Brilliance in Systems Thinking

samcarpenter_186x305.jpgAs I mentioned in the prior post, I have just finished reading Sam Carpenter’s book — Work the System.

I am a bit in awe of what he’s written, and the fact that he’s written it as a business-owner, rather than a management theorist.

What has really got me excited, however, is that he perfectly echoes, in general terms, the essence of the 2Time approach.

It’s a bit uncanny, really, but if you are a reader of this blog, I invite you to draw your own conclusions about the general principles he has derived, and the ones I describe here on the blog.

He says, for example:

Here is the system-improvement concept in a nutshell:  For a given primary system, in order to ensure that the desired result occurs over and over again, the task is to adjust that primary system’s subsystems so the correct components are being used and they are sequenced properly.

In essence, this is the 2Time approach to Time Management stated a bit differently.  I discovered, to my astonishment, that I have basically followed the same steps he lays out in the book:

1. define the systems and subsystems (i.e. time management and it’s 11 inescapable fundamentals)

2. examine the subsystems, and analyze their components one by one, looking for opportunities for improvement(i.e. focus on building new habits one at a time)

3. make the system improvements, moving each system to peak efficiency.  Document the new procedures (i.e. in the system of Belts moving from white to green.)

Anyone who is familiar with Michael Gerber’s book, The eMyth, will recognize that his ground-breaking book says very similar things from a slightly different perspective, and without contradiction.

Carpenter spends a great deal of time in the book sharing his own experience of  trying to manage a company using the “Whack a Mole” approach to fighting fires on a daily basis. It was debilitating, addictive and ultimately un-sustainable until he had a moment of satori – enlightenment – and saw that his business was one large system that was being poorly managed.  The way to escape the rat race that was killing him was to work on the subsystems.

He argues against the kind of wishy-washy thinking that the focus away from solid, tangible mechanics, and urges company-owners to look for the tangible processes that are falling apart in front of their eyes, while they have been chasing after the fallout.

The problem with a lack of systems thinking is that when bad things happen, we chase after the results to try to correct them, without being able to see the causes correctly.

In a way, this is what people struggle with in their time management, also.

There is stress in their lives, broken promises and forgotten commitments, and they don’t know why.   They place the problem in the wrong mental category, thinking it has something to do with the kids, their own tendency to procrastinate, their ethnicity, the demands of their job, their need for a vacation, etc.

When the factor that they think is the cause changes either by luck or design, they are stunned to find out that peace of mind doesn’t come as they thought it should.

All that’s happened is that they don’t understand how time management systems work… how they ALL work, and that there’s certain inescapable, common design that they must follow in order to function.

Carpenter says virtually the same thing about companies, but he doesn’t go as far as Gerber or I do in suggesting what the subsystems are.

Not a problem, because the book is a compelling autobiography that makes it seem easy to make the journey he has made. He encourages business-owners to figure out their own sub-systems, launch their own improvement programs, come up with their own foundation documents and develop their own language to keep it all together.

At the most, this book is a brilliant business-book that every business owner should read, right before Gerber’s.

At the very least, it has helped me to see my own learning curve, from my degrees in operations research, through Peter Senge, via Michael Gerber and to this point where he echoes the underlying logic of 2Time.

What is clear is that he is elevating systems thinking and acting to a discipline in and of itself, and this is one of the book’s major contributions.  He has made a powerful addition to the work Peter Senge did in the 1990’s to bring “systems thinking”to the fore in his book The Fifth Discipline.

I recommend it wholeheartedly.  Download Work the System here.

Work the System – Now Free

work-the-system.jpgI had the unique fortune of visiting the Work the System website while the book is being offered for free.

While I write a review of the book, I want to invite you to “grab it while you can.”

According to the Work the System website, the book is available for download only until July 27th, 2009 — that’s tomorrow.  While it might very well be extended, this is an excellent book that’s well worth the five minutes it will take to download it.

Download the Work the System e-book here.

An Argument for Time Management 1.0

While this blog is written to explore Time Management 2.0, I am starting to think that there is an argument for Time Management 1.0.

What’s the difference?

In Time Management 1.0, users were told to follow a prescription laid out by a guru.   The details were quite specific — follow this, do that, organize yourself this way, use these strange terms, follow the system, everything will work out.

In Time Management 2.0 the onus is on the user to create time management systems of their own that fit their personalities, habit patterns and needs.  Users come to realize that there is no way that someone can devise a system that works for everyone.  Instead of looking for the perfect system to adopt, they go looking for principles that they can use in their own time management systems, with a twist here and there to improve the odds of it working.

But what about the rank novice, or white belt?  They made it through grade school, which indicates that they have some kind of idea of how to manage their time.   However, they stumble along in life, forgetting appointments, being late, and experiencing the stress that comes from feeling overburdened.

At this point, they are not aware that they are  using a time management system, albeit one that was not intentionally developed.  The habits they are employing on a daily basis were not chosen, or practiced.  Some are good, and some are bad, but the novice remains blissfully unaware.

From what  I can tell, they continue until they hear a clear message that causes them to reflect on their situation that goes something like this: “Follow this new time management system and you will become much more effective, and have greater peace of mind.”

They do a quick comparison between their current situation, and the one described by the new time management system, and decide to learn all they can about the new one. They take a class, or read a book, but at the end of their period of learning, they are aware of some new things they are not doing, but are convinced they should.

They all face a similar challenge however, that few overcome — they now have a whole bunch of new habits that they need to implement, but they don’t know how.

A few are able to make some changes, but from what I can tell, most fail to implement what they have learned in a anything more than a cosmetic way.

Which brings me to the first question I posed at the top of this article — is it better for the novice to try to adopt someone else’s system, than it is for them to contemplate creating one of their own?  Is Time Management 2.0 an approach that is only for those who have “graduated” from 1.0?

I don’t know the answer — let me know your opinion on this one.

The Pomodoro Technique

I just came across an interesting technique for time management, which takes its name from the Italian word for “tomato.”

I briefly glanced through the pdf and decided to post it online to encourage others to read it and provide feedback here.  In the next week or so, I’ll also read it, and post up a follow-up article.

The45 page pdf can be downloaded at the following link:  The Pomodoro Technique

Bit Literacy — part 9 — Requiring an Email Response

One of the mysteries of managing my email has been trying to figure out how to manage follow-up email.

The scenario is well-know to users of Outlook or any other email program.

You send an email to someone who you need a response from.  To compound matters, the response is needed by a certain time so that you can get on with doing other important activities.

As I say here in the 2Time blog, the point of high quality time management is to get to the point where you don’t have to remember anything whatsoever. Sending an email and trying to remember to follow-up if there’s no response by a certain violates that principle entirely, yet it’s the option I use more often than not.

There are, however, better choices available.

One is to blind copy yourself on the email and store it in some folder or, even better, in your calendar with a reminder.

Another option is to put some kind of code in the body of the email, and use a filter to place a copy of all the emails with that special code in a special folder.

Yet another option is to use some third-party software that does all the above once you remember to active the option when sending the email.

Finally, there is a fourth option I recently discovered in Microsoft Outlook 2007 in which a reminder can pop up a set time after the email has been sent.

I have tried all these “solutions” and I find them to be inadequate.

The main reason is that it’s difficult to remember to take the extra step  just before hitting the Send button. They ALL require me the remember t odo something specific that I currently don’t  have as a regular habit.

Instead, I wish there were a way to set the extra option as the default, because most of the email messages I send do require some kind of response.

Here’s how it would work.

When I click on the Send button, the program would offer me either a chance to enter the date and time of the followup reminder, or allow me to reject the reminder completely.

An added bonus would be for the program to recognize when a response to the email comes into my inbox with the same subject line.  If it recognized the response and immediately deleted the followup reminder, I’d be ecstatic!

If anyone knows of any program that provides the functionality I described, please let me know, as I’m sure that I’m not the only person who is trying not to use their memory for this particular task.

Bit Literacy — part 8 — Newsletter

newsl-hugopardo-paloalto-digitalismo-384823-l.jpgBit Literacy has some sound advice when it comes to reading and processing  electronic newsletters (or zines.)

The first recommendation is to scan newsletters once before deleting them.

I began this practice about a year ago, and have found that it works much better then trying to shove all my newsletters into a single folder in Outlook.  As you might suspect, the newsletter folder simply became overwhelmed with hundreds of unread items.

The discipline of reading a newsletter once it’s downloaded has a variety of side benefits.  One is that it ensures that if I am downloading the newsletter, then I should only do so when I actually have the time to process and read it, along with all the other items coming into my inbox.  This prevents me from doing half-ass scans of my inbox, leaving unread and unprocessed email to sit around and accumulate into the hundreds and thousands.

Making this work requires some training, and some chutzpah.

The training takes place with the people in your life, who must come to learn that email is an unacceptable medium for urgent messages.  The chutzpah is required with people like your boss, your spouse / S.O. and your parent, as you decide that the old ways of contacting you are going to change.

Depending on your preference, you may decide that IM, text, phone calls or personal visits are the new ways to send you urgent messages.  Some people set up special email addresses (such as [email protected].) with specific instructions that it should be used for emergencies.

Millions, however, choose instead to purchase iPhones, Pre’s and Blackberries so that they don’t miss a single important email.  However, continuously scanning your email inbox is a poor strategy, as in addition to the permanent distraction that the device becomes, there is the fact that scanning for the 1 email in 1000 that’s urgent, leaves 999 to be processed later, clogging up the email inbox for a time that never seems to come.

For many, this kind of life fast becomes one that they don’t want, leading them to lose, disable or breaking their US$500 email devices so that they can untether themselves from their email.  The fact is, they lack the chutzpah that’s needed to demand different behaviour from others.

The second recommendation the book makes is to manage one’s electronic reading in a very explicit way.

One group of items belongs in the “Stars” category of items that are read on a regular basis, or from beginning to end.  Another group belongs to the “Scans” which deserve only a a once-over because only some of their content is useful some of the time.

The last group comprises “Targets,” which includes items that are read for a specific single purpose, such as forwarding them to others who are interested in the topic.

Both sets of recommendations are sound, and I’ll be trying out the latter to see how well it works for me.
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Bit Literacy — part 7 — Todo List Failure

planes-raptor-1312631-l.jpgOne of the key recommendations of Bit Literacy is that one should take todos and schedule them onto lists that belong to particular days. It argues that a single todo list quickly becomes overwhelming, and that the items should instead be allocated to lists that belong to separate days in the future.

It’s not a bad approach, and represents an improvement over the raw todo list.  For a user with a certain, low number of time demands, it could function well.

Above a certain number of time demands, however, this technique also becomes overwhelmed, especially when a user attempts to attach priorities to each item on each day, as recommended by Bit Literacy.

The reason this happens has everything to do with the failure of todo lists to cope with the volume of time demands that working professionals have to deal with in todays’ working world.

The major shortcoming of todo lists is that they force users to keep mental schedules.

This works against one of the general purposes of time management systems which is to keep as little in memory as possible, and as much as possible in some kind of system, whether it be electronic or paper-based.

If we could climb inside the mind of a user of todo lists for a moment, we would see that when they try to schedule a todo for a particular day, they actually do a mental scan of what they have to do each day, before assigning the todo to that day.

Because the scan of their mental schedule is a memory-based activity, it is likely to be faulty.

Also, when the user assigns priorities to a task, they are encouraged by Bit Literacy and other systems to work on the higher priority items first.

In other words, they are using the priority system as a rough method for scheduling.  It’s a method that’s unlikely to work for long, because it ignores many other variables such as the user’s physical location,  the length of the task, it’s due date, who else needs to be involved, what information is needed, etc. All these factors must be considered in the heat of the moment, as a user makes a decision about what to work on next.

It’s also not uncommon for someone to end up with enough high priority items to fill an entire week.  At that point, the priority system becomes useless — 100 items of the highest priority obviously means that nothing is a priority.

Some systems do try harder to make the priority approach work, and try to use all the variables it can include to derive a composite score. But at the end of all the computations, it’s easier to upgrade one’s approach to scheduling, and to move from a mental schedule to an electronic one that requires no system of priorities whatsoever. Out the window goes A’s, B’, C’s and 1’s, 2’s and 3’s.

In comes more advanced, simpler skills, and a schedule that looks like what we call here in 2Time and Orange Belt schedule rather than a White Belt schedule. (See the Article on Scheduling for more details.)

For professionals who must deal with a great number of time demands, this is the only approach that helps them to deal with a significant number of time demands.

To borrow a term from Bit Literacy, it’s also the only approach that “scales,” or in other words can be used to handle time demands at all volumes.
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Bit Literacy — part 6 — Time Induced Anxiety

reachstar.jpgIn Bit Literacy, the author makes a brilliant insight, which confirms for me that the book is probably 3-5 years ahead of its time.

He quotes a book by Richard Saul Wurman from 1989 titled Information Anxiety: “One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.  Realizing your own limitations becomes essential to surviving an information avalanche; you cannot or should not absorb or even pay attention to everything.”

(1989???? That was before the term “internet” was coined, and only a handful of scientists had access to each other’s computers via a handful of modems and dedicated lines long before the world wide web was conceived.)

Bit Literacy and Information Anxiety have hit the nail on the head.

In Bit Literacy, the author lists all the ways that information flows to us, and due to the fact that the book was written in 2007, it hardly mentioned blogs and podcasts, and makes no mention of Twitter, Blackberries or iPhones.  In 2 short years, the volume of infromation has only increased.
He also goes on to say that the natural reactions to information anxiety are:

– to live by reaction, responding to each piece of information that appears and demands attention

– to opt out, which is to avoid the problem entirely by living in an ignorant bliss

– to practice bit literacy, by paying attention to some information, and letting the rest go

What struck me is how true the sentiment is for “time anxiety.”

After all, to rephrase the author: “one of the most anxiety-inducing effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to DO it all.”

Let’s look at that more closely.

Walking by a library does not induce anxiety in the minds of most people.  All that information in all those books does nothing except to sit there on shelves, resting on pages.

Strolling by a hard-drive filled with information doesn’t do anything either.  Carrying a number of USB drives in a briefcase seems not to add to our stress levels.

However, one letter received six weeks ago, a single unreturned phone call or 2 unreplied emails can cause more stress than 100,000 unread books.

The only difference  is a thought that we have in our heads — “we need to give a reply.”

That’s often followed by another thought — “but I don’t have enough time.”

What often accompanies that thought is a feeling of guilt coming from the notion that “I should have enough time.”

What compounds that feeling is a bit of an existential realization — “I’ll never have enough time.  My mental grasp will always exceed my reach.  I am likely to die without ever getting to the bottom of the list of things I believe I should do.”

Or maybe that’s taking things a bit too far…. or is it?

After all, the time anxiety that we feel does not come from the books in the library or the websites on the internet, it comes from us.  As human beings, we are incapable of confronting the sea of information without having some version of the train of thoughts I mentioned above.

The expectation that we place on ourselves that we should do everything that our thoughts tell us we should do, might be a useful place to look for answers.  That might be something that we can change.

According to the Work of Byron Katie, these thoughts that appear in our heads can be successfully questioned, and we don’t need to believe them.  We also don’t even need to become better at managing time demands or Bit Literate, or better at GTD®.

It would be actually be easier for us to implement these techniques if we could free ourselves from the anxiety, guilt and untrue thoughts that creep into our minds incessantly, and we could grasp the fact that at the end of it all, our thoughts are not a reliable guide to what should be accomplished in a lifetime.
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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.

On Bit Literacy – part 5 – Todos and Scheduling

One confusing aspect of Bit Literacy is a contradiction  that I found in the discussion around ToDo’s:  the book calls for scalable solutions, while in the same chapter it describes 2 solutions that seem to ignore that sound advice, because they scale well.

The author makes the point that many emails create the need to engage in future action, and make future commitments.  In Bit Literacy, these are called “Todos” and they seem to be equivalent to what we call “time demands” here in the 2Time system.

Bit Literacy advocates assigning Todo’s to future days, and offers a software service to help get this done.  For example, an action item such as “call purchasing department” would be designated for Friday, and added to a list of actions for that day.

Neither the software, nor this approach scale well, but for quite different reasons.

First the software.

As a web-based service, it allows a user to send him/herself an email which the program converts into a todo that will be displayed only on a particular day.

It’s a neat idea, but for people who don’t have access to portable email devices, it’s hardly one that can be used unless the user has a desk job.

The good news is in a few years I can imagine that the software will be available to use all, and that we’ll enjoy access to email through devices as small as a watch.  While it’s easy to see this happening in the future, it’s not something that is very widespread today, as only a few million people worldwide own these devices.

The bigger issue is that time demands, or todo’s,  (especially in a setting like a meeting) tend to arrive faster than they can be converted into email in the average group conversation.  The same applies to ideas being generated from a brainstorming session.

The use of an electronic device as a Capture Point is a neat trick, but it doesn’t scale well as the  number of items increases.  In my experience, I have sometimes have difficulty writing down all the action items from a meeting, even when I am using only a pad and pen.

More important is the critical decision that must be made in the heat of the moment — “What day should I assign the item to?”  That is a decision that requires some reflection, especially for those who have busy days with little slack time.

As an example of where this system doesn’t scale well, let’s look at a typical todo assignment that’s made in the heat of the moment.

Imagine for a minute a typical meeting of 5 people; the kind that occurs every day in the corporate world.

At the beginning of the meeting, the convenor might announce that there will be a follow-up meeting on a day that is convenient for all attendees for one hour. Using the Bit Literacy system, users must go to their mental calendar to determine whether or not there is time on Friday the 17th to attend the meeting, given the todos they have assigned to that day.

However, whether they consult a mental list or electronic list is not the most difficult part.  They must make a spur of the moment estimate of the time it takes to do each todo, and then they must calculate the available time.  They must take into account the amount of time each item takes, and consult their mental schedule to see if they have any spare time.

This is not a problem when there are only 2 small todos assigned to Friday the 17th.  On a small scale, this can work well.

However, when I have 9 or 20 or 50 todos for that day, I have a problem.

The calculations about whether or not I can meet on that day for 60 minutes are, at some point, going to give me a headache.  The level of headache depends on the number of todo’s, the nature of the items and our own idiosyncrasies.

Bouncing Todo’s from one day to another only works if there are days that are relatively free of todo’s in the required time frame.

At the end of it, we all have our individual level of tolerance, and the approach described by Bit Literacy becomes a problem once that level is attained.

Bit Literacy implies that the answer is not to hide from odo’s, but instead to employ a system that will allow for a greater capacity to deal with these todo’s.

This very much echoes the approach taken in this blog, in which the the answer might be given in this form: move from a Yellow to Orange Belt in the practice of scheduling.

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On Bit Literacy – part 4 – Letting Go

palm-947511170_dea998692f.jpgAnother one of the key ideas in Bit Literacy is that “letting bits go” is a critical frame of mind to maintain.

Letting bits go simply means that a user of an email system is better off deleting freely, early and often, rather than keeping stuff around just in case it’s needed later.  Mark Hurst, the author, makes the case that it’s the only way to get to empty.

It’s not too hard to predict that in    the future we can expect more and more bits to come our way.  The key is to develop an approach to deal with the increase.

The one thing that we do experience a shortage of is the energy and attention to engage all these bits, or pieces of information.

In 2Time terms, I’d say that we need to take control of our time management systems, and be prepared to upgrade the underlying practices once we understand that the current system is unable to cope.  As the upgrades take place, we must train ourselves to let go of more and more information, as it’s not too hard to predict that the amount of information coming at us is only going to increase.

Without any hard evidence, I’d go a step further and predict that the amount of data coming at us is increasing faster than our ability to use it.  In other words, if today we are using 10% of what comes at us, tomorrow we’ll be using 9.

This notion uses one of the principles that Bit Literacy rightly focuses on — that any approach we use must be “scalable.”  In other words, our approach to time management must be flexible enough to grow, evolve and adapt to changing volumes, technology and circumstances.

In addition to feeling comfortable letting go of bits, I would add that we must feel comfortable with the idea of abandoning old habits for new ones, in favor of upgrading our time management systems.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the time management system of a 13 year old is not suitable for a 30 year old.

Also, a time management system built for 1991 is probably not “bit-ready” for 2010.

Overall, it’s an easy concept to grasp, but in the midst of a warm comfort-zone, it’s difficult to give up the tried and true for the promise of something new.

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