Applied Research in a World of Increasing Time Demands
It’s an intriguing thought. Are there similarities in the ways that CEO’s and college students manage their time?
It’s a topic that I’m giving some attention to due to some research that I uncovered while reading an article about the ways that law students manage their time.
My first effort to delve into this topic came in the form of a recent article I wrote for the Jamaica Gleaner – How to Manage Your Time Like a CEO.
Kathryn Welds’s blog is a super one, if one because she tackles one brand new topic with every post, sharing some of the latest research in the field.
She makes mention of the work here at 2Time Labs in her recent post: How the Brain Perceives Time
There are a handful of working professionals who have chosen to use their calendars as their hub for all their planning activity.
The challenges they run into are only rarely mentioned in time management and productivity books, programs and websites: the overwhelming conventional wisdom states that it’s impossible to use a schedule in this way, and that one should only use lists. Unfortunately, these statements (so far) remain empty assertions, without the backing of either academic research or recent, direct experience by the author.
This leaves the working professional who has decided to use this technique without help… until now. Here are some of the articles we have written and research we have found to back up our central hypothesis: it’s possible to execute either a list-based or a schedule-based strategy successfully. Our additional hypothesis is that, in general, schedule based strategies are more suitable for handling large numbers of time demands.
The Benefit of Developing Advanced Scheduling Skills – this article compares Listing and Scheduling directly.
Videos based on the work of Dezhi Wu – her research shows the superior results gained by those who maintain electronic schedules.
Student Time Management Video – watch as a student as she develops her weekly schedule and you will notice some of the challenges she has that you might share.
We have trained hundreds of people in the use of these techniques and often provide the following specific advice, which will become the topic of future posts on this blog:
Update: Much of the discussion on schedule usage has been moved to ScheduleU.org.
Tourists love Jamaican culture for its laid back attitude and easy vibe. That is, until the guy who is supposed to check you out of the villa shows up to work late, causing you to miss your flight… in that moment, there’s not much to love.
In this article, I address a problem that shows up in the Caribbean workplace – lateness. There’s a lesson here for all managers – never assume that your employees know how to undertake a practice that you have mastered, such as getting to work on time. You have probably forgotten what it took to learn the micro-habits needed to achieve mastery and if no-one spells them out, it’s likely that they’ll never be learned.
Here’s the article from the Sunday newspaper in Jamaica – How Hard Is It to Come to Work on Time?
The seventh and final post in the series: The New Lifehacking came out yesterday. It addresses the reasons why we should be wary of new technology and new ideas – before rushing to incorporate them into our individual time management systems.
The entire series lays out a pathway for continuous improvement that replaces the random search for tips and tricks that most of us rely on. Instead, it calls for a systematic effort that builds on an understanding of the time management system that we self-created and now use every day.
The New Lifehacking #7 – Why You Should Be Open to New Stuff, But Wary About Using It.
A Time Adviser is a coach, consultant, trainer or professional organizer who is in the profession of helping other people improve their time management and productivity skills. Over at the MyTimeDesign.com website I have been focusing on helping them use the latest research to have a bigger impact with their clients.
To that end, I recently partnered with Janice Russell to produce a new Special Report entitled: The 8 Fatal Assumptions that Time Advisers Make. It’s available for immediate download at the website, and also on Scribd.
If you are a Time Adviser, when you download the Report from our website you’ll be placed on our mailing list which will immediately start sending updates on the work we’re doing. plus you’ll be introduced to our other resources developed to date, and provide some information on the progress we’re making towards creating a formal certification process for Time Advisers.
It’s a tough question – how do you cope when you are assigned a team with time management skills that appear to be suspect?
They represent a risk to the success of the project and before you delegate a single task, you want to have an idea of the amount of work that each individual can handle.
In this paper and speech, presented at the Project Management Institute of the Southern Caribbean Chapter, I addressed this question using recent research from Brigitt Claessens. On this page with the materials from the conference, I share the audio, slides and research paper I presented.
It was a great experience presenting to an audience that takes the topic of time management so very seriously.
If you are interested in discussing the topic further, simply visit the forums at my book’s website: simply visit the newly created forums focused on Project Managment at my book’s website.
This article written for the Jamaican newspapers echoes a complaint I hear in time management programs. Policies created by well-meaning executives run into problems when they are impossible to scale effectively.
It’s another of these problems that simply falls through the cracks in the average organization which just hasn’t caught up with the times.
To discover more about Time Demands and the new possibilities it opens up, see the following page on the topic of Time Demands
As I mentioned in a prior post on the topic of time demands, this distinction is one that we at 2Time Labs were forced to create when the old definition of a task just simply stopped working.
One of the major differences has to do with agency – where do time demands come from?
I’m reminded of the following quotes, the first of which is from A Course in Miracles:
“The default way of thinking about conversation is that it is ‘just talk’ and that it is is a poor cousin of Action. But that misunderstands the formative power of language. My promise is to bring you a way of utilizing language so that what you need is created rather than ‘just talked about’.” David Firth TEDxCSU video
The power of using the concept of a “time demand” is not just a matter of labeling “the stuff we have to do” with a different name. New language opens up new meaning according to David Firth, and also a possibility. Here’s the definition we share in our classes:
A time demand is an individual commitment to complete an action in the future.
Implied, but not stated in this definition is a new kind of agency or responsibility. No time demands exist until you, the individual, bring them into being. Picture this – nothing is there, and all of a sudden you create a time demand, triggered by a conversation, memory, television advertisement, etc. Someone else sees the same ad and nothing happens, demonstrating that your willpower is required to create a time demand each and every time.
Some people in my programs tell me that their boss or spouse creates time demands, and I ask them not to confuse the trigger with the source. You can always elect to refuse a request, while accepting the consequences. Or you can simply ignore it. Failing that, you could quit the job or get divorced. Ultimately, you even have a choice whether to live or not.
Something psychological happens when we create a time demand, however, and it always involves some obligation. When it gets created in your mind, it includes some action to take, by definition. General commitments (to one’s family for example) are not time demands, but a promise made to oneself to pick up the milk on the way home certainly is.
One the other hand, when you don’t have the distinction at work in your way of being, you are left in a delusion that the stuff flying at you to be done everyday is out of your control, like being caught in the middle of a blizzard in which each time demand is a snowflake.
In their experience, they are victims. The best they can do is struggle and fight to stay alive against an onslaught of overwhelming data, information, requirements, invitations, obligations, promises, etc.
It’s what we do: sign up for every newsletter in sight and then complain about getting too many messages while griping that we don’t have enough time to read them all.
The great thing about taking responsibility for _all_ the time demands we create is that doing so empowers us to stop creating so many. At the same time we can start a serious efort to manage the ones we do create.
This isn’t ordinary thinking, but it’s the start of a transformation.
If you examine your day, you’ll see that your mind is always creating time demands. At the moment of creation, your mind simultaneously might tag on some more information: a likely start date/time, the duration, plus some level of commitment to get it complete. You may also add other information such as who else must be involved, where it is to be performed, other resources that are required, etc.
Skillful professionals don’t allow all this information to float around in their heads – they immediately capture it somewhere so that they can keep track of it outside their heads. They appreciate the fact that it’s much less risky to do so.
What do you think?
P.S. This distinction is at the core of my book – Bill’s discovery of time demands is where everything good starts happening for him. It’s so important, I have created a new page here on the website to bring together my most important posts, a podcast and a video on the topic of Time Demands.