there are no bills to pay, and their weekly schedule of activities is a simple one to follow.  They can’t understand how their parents could forget simple time demands, like picking them up from school to take them to soccer practice.

Very few time demands slip through the cracks as a result, and they conclude that others (like their parents) who suffer from frequent mishaps, as just not as smart.

They take this practice with them into the workplace, in their first jobs, and for a while it works.  They appear at meetings with nothing in their hands to wrote with, or on, and when asked will scornfully tell others: “Don’t worry, I’ll remember.”

However, the time comes when they don’t.

At some point, their habit of committing time demands fails, and it happens for any number of reasons.

One may be that their managers give them additional responsibilities, and assign them complex projects that are too big to be managed by even the smartest person.  Another might be that as they marry, have children, assume mortgages, handle finances, pay taxes, play roles in their communities, and jump on volunteer projects , the number of time demands rapidly increases.

Also, even the smartest notice that as they get older, their powers of recall start to fade.  They realize that their parents’ momentary inability to recall their own children’s names is a malady that is about to befall them.

They need to develop some new habits in order to continue to be as effective as they once were.  Some persist however, and convince themselves that they can do no better.  They insist that that “their plates are full,” “they have too much to do” and “get too much email.”  They blame their circumstances for the number of balls they drop each day — I’ve known some to conclude that they simply cannot seek a promotion, or accept a new project because they cannot imagine a way to craft the 26 hour workday they think is required to be successful.

The solution is a simple on to describe — adopt new habits that are required in order to handle a new volume of time demands.

It’s much harder to do, and many smart people develop never develop these new habits, insisting that they already have good time management techniques.

What they really mean is: “I’m the most productive person I know, and I already know everything I need to know about time management.”

For some, it’s not until they are shown a multi-belt system like the ones that I give them in MyTimeDesign or NewHabits classes, that they begin to see that there are people who are way more productive than they are, even if they don’t know them.

A few never get to learn the lesson, and instead they use their ability to think fast on their feet to talk themselves out of trouble.  This works for a while, but it never moves them up the ladder to greater productivity.  Instead, it just helps them stay stuck at a low standard… just a little bit better than those around them.

Unfortunately, learning new habits has nothing to do with being smart, and has more to do with being resilient, or stubborn, and more than a bit humble.

It’s difficult (and sometimes scary) to admit that your strengths don’t work as well as they should, especially when they have never really failed

Green Belt vs. White Belt Excuses

One of the key differences that I explain in my training classes between White and Green Belts is the excuses they give when something fails.

Let’s imagine that both are late for a function such as a wedding, by 30 minutes.

White Belts would often explain the error by using an excuse that’s memory based:
– “I forgot what time it started”
– “I couldn’t remember the directions”
– “Another appointment I didn’t recall came up at the last minute”

These excuses are consistent with the White Belt habit of using memory, following on the memory skills that were were all  taught in school.

On the other hand, a Green Belt who arrives at the same time would say something like:
– “My capture point was destroyed”
– “My emptying has broken down”
– “I didn’t follow my schedule”

In other words, they look for problems in their personal time management system, and attempt to diagnose it in a way that would allow for a permanent solution.

The White Belt, however, has no easy remedy, because there isn’t a tried and true way to improve memory, especially when it comes to time demands that get created each day.  Over time, in fact, their memory is likely to worsen, and so will their time management system.

White Belts depend on memory.  Green Belts depend on reliable systems.

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More on Time Demands

As I re-read my prior post on time demands, I started to have some additional thoughts.  Not second thoughts, but old ones that I failed to add.

In the original post I listed 8 characteristics of time demands that were a bit incomplete as far as my current thinking goes.  Here are some others:

Characteristic #9: There are a finite number of time demands in play at any point in time.  Some might be in our memories, while others sitting are in our time management systems.

Characteristic #10: Time demands differ from each other in time length, and in the mental time-slots we assign to each of them.  The actions to be taken to complete each one are also different.  However, a time demand may occupy a range of start and end-dates, or a range of durations for completion.

Characteristic #11: Time demands sometimes come bundled together in a single message, email or commitment.  For example, a single message might include several time demands, and a complex commitment such as a project might have to be broken down into numerous time demands.

The management of time demands differs widely from person to person, depending on their belt level.  Yellow Belts tend to put a great deal of effort into making lists of time demands sorted in different ways.   Some use contexts, others use priorities, a few use lists based on time horizons.

Orange Belts, however, have schedules in which they put all the time demands they have committed to complete.  Lists are used in other ways.

White Belts, of course, keep the majority of their time demands in their memory, and often talk about remembering and forgetting them.

Once time demands are well understood, it’s not too hard to envision them moving through different points of your time management system.
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Time Demands: Time Management’s Widget

It might be my training in industrial engineering and operations research, or just my love of factory environments, but I am still tinkering with the idea that the basic unit of time management is something called a Time Demand.

I just re-read a post I wrote back in 2007 on Time Demands and realized that there are some new concepts I need to add in that have become more clear as I’ve shared them in classes and here online.  I think of them as the widgets of time management, drawing on the times when I studied manufacturing, and the product being created was always a widget.

Time demands are invisible, and intangible, and are silently created by an individual when he/she decides to devote future time to accomplish some result.  In the 2007 post, I provide lots of examples.

For the purposes of this post, let’s imagine that you want to do some early work on your Christmas gift-list.

What prompted the decision is not very important, but the fact that you have created it means that you have placed a subtle pressure on yourself to get it done.

At that moment, all that exists is a mental commitment.  If you don’t write it down, or record it in some way outside your memory, then you will recall it at some future point when you happen to remember it, perhaps prompted by some event related to the season such as an advertisement on television.

Many people, however, choose to record their commitment in some way so that it enters their time management system in a manner that ups the odds that it won’t fall through the cracks.

What I have said so far can be summarized in the following:

Characteristic #1:  Time Demands are always and only created by the individual

Characteristic #2: Time Demands are comprised of a commitment to take action in the future

Characteristic #3: Time Demands disappear when they are not managed, and may never re-appear

Characteristic #4: Time Demands have a finite life-cycle from creation to disappearance

When Time Demands are reliably recorded for future use, they may be embodied in one or more more different ways. Here are some examples:

  • A note is written with a marker on a piece of paper and stuck to your fridge
  • An email that describes a Time Demand is kept in an Inbox or moved to a folder
  • A Post-It Note that mentions the Time Demand is stuck on your monitor
  • A letter you need to reply to is placed on your desk, where you won’t forget it
  • A string is tied around your finger
  • Your secretary is told to remind you of a Time Demand
  • You add a Time Demand to your To-Do List
  • In your calendar, you schedule a Time Demand
  • You leave an unfinished project in your garage to remind yourself to complete it
  • Before going to bed at night, you lay out your gym clothes where you can’t miss them so that you work out tomorrow morning
  • Today’s tweets are printed out and placed in a file

These are just some of the ways in which we give Time Demands some tangible reality, to prevent them from falling through the cracks.

After a Time Demand is created, it must be manipulated in order to move it from creation to completion.

After it’s created and stored, the next moment in its life-cycle occurs when it gets removed from its place of temporary storage.  On your fridge, you may have a reminder to yourself to make that Christmas list, and you decide to take the next step before the paper disappears.

This is a critical moment of decision, as the future of the Time Demand depends entirely on your next move.  You actually have some options at this point.

Option 1:  You decide to forget about making a list this year.  The recession is impacting your budget, and you throw the piece of paper away, never to think about it again.  A nice clear spot on the fridge now appears, awaiting your next Time Demand

Option 2:  You decide to make the list immediately.  Once you are done, the Time Demand disappears

Option 3:  Your note to yourself had included a website that helps people make gift-lists.  You store that site in your list of favorites for later use

Option 4:  You add the Time Demand to a To-Do list

Option 5:  In your calendar, you block out dedicated time to complete the Time Demand

Those are the 5 ways in which Time Demands can be handled, until they are brought to completion.  They help us to understand the other 4 characteristics.

Characteristic #5: Individual Time Demands can easily become lost in the clutter of other Time Demands

Characteristic #6: Time Demands can be manipulated and moved around a time management system at will

Characteristic #7: When a Time Demand has begun its journey within a time management system it can be safely forgotten, or dropped from active memory

Characteristic #8: Once Time Demands are completed, they disappear and cease to exist

Part of what I am attempting to do here is to catalog the universal nature of Time Demands so that those who have an interest in this area can start talking with a common language and concept.  In this sense, I am also saying that the 8 Characteristics are inescapable, and essential to an understanding of time management, much in the way that an understanding of the elements of an atom are necessary in order to do physics.

Once Time Demands are well understood, it becomes much easier to do other kinds of work related to the field of time management, such as:

  • helping a working professional carve out her own system
  • assisting designers of products that recommend specific habit patterns, such as those described by David Allen, Mark Forster, Sally McGhee, Neal Fiore and others
  • redesigning programs like Outlook and Gmail so that they do a better job of assisting users to manipulate time demands that enter their lives via email
  • coaching individuals who want to improve their personal productivity
  • writing better articles and books – fewer lists of simplistic tips and more solid insight into the way that time demands can be managed
  • creating apps for smartphones, and even reshaping their design, so that they promote productivity (rather than game-playing and other distractions)
  • researching the flow of time demands through an individual’s time management system with more precision using tools like digital simulation and
  • sum

The fact is, there is not a single employee in the world who is not constrained by the 8 Characteristics of Time Demands.  These characteristics are a simple fact of working life, and it’s better to understand how they work than it is to be unaware.

With greater understanding comes an ability to achieve more of the goals that we set for ourselves in our lives.

To illustrate the point, here are some slides from one of my live programs that I use to describe the idea that Time Demands make their way through our lives in a very structured way.  In the video, I use the language of the 2Time fundamentals — described elsewhere on this website.

P.S. This article is continued in a subsequent post, More on Time Demands

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A Treasure-Trove of Data on Time Management Needs

In prior posts I have made the point that Outlook and Gmail have become much more than email programs.

While they both started out as email managers, they have become the primary portals that people use to manage time demands of all kinds. I have argued that they do a poor job for the majority of users because they are designed for email management, rather than time demand management.

Recently, Google opened up a site to ask for suggestions on how to improve Gmail. So far, they have gotten 2844 votes on all aspects of the program, but to my biased eyes, it seems as if there is a theme emerging.

Instead of just using lists of tasks, users want to integrate them into their calendars. (In the 2Time ranking of skills, it equates to an upgrade from Yellow to Orange Belt in the practice of “Scheduling.”)

I read through a few hundred suggestions and it struck me that anyone who is interested in creating a time management portal could use the information as market research — after all, this is a lot of data gathered from some very committed users of Gmail who are essentially asking anyone to come up with something better than the Gmail portal they are forced to use now.

I am not too optimistic, however, that Google will be able to make the leap that users want.

As I read through the suggestions, voted on quite a few and added some of my own, it struck me that the worst thing to do would be to figure out the most popular requests and simply add them to the list of features to be developed in the next release.

That’s a little like polling one’s family members to find out which surgery they think Great-Grandpa needs in order to get better.  In other words, it’ a bad way to make a decision of this complexity.

What Google really needs is not a bunch of suggestions, but some kind of time management philosophy around which to design an entirely new kind of portal that will be fully integrated into Gmail, and Google Calendar in a holistic way that mimics the habit patterns that users are likely to follow.

In this blog I offer a philosophy of sorts, and there are a number of books and websites that do the same. Adding more features willy-nilly will simply leave the door open to a competitor who gets it, and offers users a portal that puts the task of email management in its place alongside a number of other tools that people use to manage their time.

This isn’t to say that the research Google is doing is useless. Far from it. But it needs a context or framework to make all those suggestions come to life, and to prevent Gmail from simply becoming another Outlook in terms of its zillions of features, and heavy ponderous feel.

Check out the suggestions or add your own here on the Google website.

If you have a comment or question about what I have said in this post, let me know below.

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Solving Some Nagging Issues with A Simulation Study

There are some time management issues that I have raised in my blog, and in my videos, that I believe can be answered using a digital simulation.

This diagnostic tool, which is taught in schools of operations research, is one that can be used to answer some of the specific conclusions I have drawn about time management systems.  (I just happen to have a Masters in the field, but the last time I designed a simulation was… let’s just say it was a long time ago!)

I have been looking at different programmes that can be used, and haven’t found a cost-effective tool that can be used to do some simple modelling.  Most of them are built for elaborate factory layouts and the like, but I’m looking to answer some simple questions such as:

  •  how much time can be saved using more scheduling and less listing?  At what number of time demands does it make sense to make the switch? (In 2Time it involves an upgrade from Yellow Belt Scheduling to Orange Belt Scheduling)
  • what’s the impact of a lot of email that’s stored in capture points for too long e.g. an email Inbox?  At what point does email volume require an upgrade in skills?
  • what happens when Acting Now is abused and we spend too much time pursuing certain time demands, disrupting our Emptying?
  • when work is interrupted by unwanted distractions, what’s the cost to a professional’s productivity?
  • what’s the impact of having instant access to email?

If you happen to know of any “lite” simulation tools floating around, please let me know!

There are lots of claims floating around about which time management techniques are better than others, and this is one way to make some general claims about which approaches are indeed an improvement, especially when the number of time demands increases, and new tools like smartphones become available.

I realize that at the end of the day everyone must use a personalized system that fits their habit pattern,  but that’s not to say that specific information about the habits we choose don’t have consequences. They do, and the more information we have about them, the better we can manage our own systems.

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Procrastination Article – A Point I Missed

istock_000001479642xsmall.jpgI wrote an article for the StepCase LifeHack website on the topic of procrastination after getting a bit pissed that the word was getting a bad name!

(If you read the article by clicking at the link below you’ll get the lame joke that I just made.)

It’s a serious article, however, on a problem that I think afflicts professionals from White to Green belt levels alike — being hobbled by what they call procrastination.

After writing it, however,  it struck me that I missed one tiny point.

What I didn’t mention are those people who make indefinite commitments without due dates, and instead make vague promises to themselves to do something in the future.  The thing never gets done as a result, or only after they think it “should” have been done.

This is also called “procrastination” but is it really?

I believe it’s also the same kind of mistake that I mention in the article… a real problem with the wrong label.  A better label for this particular problem would be “habits that need to be changed.”  In 2Time language,  it might mean upgrading one’s skills in 3 fundamental disciplines: Capturing, Emptying and Scheduling.

This would solve the problem of putting off vague promises indefinitely.

But how do we get over the problem that has so many saying:  “I procrastinate too much!” ?

The answer is over at the Stepcase Lifehack website in my new article — Click here to  read “Procrastination — NOT a Problem.”

P.S. Sorry for the gap in posts — I have been working hard on MyTimeDesign 2.0 for its January release, and I also moved homes here in Kingston.  Doing both made me procrastinate… in the good way!

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Outside and Slightly Elevated

istock_000006151593xsmall.jpgIn the book Work the System, author Sam Carpenter makes an observation about business systems that I think applies perfectly to time management systems.

Carpenter’s entire book represents a strong plea to business owners to step outside of their companies and manage them from a distance by identifying, understanding, and improving them. He makes the point, using his own experience, that business owners get lost in running their own companies, playing the game of “Whack a Mole” as each problem comes up.

In other words, Carpenter asks them to step out of the addiction of problem solving and into the world of systematic improvement. There’s more of a hint of Deming, Juran, and Taguchi in the air.

The result of this stepping out is a vantage point that’s “outside and slightly elevated.”

Carpenter’s book is an improvement on The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, which also advocates the same kind of systemic understanding. But Carpenter doesn’t step over the line to prescribe which systems comprise the typical business.

One of the weaknesses of Gerber’s book is that he does take that step, with mixed results.

The example given in Gerber’s book is that of a bakery, and the examples and system that Gerber describes are those of a typical retail store. Nothing wrong with that — unless you own a consulting firm, like I do. It’s impossible to use his template in whole, and instead users are left on their own, trying to figure out what principles Gerber used to come up with the essential systems. I was forced to do the same, modifying some systems and dropping others in an attempt to create a set of systems that fit my circumstances.

Carpenter doesn’t try to go that far. Instead, he focuses on teaching the principles that everyone can use to build their own systems.  His emphasis on taking a point of view that’s “outside and slightly elevated” is critical to this effort.

It’s also critical to building good time management systems.

When I tried to apply Covey, GTD®, DayTimer, and other systems when I moved to Jamaica, I found that none of them applied.  Like Gerber, they just went too far in trying to tell me which words to use, which files to create, which tools to use, etc.

Time Management 2.0 echoes Carpenter’s point of view: you must create, own, manage, and understand your own systems in order to effectively improve them. To do so, professionals must step outside of their day-to-day frenzy and ask themselves the following questions with respect to their time management systems that echo those from Carpenter’s book:

  • What do I want to accomplish?
  • What are the principles I should use in my time management system?
  • What practices and habits do I need to implement?

These are critical questions in the Time Management 2.0 approach, and they’re essential to producing a true breakthrough in time management for each professional, regardless of his or her job, industry, age, or country of residence.

Time Management 1.0 supposed that there could be a “one size fits all” approach to time management. I believe that the failure of so many people to implement prepackaged time management programs is due, in part, to the fact that new habits are hard to implement. I also think that when they’re prescribed by a guru who hasn’t taken the “outside and slightly elevated” point of view of an individual professional’s life, it’s impossible for most.

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Mission Control Productivity, FranklinCovey, GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company (davidco.com.)  2Time is not affiliated with or endorsed by the David Allen Company, Mission Control Productivity or FranklinCovey.

Download WorktheSystem Now!

In a prior post I mentioned that I was so impressed by a new book I read called Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, that I read it in only 2 sittings.

It’s available on Amazon and in book stores, but with my special arrangement with the author, Sam Carpenter, until August 20th you can download the pdf version for free from the author’s website.

To receive the pdf, visit the website workthesystem.com, find the “Special Book Promotion” window, and use the pass word 2Timepromo

Enjoy – and let me know what you think!

Francis

P.S. This link is good only through Aug 20th, and if you miss this 7 day window, you may not be able to download it again for free. Please let your friends know.

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