Time management is one of the Seven Dimensions of Productivity. In this guest post by Francis Wade, an author and trainer who writes about Time Management 2.0 at his blog: 2Time, you learn why everyone needs to upgrade their time management skills.
I suspect that as a reader of Tara's Productivity Maven blog that you are already pretty efficient in the way that you manage your time.
Why, then, would I be writing a post that tells you that you need an upgrade, especially after you have probably worked hard to get your time management skills to where they are today?
Before getting to the 3 reasons why we all need an upgrade, let's start off with a basic fact: we all have time management systems that are made up of our recurrent habits, rituals and practices.
They probably don't have names, and we might not be aware of them, but the truth is that they help us to go to bed at night knowing that we got a lot of the things done that we intended to do. Our time management systems also bring us some degree of peace of mind, and represent our best attempts to date to organize ourselves. That allows our mind to rest knowing it doesn't need to try to remember "everything."
Given that fact, there are some powerful reasons to think that we'll need an upgrade at some point.
Reason #1 – the demands on our time are increasing
We can't help it. The lives that we live as professionals are steadily bringing more and more commitments to our attention.
As a kid growing up in Jamaica in the late 1970's, I had access to one black and white television channel. There was no problem figuring out what to watch, and there were no arguments about which program to select.
When more channels were introduced via cable, I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed as I realized that there was no way I could see everything I wanted to see in this lifetime. That fact didn't stop my mind from wanting to catch all the good stuff it was missing, however! It still made mental notes to itself as I flipped through the channels, and as a result, I was left with a feeling of having more and more to do.
This is just a simple example of one way in which modern life exposes us to more choices. Our response it to make more internal commitments which places greater demands on our time. Think of what has happened over the past few years with the advent of email, the web, ubiquitous cell phones, ecommerce, blogging, social networking, tweeting and smart phones. Each has brought with it a slew of new promises that we make to ourselves that simply didn't exist before the new technology was introduced.
If we keep our time management systems the same, even as the number of internal commitments explodes, they become overwhelmed — and this only goes away when we effect an upgrade that helps us to operate at a new level.
Reason #2 – New technology is expanding our abilities
As I mentioned before, new technology is allowing us to make a whole new volume of commitments. It also has given us the means to manage our time differently.
In the early 1990's I was a big fan of the DayRunner system, which consisted of a binder with refills that needed to be purchased each year. In keeping with how important I thought I was, I carried a BIG DayRunner stuffed with lots of colored pages!
When the Palm Pilot debuted it had an immediate impact. Professionals were able to carry around a small device that replaced all the pages, the binder and the inserts, even as it allowed users to safely backup their information to their PC's.
It was a big switch to make, but once I made it, the benefits were obvious, which is why DayRunners and other paper-based products are disappearing.
The same thing is happening in 2009 with the advent of the electronic calendar.
The newer designs make it easy to dispense with to-do lists altogether, and instead use a calendar. While this wasn't true when calendars were paper-based, it's now _much_ easier to manage all of the time-sensitive stuff we have to do than it's ever been. Emails in Outlook, for example, can be converted into scheduled items in an electronic calendar with a simple drag and drop, dramatically enabling this particular action. (Curiously, neither the iPhone nor the Blackberry carry this feature.)
Innovations in this area are coming fast and furious, and the user who fails to effect the necessary upgrade is likely to be caught with habits that are antiquated and inefficient.
Reason #3 — Our lives change
I vividly remember attending a time management program with a retiree. She had just left the working world and had radically reduced the number of items that she had to deal with on a daily basis.
It was obvious to me that the system being taught in the class would be of little use to her.
Her life had changed, as the number of demands on her time had fallen to the point where she simply didn't need a fancy system.
I happen to live in Kingston, Jamaica and when I moved here from the US, I quickly learned that I couldn't rely on the time management techniques that I used — life in a developed country is much more hectic and unpredictable.
Other people have reported the same kind of problem when they had children, got promoted or were assigned a new project at work.
The fact is that a time management system that works for one stage of our life is unlikely to work for another. New habits are needed in order to make the switch and those will only come about from an upgrade so that our system continues to match the our life-needs.
The Bottom Line
Ongoing upgrades are easier to make when we understand that we need to make a switch from implementing a guru's approach, to customizing and refining our own. Then, we can always be on the lookout for new information that we can incorporate into our systems whenever we have the need.
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