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.)

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Getting Past the Post-Retreat Flop

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On Thursday night (Oct 6th), the adventure continues with a teleclass entitled “Breakthroughs You Can Use.”  I’ll be sharing how you can use the findings on the most recent time management research in Scheduling (Dezhi Wu) and Habit Change (Patterson et al.) to derive personal shortcuts to personal productivity and peace of mind.

Here are the details of the call:

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Address the problem today by changing your scheduling skills, and use the latest research from the best time management researchers, who don’t just make stuff, but use actual data to draw conclusions.

Check the video to learn how to make more realistic plans here.

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I thought I’d update his ideas with some of the newest research…

Click here for the video on Making Big Goals:  http://www.youtube.com/embed/PMci0lYCqIk

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In this video, I talk about the benefits of making the switch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOms6wHZHdQ

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It’s the dawn of a new age, I hope — time management researchers are actually tackling the problems that ordinary people people face when they try to improve the way they manage their time.  New tools, gadgets and software are coming out every day, but they all miss the point… and Dezhi’s research is essential to putting them back on track.

Listen in as I summarize one of her key findings – it’s my final summary of her book for the time being (until I schedule time to read it again!)

or click:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp3t4iJPUdk&feature=colike

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Instead, I find myself coaching clients in programs from a bit of a vacuum.  I know what worked for me, and a few others,  but I can’t back it up with proper research.  Which I hate.

At the same time, I do have some guiding principles.  You should probably upgrade from keeping multiple lists to managing a single calendar when:

• You find yourself using multiple lists and hating the required activity of reviewing them frequently.  After you make the upgrade, you’ll only have to check the ones that fall within a narrow time period, e.g. that day, yesterday, and tomorrow.
• You find time demands falling through the cracks.  You want to be sure that the cause is related to this upgrade, and not another cause, or your upgrade won’t work.   When you do make a successful upgrade, it’s harder to lose time demands because you are focusing on a handful, rather than tens or thousands.
• You find yourself running late often.  Once the upgrade is made, you’ll find that you can schedule reminders, buffer times, and travel times, delegating the job of remembering when to leave to your calendar, rather than to your memory.
• You feel stressed from using a mental calendar.  Having a calendar fully worked out in front of you and available at all times requires less energy, attention, and effort than trying to keep one in your head.

These aren’t fool-proof tests by any means, but it’s important to note that they might be precipitated by a life-change of some kind that brings an instant flood of new time demands.  These are the moments in our lives and careers when we need to be vigilant, because we might notice some of the above events, which never used to happen, taking place for the first time.

The combination of the life-changing event, and the symptoms listed above, are a good sign that something needs to change, and that it needs to happen quickly.

I plan to make it easy for anyone who wants to make this kind of upgrade.  In a couple of weeks, we’ll be initiating the next 2Time Labs Open House. During this time, our doors will be open to anyone who wants to take one of our free training programs.  The registration period will be short, and hopefully we’ll be able to fill the class before the doors close.  Stay tuned, or visit http://mytimedesign.com for early notification.  (For those who have been tracking carefully, you may have noticed a shift in date.  We simply bit off more than we could chew and put in too much new stuff to hit the original deadline.)

We’ll also be promoting our paid programs during this period to anyone who wants to take things a step further, deeper or faster.

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The idea is a new one:  the time is fast approaching when your time demands will sit in the cloud, and not on your desktop, smartphone or laptop.

Furthermore, the way you look at your schedule will also change when you get used to the idea of looking at your calendar from different points of view, each of which hides the stuff that you don’t want to see.  The benefit?  Being able to track more stuff with less effort, and making it easier to get to the point where your calendar replaces your list.

Here’s the original Stepcase Lifehack article: How to Use 6 Calendar Views to Be More Productive

And the follow-on Lifehacker article: Use a 5-Calendar Setup to Avoid Cluttered and Confusing Schedules

It’s my first time being published on the Lifehacker website — so this is a happy moment!

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Here’s a summary of some of the findings as they pertain to a topic I have been exploring in depth here at 2Time Labs.  In it, she uses the term “temporal structure” to mean “a time representation indicating how (people)…. capture, manipulate, and manage … time -related structures… in order to find out the best way to manage their time.”  In an earlier paper she states that a “temporal structure is defined as patterned organization of time used by humans to help them manage, comprehend or coordinate their use of time.”

In other words, temporal structures are the items that you put in your calendar, ranging from birthdays, study schedules, meetings, appointments, project work, exercise time… pretty much anything.

The best time managers use calendars to schedule their tasks.

This finding was unambiguous, according to the following excerpts:

“effective time managers demonstrate more skill in capturing and using their temporal structures than ineffective time managers.”

“better time managers (in terms of how much they accomplished in their work and how busy they were) were more likely to have intricate use of temporal structures as part of their scheduling behavior.”

“time-urgent individuals have a tendency to schedule more activities and are capable of fitting these activities more comfortably into time slots.”…. “They are more capable of completing more work within the same time… and have a tendency to be good time managers.”

“Effective time managers who exhibit less procrastination are found to use…. (and create) …significantly more explicit temporal structures in comparison to time managergs who procrastinate.”

“Time managers who meet more deadlines exhibit significant differences on the use of explicit temporal structures”

“there is a significant correlation between meeting deadline and creation of temporal structures.”

“Within the set of respondents were individuals who complained less about the difficulty of managing their time and who also had more time for personal activities and additional achievements. …. they were better able to estimate the amount of time a task required…  They created their own temporal structures to manage their life… they allocated units of time for specific types of repeating activities.  These better time managers also recorded more of the external temporal structures affecting their time usage in their electronic calendars. In contrast, another set of respondents, who complained about a lack of time for accomplishing anything significant, were much less likely to record and manage their time in a calendar system…. They were relatively unproductive… (and) produced less work product.”

Her research involved over 7,000 respondents and took place in a variety for forms, including surveys, in-depth interviews and a survey of existing time management research that must be the most comprehensive of its kind.

What does this all mean for the average professional?

Well, it casts into doubt the assertions made in many time management and productivity books that state or imply that it’s too difficult to keep a calendar of tasks, and that instead one must revert to using lists.  In all the research I’ve done, I’ve never seen any data to back up these statements, or even a single author who has stated that they tried both methods and have first hand experience that compares the use of lists to electronic scheduling.

Wu’s research backs up my own findings: there are many professionals who manage their tasks in schedules, and they tend to be the more productive as a result.  In numerous posts on this website, I have made that point, but here is the first empirical evidence that backs up my observations, and my own experience in moving from an electronic calendar, to lists, and back again to a calendar.

There are other findings I’ll share in future posts having to do with the paucity of tools at our disposal, different time management types and the reason why there is so little research.  None of it contradicts the 2Time Labs concept that each user needs a system that is customized to his/her needs, and habit pattern, and that it’s simply invalid to state that one size fits all.

If you liked this post, take a moment to download the 2Time Labs Special Report, and also to follow me on Twitter or Facebook using the links in the right-hand column.

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