Applied Research in a World of Increasing Time Demands
Between June and October I haven’t posted a single time to my blog. I have a good reason… but the bigger story is that a new calendar software I was testing saved my skin.
Find out why at this post on my book’s blog and while you’re there, sign up for the exclusive private Beta i am excited to be launching.
How is it that the above graphic encapsulates the past few months I spent writing Perfect Time-Based Productivity – A Professional Approach? (The book is 90% complete and will be released in September on Kindle.) This graphic is a perfect example of some of what I had to do to bring it to this point. It shows:
These are just a few of the concepts I have wrestled into my book. To sign up for early notification including free launch bonuses, visit my book’s website and join the list for further information.
A few years ago, I remember talking with a friend who was telecommuting and saving an hour each way in traffic. At first, it sounded great! That is, until I heard about the electronic snooping, keystroke recording, logging and clicking in, and webcams that were used to track whether or not she was really working or goofing off.
It sounded worse than working in the office.
A couple of companies have moved in completely the opposite direction, and given their employees complete freedom to set their own hours. What’s remarkable is that these companies are are well-known national retailers: Best Buy and the Gap.
Not only are they allowing their employees the freedom to do this, but in a recent study of the results at Best Buy, those who chose to set their own hours were found to be taking better care of their health, experiencing less work-family conflict and reduced turnover (from 11% to 6%.)
While this is good news, it would be interesting to know what the impact might be on the productivity of the salespeople who are the targets of the ROWE program. (ROWE stands for “Results Only Work Environment.”) That would truly get the attention of forward-looking companies.
What caught my attention, however, was the fact that there was a control group that did not sign up for the ROWE program. It made me think that there might be some who are just not interested in that much freedom, and just want to collect a paycheck for doing a certain amount of work.
It also made me think that the company would do well to give their employees in the ROWE program an opportunity to upgrade their time management skills. Simply giving employees the ability to manage their own time does not necessarily mean that they are more effective.
In fact, giving them more freedom would make things more difficult for anyone who must now make a number of new decisions about how they schedule their time, for the very first time. Without higher skills, they could easily find that their productivity drops.
This isn’t as unusual as it sounds. Whenever we undergo major life changes, it’s often the case that a review and upgrade of our personal productivity is required, just to be as productive as we were before the change occurred.
For example, I moved my place of residence over the weekend to an older residence with a gorgeous view of the Jamaican interior. As beautiful as the view is, moving has always caused a dip in my productivity as habits that were prompted by the physical environment need to be re-crafted from scratch.
The effect of these major life changes, whether they be a relocation or a ROWE program, is tremendous, and they deserve to be respected as such. It’s a good time to revisit our time management systems to see whether or not they can, in fact, hold up.
(The picture above was taken yesterday morning, our first.)
I can’t imagine what this post has to do with time management… but yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in the US, and this video made me not only thankful for my mother, but also the life I have here in Jamaica.
Last week’s teleclass focused on the most recent research in time management, and how it can be used to improve the way we schedule our time, and change our habits. I used the research by Dezhi Wu and the authors of Change Anything as my primary sources of information, taking their best ideas that we’re working with here at 2Time Labs.
Here is the link to the teleclass, which you may also download.
Also, I want to give you access to a new way of teaching and learning time management via e-learning – using an interactive simulation that we developed. It’s a game of sorts, involving different choices you can make to help Brenda, a young professional, use the best time management techniques to navigate her first day back at work after a long vacation.
Here is the link to the simulation: “Brenda Returns from Vacation.”
A basic idea underlying Time Management 2.0 is the notion that one size / system can never fit all.
There are few places in books or on the Internet where this point is embraced, accepted and addressed in some form, and here’s one I stumbled across.
Kirsten over at the Being MultiPassionate blog has found some time to come up with a quiz that gives some insight into the kind of productivity system you should be implementing, based on your personality. It’s an interesting take on this very new idea — follow this link to take her short quiz.
One of the quarrels that I have with myself is… “Why Do You Insist on Putting All Your Ideas Out There in the Public?”
The answer isn’t too hard to figure out, now that I am writing “the book” in earnest. My ideas don’t gather steam and make sense unless I am actually spelling them out in words for other people to see. It’s a little like the difference between doing a live performance versus one that’s being recorded.
When I know something will be “out there” I write differently, in a way that not only enhances the standard, but also helps cement it as a building-block for further ideas and insights.
Writing “the book” isn’t much different. The part I’m having the hardest part with is not the ideas I want to include, but instead it’s the story around the learning that I want the protagonist, to experience.
To that end, I have found wonderful help from a book called “Techniques of the $elling Writer” by Dwight Swain. There are some memorable quotes in the book, which clued me in to the fact that it’s written very much along the lines of Time Management 2.0. The author claims that there are certain fundamentals of writing fiction that are simply inescapable, and it takes continuous practice in order to become proficient in each of them.
I almost fell out of my chair, especially when he stated:
“the skill of a skilled writer tricks you into thinking there is no skill.”
“You first have to be willing to be very, very bad, in this business, if you’re ever to be good. Only if you stand ready to make mistakes today can you hope to move ahead tomorrow.”
“Can you learn to write stories?
Yes.
Can you learn to write well enough to sell an occasional piece?
Again yes, in most cases. Can you learn to write well enough to sell consistently to Red-book or Playboy or Random House or Gold Medal? Now that’s another matter, and one upon which undue confusion centers.Writing is, in its way, very much like tennis. It’s no trick at all to learn to play tennis—if you don’t mind losing every game. Given time and perseverance, you probably can even work yourself up to where Squaw Hollow rates you as above-average competition.
Beyond that, however, the going gets rough. Reach the nationals, win status as champion or finalist, and you know your performance bespeaks talent as well as sweat.So it is with writing. To get stories of a sort set down on paper; to become known as a “leading Squaw Hollow writer,” demands little more than self-discipline.
Continued work and study often will carry you into American Girl or Men’s Digest or Real Confessions or Scholastic Newstime. But the higher you climb toward big name and big money, the steeper and rougher your road becomes.
At the top, it’s very rough indeed. If you get there; if you place consistently at Post or McCall’s or Doubleday, you know it’s because you have talent in quantity; and innate ability that sets you apart from the competition.
Now this doesn’t seem at all strange to me. The same principle applies when you strive for success as attorney or salesman or racing driver.Further, whatever the field, no realist expects advance guarantees of triumph. You can’t know for sure how well you’ll do until you try. Not even a Ben Hogan, a Sam Snead, or an Arnold Palmer made a hole-in-one his first time on the links. To win success, you first must master the skills involved. A pre-med student isn’t called on to perform brain surgery.”
Alrighty then… This isn’t a book about tips, tricks and shortcuts: the kind of stuff that’s killing time management training and learning.
Instead, it’s about honest hard effort to learn a craft that doesn’t yield it’s deeper secrets to anyone who simply picks up a pen.
In like manner, if you are serious about time management, don’t expect anything to change when you purchase your first Blackberry (even though you might feel more productive.) Getting better at time management, and becoming really, really good both take hard work.
I imagine that some would say that he’s being too discouraging but, as I have said in prior posts mentioning Usain Bolt and Andre Agassi, they didn’t arrive at the top by taking every silly piece of advice. Why should we?
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
A few weeks ago, I visited The Bahamas and mentioned to a NewHabits-NewGoals class that it’s becoming clear that companies need a way to communicate emergencies outside of email.
We had a discussion about the different reasons why email doesn’t work for immediate notifications and emergency requests:
1. not all email is delivered
2. sometimes email is diverted to a spam folder
3. too many people read email and don’t let the sender know that it was received
4. email messages are difficult to craft well and often result in mis-communication, especially when the content is emotional in nature
5. urgent messages can get lost in the hundreds of other pieces of email sent each day
and the biggest reason of all….
6. the practice of sending urgent email trains all employees to keep checking their messages continuously, just in case something important has just come in — making them all slaves to email – a pernicious and unproductive habit
The fact is, companies to establish alternate ways to communicate urgent messages, and avoid using email wherever possible.
Some have decided to use face to face conversations, phone calls, Skype or instant messages instead. The one thing these methods have in common is that they are synchronous communications that allow for immediate responses, and some degree of negotiation back and forth about how quickly an issue should be addressed, and whether it’s more important than every other time demand someone might have.
It would help the millions of people who waste time checking their email tens and even hundreds of times per day, just in case something juicy has come in within the past few minutes. Too many companies are encouraging their employees to become “more responsive” via email, and fast responders to urgent email, even as they damage their own productivity and that of others.
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In the 2Time system, there is a critical point that must be crossed to make the jump from a Yellow Belt to an Orange Belt. At this point, a professional must change two major habits at once, doing much less Listing and more Scheduling.
This is no mean feat.
I’ll be covering this switch and all that it means in a series of posts, but let me start off by giving the reasons why someone would want to make such a major change.
Most adults who grew up without computing resources learned how to make lists somewhere in their teens or early twenties. These were paper and pen lists that were intended as memory joggers. They easily and cheaply expanded individual effectiveness, and allowed one to work on a greater number of time demands than their memories could manage. The results were easy to see: homework that would have been forgotten was remembered, phone numbers that would have been lost forever were stored later and the skimmed milk made it to the fridge at home as a result of a trip to the corner store.
At some point, they also learned to use a calendar as a method for scheduling meetings and appointments. The first appointment calendars were modeled after the ones used in doctors’ offices, and only included a few items. These were also built with paper and pens or pencils.
Most time management books stop at this point, and advocate this approach, with only minor variations. Some emphasize the way in which the lists must be categorized and sorted. Others say that the key list needs to be limited to only what can be done on that day, and other lists should be kept of future time demands.
There are a few systems, however, who advocate the upgrade to Orange Belt Scheduling, and it’s a shift that’s ctually being driven by today’s college students.
Smartphone, laptop and iPad penetration in tertiary institutions have placed powerful productivity tools at the hands of millions of smart kids. They aren’t limited to paper and pen like their parents were. Instead, they have a choice of using electronic calendars in a variety of devices.
For example, their classes are scheduled on their electronic calendars, and not on paper. When they sign up for a class, their schedule is instantly updated. Once that happens, many go the extra step and schedule other important activities that must be done if they are to be successful.
Most of who are effective will also create a study schedule at the same time, and if they are realistic they’ll also set time aside for life’s other essentials such as meals, exercise social time and leisure. Here is an example of a Darden School of Business student who has done just that.
He hasn’t scheduled all his meals, or exercise, and he hasn’t included all his study time, but you can imagine that this is an important part of his plan for doing well that semester.
The reason that a schedule like this works so well is that students have a tremendous number of time demands to manage in any given week, and any item that falls through the cracks is likely to produce an immediate impact on their grades or some other part of their lives.
At the same time, it’s not too hard to see that managing an electronic schedule of time demands is more efficient than the alternative: keeping a list of these same items to be done each week.
Listing is a very efficient method for tracking a low number of time demands, and it was a decent tool to use before the advent of internet communication. Now, life is different, with the average professional facing hundreds of time demands each day.
The old method of keeping a list on paper no longer works at higher volumes, for practical reasons. Updating a paper list with more than 10-20 items is time consuming. Also, paper lists don’t have backups. It’s a practice that can only be afforded by entry-level employees with light workloads, or someone who works part-time.
Electronic lists are better, but they become a mental burden. Let’s use the example of the Darden student. If he were to create a list instead of a schedule, he’d end up with a physical list and a mental schedule.
The reason is simple. When anyone makes a to-do list of any kind, they automatically make a calculation, and need to store some information in their memories.
For example, the item: “Learning Team” appears on the student’s schedule five times. If he weren’t using a schedule, and instead had the item on a list it might look like this:
As he glances down the list and his attention rests on “Learning Team” he instantly makes a calculation:
Once he answers each of these questions, he’d store the results in his memory. If you multiply these actions of calculating and memorizing by the number of items in his schedule, you could see that he has now given himself the difficult task of remembering a great deal of his schedule, rather than having it plotted out in front of him.
When someone asks him if he’s free on Friday night, he has nothing to consult but his memory at that moment, and he’s likely to make a mistake.
It’s obvious that an attempt to remember all these items for every item in the list is likely to fail. It’s just not possible to manage a great number of time demands using memory.
This is precisely the challenge that many working professionals face today. They have a large and growing number of time demands, that simply cannot be managed with a long list and a basic schedule of appointments. When they try to do so they end up feeling overwhelmed, burdened and stressed out, with lots of time demands slipping through the cracks. They spend inordinate amounts of time reviewing their lists each day, making sure that nothing has popped to the surface when they weren’t looking.
They need to perform the upgrade that will take them to a different blend: short lists used infrequently, and a deeper schedule that includes all the time demands they are likely to forget, overlook or under/over estimate in terms of their duration.
(If you’re a fan of project management techniques, you’ll undoubtedly recognize some best practices taken from that discipline, and applied to individual time management practices. The most recent mobile latest technology makes this translation a feasible option for the first time on a large scale. )
In future posts I’ll address other questions related to this upgrade, such as when it should be undertaken, how it should be initiated and who would gain the most from making the switch.
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