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Secrets of Task Management

How can you manage your tasks in a way that allows you to escape overwhelm? There are certain invisible principles you need to use to stay on top of an expanding workload. When known, they dramatically change your career for the better.

However, no-one teaches us the importance of managing our tasks skillfully. It’s usually discovered in the breach: when life isn’t working the way we want and we scramble for answers. Instead, most live on auto-pilot, never questioning why they do things the way they do. Let’s make some of these secrets conscious.

Secret 1 – Tasks Come from the Inside

What is a task? In its purest form, it belongs to a class of “psychological objects” that can’t be touched or seen, but still have an emotional weight. That’s because they come from within: each one is born when you quietly assign yourself an action to be completed in the future.

This is a self-taught practice. Around the age of seven, someone teaches you how to tell time. You realize it’s a great resource and start to create tasks which can only be executed later.

At first, all this takes place in your mind. Before long, you have developed a daily habit of creating mental commitments, even though the initial number of tasks is small. After all, that’s what a child’s parents and teachers are for: to remind them what they need to do.

But as you enter adolescence and adulthood, things change.

Secret 2 – Only Kids Should Be Using Memory

If you have ever worked with a full adult who regularly fails to do the tasks they intend, you may agree that they have a “bad memory”. This is probably true.

But it obscures a bigger problem: they are using the memory-based techniques of a child, rather than the grown-up methods of an adult. Here’s why so many get stuck.

As I mentioned, you are a self-taught task manager. However, as you grew out of your teenage years, the number of tasks increased, but your approach remained the same: to habitually use your memory.

Before long, you started to experience problems. Overwhelm crept in as you struggled to prevent promises from being broken and appointments from being missed. The harder you tried to remember, the worse things became.

Perhaps you got lucky and a parent or friend intervened, or maybe you figured out the changes you needed to make on your own. Instead of relying on memory, you began to write down all your tasks on paper or a smartphone. In either case, you stopped trying to use a Band Aid to heal an amputation, and switched your approach for the better.

The fact is, most adults have lives which are too complex to be using their memories for task management. However, most of us still complain about having a poor memory for our tasks, long after we should have given up that method.

Pro Tip: you can evaluate the capacity of a teammate by observing his/her reliance on memory for important tasks.

Secret 3 – Migrating to Better Tools

Most professionals understand the need to switch from memory to the use of written commitments (or even the employment of an administrative assistant). However, they don’t realize that this should be the first of many transformations. Research shows that your appetite to manage more tasks is insatiable: successful solutions lead to greater task loads.

These volume increases inevitably make you hit new limits. Consequently, whenever you experience symptoms of overwhelm and other task management problems, you should analyze your current combination of tools and behaviors. They must be upgraded to keep up with an increased number of tasks.

Unfortunately, this is simpler than it sounds. For example, you might recall the age when you shifted to writing down your tasks on an aid like Post-It notes. Since then, you moved on to using digital tools, but let’s imagine that you recently started noticing that familiar feeling of falling behind.

You may be tempted to believe that a return to Post-It notes would help, but here’s the surprise: it won’t. That approach was useful at a lower task volume, but cannot fit your adult life.

Now, you must perform a fresh analysis of your entire self-taught system. Look for small changes to make which together can give you brand new, added capacity. Do the research and experiment with different suggestions and technologies before settling on an upgraded approach.

But the best benefit is that now you’ll know that whenever you feel overwhelmed, the answer is never to revert to what worked for you in the past. Instead, you must go forward to adopt behaviors which are suitable for a future of even more tasks, and less overwhelm.

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Why The Most Ambitious People Time Block

Have you ever wondered why a few high-performers insist on scheduling (i.e. time blocking) their entire day? It’s not because they are indulging in an idle pastime. Instead, they are resorting to this little-known technique because they have no other choice.

CEO’s. Olympic athletes. Entrepreneurs. Teachers. Part-Time Students. Parents of twins, triplets or more. Employees with a side business.

These are some of the busiest people you may know. But being busy isn’t just a state of mind, or a feeling. Research shows they have a practice of creating a huge number of tasks. In other words, the backlog of demands they have set for themselves far exceeds 24 hours per day and 168 hours per week.

Furthermore, they face the same challenge we all do of living in Jamaica, with its hectic daily surprises that make it so hard to focus. Time blocking is the way they stay on top of their time commitments.

What you may not know is that they actually started using the technique relatively late in life, after progressing through other practices. Here are the steps you could follow if you are looking towards a future of increasing task volume.

1. Start Off Using a New Kind of Memory

Like most adolescents, you probably had a goal of having a great memory. After all, primary and secondary education is almost all about memorization, recalling facts and figures, using what’s called “retrospective memory”. However, there is another: “prospective memory”. This is the kind of memory used to perform actions in the future, such as your plans for the rest of the day. This type has a short shelf life, unlike retrospective memory. For example, your schedule for yesterday afternoon is of little value today.

Furthermore, prospective memory is used to help you reach your goals and intentions. However, the fact that you’re taught to use personal memory to track incomplete commitments is a problem. Why? Once you try to remember too many tasks, it fails.

Finally, the older you get, the worse this kind of memory performs; as you may have observed with your parents. It’s not a long-term solution to the problem of task recall, even though it’s the most popular.

2. Solving the Problem With Lists
If you came of age before 2005 you probably sought to solve the problem by using paper lists. Consequently, you developed the successful practice of carrying around a pad or notebook.

Of course, not everyone has learned the habit. “Don’t worry yuhself, mi wi remember” is a popular refrain that often leads to problems. (My casual observation is that more Jamaican men than women are likely to utter it, and less likely to have pen/paper handy.)

Unfortunately, there is a limit to the number of tasks a paper list can handle before the practice of continually writing a new one becomes a chore. Plus, it can be lost, stolen, wet or burned. Thankfully, new technology on our phones can help.

3. Migrating to Smartphones
If you came of age after 2010 you may think the idea of using paper instead of a digital task app to be backward.

Instead, you jumped straight to using your phone to manage your tasks. Now, your cloud-based app offers perpetual safety, plus the ability to stay on top of much more todos. But you are still subject to the law which states that whenever you try to manage your tasks with tools which lack the requisite capacity, you will experience difficulties. This law applies whether you are using prospective memory, paper or a digital task app.

So if you happen to be using an app and find yourself unable to keep up, there’s one more level to consider.

4. Adopting a Super Calendar
Academics in the 1990’s discovered that when you specify the time to complete a planned task, it dramatically increases the odds of completion. In other words, you are more effective when you time block a task in your calendar than if you merely add it to a list.

While it’s possible to use a paper planner, there are two powerful digital solutions: picking up a calendar on Google or Outlook, or switching to an AI-powered auto-scheduler. The former requires you to move tasks around one-by-one by hand, which can become painful. The latter uses an intelligent robot you can train to produce a new, optimal schedule on demand.

And if you don’t want to manage your own calendar, a third option is to hire someone (like an administrative assistant) to do the job of time blocking for you.

All three are techniques used by most ambitious, accomplished people.

Unfortunately, given psychological and technological limits, these are your only choices. Until something better is invented, time blocking tasks directly in your calendar is the best choice for dealing with a high volume of time demands with sharp deadlines.

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Why People Who Use Time Blocking are Never “Free”

“Do you have some free time?”

If you have ever asked this question of someone who is a driven, high-achiever you may have received a quizzical look. Their blank look isn’t a sign of overthinking.

They just happen to be one of a group of individuals who simply don’t understand the question. They think about their time usage so differently that the question doesn’t make sense.

Strangely, it probably all started in the past, when they accepted the notion that there will never, ever be enough time to do everything. In other words, they embraced the fact that there will always be a negative gap between the following:

– the total sum of all the tasks they would like to complete (measured in hours) 

and

– the total number of hours they have available each week.

Of course, like everyone else, they only have 168 hours per week. This number represents a hard limit to the tasks they can complete, measured in hours. At the same time, when they add up all their commitments, the total amounts to far more hours.

Their quizzical response says: “I have way more commitments than I have time. I don’t understand what you mean by free time.”

Unfortunately, most people view this condition as a bad problem to be solved. They respond to the imbalance by trying to cut down the volume of their commitments. They believe that they should have “free time” in their calendar and in their lives.

However, high achievers who use Time Blocking don’t think this way. If you happen to be one, you may know there are two parts of your brain at work which operate very differently which take away the need for free time.

One region is responsible for creating tasks. It responds to a 24–7 array of triggers by adding new tasks, even in your sleep. It wants to be free to create fresh commitments whenever the need or desire arises.

But there’s another corner of your brain which is assigned the job of making sense of the tasks the first part created. It understands that there are real constraints and must choose between tasks using different criteria to answer the continual question: “What should I work on in the next instant, later this week, six months from now, and by the end of the year?”

It realizes that a decision to work on a task is (by definition) a choice to set aside hundreds of others which are unfinished. Furthermore, to prevent the chosen task from becoming swamped by the weight of all the others during its execution, you need to manage them all effectively (bar none). If you don’t, you’ll be consumed by the nagging distraction of the Zeigarnik Effect. In essence, your subconscious mind pings you when it believes you cannot be trusted to govern all your incomplete commitments.

One reason you time block is to ward off the Zeigarnik Effect. However, early success with the technique leads to adding in more tasks. Eventually, you end up with more than 168 hours of tasks to put in your calendar, putting you in a negative balance.

The average person takes a different approach to avoid the Zeigarnik Effect. They simply don’t create as many tasks (or commitments) and therefore have a nice, positive gap between commitments and time. They aren’t trying to accomplish as much, and therefore rarely run out of time.

Once you add so many tasks that you lack time to complete then and must resort to time blocking, it’s hard to go back. Instead, you must go forward and use different practices and new tools.

What People Who Time Block Really Do

Veterans in the use of the technique report that they see their time in big resource chunks, such as sets of 168 hours. They treat every hour as if it were precious. They make a conscious decision to spend each one to accomplish a particular goal.

For example, they may begin by setting aside time to sleep. While most people view this as a respite that requires little attention, those who have a negative gap tend to think hard about the role of the activity. They may consider it to be time to replenish themselves, which is too important to be left to chance.

They also realize that they need space in the day to recover their focus and energy: time blocking their calendar for mind wandering, a nap or to shake off the after-effects of a hard meeting.

In addition, they know that tightly scheduled days rarely go according to plan. Their calendar includes time slots which are placeholders for unplanned interruptions. This may even cover “requests for free time from other people.”

So before the week has started, someone who time blocks has already thought about these eventualities and accommodated them. Those who are more experienced put together a time blocking template for their weekly use, such as the one below. It serves as their starting point.

Notice that the template has times for meals, exercise and daily planning. If it were mine, it would also include time to take a coffee nap each day!

To the non time blocker, this may look like the beginning of insanity. However, to the person who is keen to allocate time efficiently, it’s a tool to accomplish their goals.

In effect, they are making a statement to themselves and to the world: I am taking care of myself first, before anything else intrudes. It’s a bit like putting on your mask in an airplane emergency before that of another.

By the time each week’s appointments and tasks are added in, the calendar becomes full. There is no “free time.” In fact the time blocking apps are built with the end-point in mind, especially those with auto-scheduling features.

But what if you decide not to enter each task in your weekly schedule in such a time blocking app? Isn’t the effect the same?

Apart from the burden of maintaining a mental calendar with numerous moving parts, consider what takes place when you are under pressure. Imagine that, in the middle of a meeting, your boss asks “Do you have the free time to work on this new activity next week?”

All eyes are on you as you search your mental schedule. With a few seconds to respond and the weight of expectations on your shoulders, you are far more likely to make a mistake: a blind sacrifice of your “free” time.

The sad truth is that if your manager likes your work, there are more requests like this coming your way. She’ll continue to ask if you keep on saying “Yes”. While there are some supervisors who sense that you are over-promising, most will simply hold you to account and not care too much about the personal costs of your mistake.

By contrast, pulling out a fully time blocked calendar allows you to offer a fact-based answer.

The obvious conclusion is that being conscious and explicit about your schedule beats being unconscious and implicit. It leads to clearer decision-making, especially if you consider yourself to be a high-performer who pushes hard for results.

The challenge here is to think in totals: all of your commitments versus all of your limited time.  This includes those tasks which aren’t work related, and those which are required for self-care.

Your calendar is the best tool to connect the two. Just give yourself the freedom to use it in a way others may not understand.

Their version of “free time” isn’t a reality in your world in which every single new commitment doesn’t take up time that is sitting there waiting around to be assigned. Instead, it means making a difficult trade-off that has practical consequences.

Why People Who Use Time Blocking are Never “Free”

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How CEO’s Optimize Their Time Budgets

If you are a top executive, you face a unique challenge: The weekly demands on your time regularly outstrip 168 hours. Yet, as you know, most CEO’s receive little formal training in time management on their journey to the C-Suite. Fortunately, new research can help close this gap.

Harvard’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria recently published the results of a multi-year study of CEO time usage. Their findings can help you allocate time more efficiently, even despite variations by industry, nationality, and tenure.

Four Major Findings

  1. CEO’s schedule a whopping 75% of their working hours. Most of their day is occupied with meetings, translating into precious little time spent alone in blocks of uninterrupted time. Recommended: use your calendar as a tool to carve out quality solo efforts.
  2. CEO’s work, on average, 62.5 hours per week, which include 3.9 hours per day on weekends, and 2.4 hours per day on vacations. They also spend about half their non-working, awake time with family. For many, this pace isn’t sustainable. Given their long days (9.7 hours per weekday) they must be strict to meet their own minimum standards. Recommended: Follow a set schedule on both off-hours, and off-days. Include time-slots to do “nothing.”
  3. CEO’s spend some 43% of their time on their core agenda, and the rest on routine items or unplanned surprises. Recommended: Use your administrative assistant as your partner to ensure that your schedule continually reflects your priorities.
  4. On average, few CEO’s track their time. Sadly, they have no idea how they’re really doing against these average numbers. While they know much about their financial budget, its time equivalent remains a mystery or at best, a vague gut feeling. Recommended: Commit yourself to this commonsense habit, via the use of suitable tracking software.

The CEO’s Two Social Problems

However, applying the researchers’ recommendations isn’t enough. Every CEO I have met faces two ripe areas for improvement which are difficult to tackle: They spend too much of their precious time processing email and attending meetings. Fortunately, these twin problems have a common root.

Case 1: The CEO who replies to every email within five minutes may seem, at first blush, to be “on top of things”. To wiser heads, it’s a clear sign that he’s doing little else but playing an elaborate, wasteful game of email ping pong.

Case 2: The CEO who avoids calling meetings, may think she’s making the most of her time by working on tough problems behind a closed door. However, her lack of communication leaves people guessing about her true priorities, causing a level of infighting she pointedly ignores.

Both of these practices are typically hard to solve. Anyone who has rolled their eyes while suffering through a pointless meeting or email message knows the feeling. The demand on your psyche it creates slowly creeps up, robbing you blind of time and energy. Before you realize it, you have become trapped in a sticky web of social waste.

Furthermore, this all takes place on an open stage. People watch what executives do in meetings and email for hidden cues as to their true, unspoken intentions. As such, they represent far more than personal logistical challenges. They are public performances undertaken by actors who are mostly unaware of their platform. It’s why their unwitting, mixed signals quickly become other people’s marching orders.

Where is the escape?

Launch Improvement Projects

Fact: The average employee spends two hours per day processing email. She also devotes four hours per week preparing for status updates meetings, 67% of which are failures.

However, individual employees who try to solve email or meeting problems frequently fail. There’s just not much a person can do on his/her own if they are part of a wider culture.

Fortunately, the CEO is in a unique place. As the sole person who unifies all employees, he is in a position to affect this kind of change. Therefore, a CEO who fails to launch campaigns to improve these twin evils is allowing productivity to erode.

While specific causes and remedies to these two complex challenges are beyond the scope of this article, there’s a mindset every CEO can initiate immediately. It starts by declaring the truth about this rampant loss of productivity. It continues by creating a series of company-wide games to “Achieve the same results, using far fewer emails and less meeting time.”

As the CEO, if you engage a critical mass of your staff in such a goal, it should provide an immediate, positive impact on your time usage. Instead of losing steam in email and meetings, you should be able to create more long blocks of solo, creative problem-solving, plus more time with your family. This should be a welcome start, but it requires all employees to cut away the wasted time and effort inherent in these two practices.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. Missed a column? To receive a free download with articles from 2010-2017, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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Why employees need the power to say no

This week, I created a video summary of the column.

 

 

 

Should an employee be granted the right to turn down a manager’s request to focus on a given task, thereby dropping everything else? And is it better to have a reporting relationship based on obedience or its opposite: independent choice? While there are no easy answers, the times are changing and so must leaders in your company.

 

Fortunately, managers who believe that their job is to do all the thinking while employees solely follow instructions are becoming rare. Yet, when the pressure is on, many managers become bossy. In the heat of the moment they give orders, and expect them to be followed without question. Resorting to anger they issue threats, stirring up fear in the hearts of others.

The worst rely on this tactic exclusively. Better managers initially start off being nice then turn into monsters later, arguing that people take advantage of the softer approach and therefore deserve this treatment.

They point to their personal experience as proof, which science supports. However, studies also show that this dominating technique has severe limits. While it gets action started, should it be a manager’s preferred tactic?

 

New research demonstrates otherwise.

 

A recent study led by Rom Schrift at the University of Pennsylvania shows that experimental subjects persisted longer in a task when they had the option to say “No.” It revealed that when they were granted a degree of autonomy, they performed better than others who weren’t given the same choice.

If you are a manager, it’s not hard to see why. In general, intrinsic motivation is a far better tool than its counterpart. In other words, you must give employees the option of saying “No” if you want them to perform at their best, especially if the task at hand involves more than a quick, physical action.

Let’s consider the extreme: what about the person at the bottom of your pyramid who is a simple laborer? I invite you to question your assumptions around this example from three angles.

  1. Should simple workers be in your firm at all?

A contractor once shared with me that his industry is the only one in which a convict can leave prison today, and tomorrow be hired to take orders on an active construction site. The consequence? Poor quality work, indiscipline, random departures and theft.

While this tactic guarantees a low wage bill, it simultaneously creates greater problems.

Unfortunately, this mindset of hiring “mere” workers pervades companies of all kinds.

Try a different one: even the simplest role expands in complexity when the person who performs it has some autonomy to produce superior results. Therefore, all potential hires have the capacity to make up their own minds, becoming better contributors over time.

Armed with this mindset, abolish the notion of a “simple” laborer.

  1. Should employees be calendar-trained?

Too many managers try to be omnipotent, believing that they can keep track of every employee’s calendar. In other words, they don’t trust staff to prioritize their work without being directed.

The solution isn’t to make an effort to become omniscient. Instead, managers need to train their workers to use better time management skills so that their calendar actually reflects the work they are doing from one hour to the next.

In habitual practice, the opposite is true. Most smartphone calendars are only used to track people’s appointments. All other tasks are left to memory – a sign of weak skills.

By contrast, employees with superior abilities are always looking at real-life trade-offs between activities. To make these difficult decisions, they realize they must use their calendar as a point of coordination. As such, their “No” is a reflection of a tough call, rather than a whim.

  1. Should managers be retrained?

As a manager, it’s tempting to jump in, give orders and negate your employee’s choices. Instead, when the impulse hits, restrain yourself. Have a conversation that looks more like an inquiry into priorities, than a demand for immediate obedience.

Why is this important?

Here in the Caribbean, our workers are sensitive: highly reactive to small slights which they take personally. The sad reality is that it only takes a single, harsh interaction to demote a newly hired eager-beaver. In the quint of an eye, they join the ranks of other sullen victims who only go through the motions. This coping mechanism got us through slavery, and the fact that it won’t change soon means that managers must un-learn the habit of routinely negating an employee’s “No.”

These three recommendations have a magical benefit: they grant employees the opportunity to say “No” in a way that keeps them motivated and productive. Take this power away and you risk miring your company in mediocrity.

 

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. Missed a column? To receive a free download with articles from 2010-2017, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

 

 

 

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No such thing as ‘basic’ time management

“Basic” Time Management Training? No such thing!

As a manager, you may advise a subordinate: “You need a basic time management program.” While this advice is probably well-intended, it turns out to be flawed. Today, a more nuanced picture has emerged.

Your intent might be pure. Many employees who once appeared to be capable and reliable have fallen into rough times. Even though they remain motivated, they look harried, are behind in their email and keep missing deadlines. Their reputation has taken a hit so you want to help.

But they still have to complete the new project you assigned them, in addition to their other responsibilities. None of it can be delegated—it’s all important.

Yet, their sense of overwhelm remains real. Maybe, you think, “They don’t understand the basics of time management.”

While this line of thinking sounds logical, it happens to be incorrect. Here are the reasons why.

  1. They are adults, not kids

In the world of adult learning, there’s a known fact: teaching adults differs from teaching children. Why? In most cases, it’s because the adult already possesses some capacity, prior practice, plus a motivation to solve everyday problems.

In this context, teaching Jamaicans Latin isn’t the same as teaching us patois. We all chafe and resist when someone tries to force us to learn something we think we already know.

With respect to time management, my local research shows that you and your employees are similar to other experienced adults around the world.

To illustrate: you were taught the concept of time at age eight or nine. Shortly after, you taught yourself how to create “time demands” – your own internal, individual commitments to complete actions in the future. You stored each one in memory to prevent it from being lost or forgotten.

Over time, you evolved, having learned the superior nature of paper or digital storage over brain cells. But regardless of your efficacy, you became a functioning adult with many successful time management habits. After all, they are responsible for positive results at school, work, and family.

However, you suspect that your subordinates have not kept up with the volume of their work and suffer from some weak habits or tools… the question is, “Which ones?” Only nuanced (not basic) training can help them uncover and close these gaps.

  1.      They need personal diagnostic skills

Instead of being instructed to engage in specific behaviours (the stuff of basic programmes) adults need to learn how to analyse and improve the habit patterns they are currently using: the same ones they have been honing since their teenage years.

In the second edition of my book, Perfect Time Based Productivity, I condensed the actions required to guide this transformation into four steps, known as ETaPS.

The first step is to E*valuate your current skills. Unlike other trivial behaviours, this takes more than completing a two-minute quiz from a magazine.

Unfortunately, empirical data from local classes reveals that the combination of habits, practices, and apps you employ today are complex. For example, everyone in your office may rely on Outlook, but there’s a unique way they use the program. Over time, you each developed routines which are idiosyncratic. Understanding them enough to make changes takes some study.

Therefore, a sound self-diagnosis starts with a deeper than average knowledge. With it, you can compare yourself against a typical Jamaican, or the very best in the world. This can be a sobering exercise, but the knowledge is priceless and produces a lifetime of steady changes. How fast should you expect to see real improvements?

  1. Instant, magical change won’t happen

A “basic” training which ignores the lingering effect of old behaviours sets learners up for failure. They go to work the next day thinking that everything will change right away.

This is impossible. It took a decade of practice to develop your current skills which don’t change overnight. To help, I recommend the remaining steps of the ETaPS formula.

–          Ta*rget new levels of accomplishment for each skill.

–          P*lan a timeline of changes to reach these new levels in months or years, taking baby steps.

–          S*upport each change so that single behaviours turn into habits. Draw on other people, reminders, and progress tracking to maintain momentum.

The idea is to break a complex, long-term transformation into small, manageable actions.

If you are a manager, help your subordinates see where a personalized plan of improvement provides a way to accomplish their goals. Then, show them how better time management could improve every part of their life:  relationships with significant others, children’s performance at school, work-life balance, health and engagement in their community and family.

Instead of trying to shoehorn them into one-size-fits-all “basic” training, give them the nuanced understanding they need to make consistent, fool-proof changes.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. Missed a column? To receive a free download with articles from 2010-2017, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

 

 

 

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Boosting your temporal IQ

We may laugh along with our leaders about our personal productivity and constant overwhelm, but those who have worked in developed countries know that top organisations take time seriously.

It’s no coincidence. Corporate success relies on individuals who execute brilliantly, never run late, and don’t forget to do their tasks.

But here in Jamaica, we are perplexed. We want the crime-free growth opportunities that occur in a strong economy built on high-performing companies. Yet, when pressured, we continually excuse the fact that we are individually slack. For example, almost no one complained when every meeting of the 2017 Jamaican Parliament started late.

Instead, tardiness is met with a joke. The brave few who insist on timeliness are sidelined as ‘anal’, as boards, teams and cabinets tolerate behaviours that keep us mediocre. When this vibe is amplified across society, contributing to mayhem and murder, we scratch our heads: ‘What’s wrong with THOSE people?’

Nothing.

They are simply echoing the low standards we all indulge in, even when we know we’d have to give them up if we ever migrated to a developed country.

 

IMAGINE – A JAMAICAN?

 

A few years ago at a conference in the United States, I listened in agony as the top organiser explained why they needed to check my credentials twice before inviting me to speak. “We just had to ask,” she shared, “Is he for real? Who would imagine that someone in Jamaica knows something about time management?”

Unfortunately, we have collectively earned this suspicion. Our economy hasn’t grown since the 1960s – a case study for stagnation, resistant even to above-average outside investment. In terms of our macro-productivity, we fight to stay a step above last place among countries in the hemisphere.

But the conference organiser was no economist. She was talking about the lack of micro-productivity visitors see upon landing ‘Jamaica time’. It’s why they took two different taxis from their hotel to the airport, ‘just in case’.

We can rescue our reputation with a focus on a locally defined temporal intelligence quotient, or TemQ. It would help us understand the extremes – the Bolt-like performance seen in the world’s best companies versus our sloppy, everyday mediocrity. It could also provide us with universal targets to aim for, whether we happen to be an individual workman, CEO or Supreme Court judge.

For example, our prime minister could declare an ‘Arrive on Time Week’. Such a challenge would push us to discover and practice industrial engineering techniques needed everywhere in our economy to meet Vision 2030 and the productivity problems it describes.

Until then, how can your company use TemQ right away? Here are three suggestions.

 

STEP 1 – ESTABLISH TIME USAGE OUTCOMES

 

Professionals with high TemQs set clear intentions for each hour of the day. A high percentage of their plans are effective, which means they use mobile, digital planning tools, create a daily schedule which includes travel and recovery times, insert buffer periods for interruptions and other unexpected events, and track their time usage to effect improvements.

By contrast, individuals with low TemQ are hapless creatures of random impulses and miscues. They are often seen as a very busy but produce little of value as they bounce from one fascinating, shiny object to another.

 

STEP 2 – HIGHLIGHT ERRORS IN TASK EXECUTION

 

As a professional climbs the corporate ladder and adds more to-dos, their productivity is challenged in new ways. Each increase brings them closer to a recurrence of old symptoms they thought they had overcome, such as forgetting important commitments, seeing tasks too long or missing due dates.

The person with low TemQ won’t even notice these mild issues until they turn into crises. However, their counterparts remain eternally vigilant and see these early signs of trouble.

 

STEP 3 – DEVELOP

 

 

META-SKILLS

 

High TemQ individuals don’t panic when such unwanted symptoms pop up. Instead, they realise that they need an upgrade and go about diagnosing their habits, practices and apps in a systematic way. In other words, they demonstrate the meta-skills needed to build added capacity – the only approach which keeps up with a continuously increasing workload.

Unfortunately, low TemQ professionals get stuck and never improve, slipping into a mindset that partly explains our stagnant productivity. After all, if we aren’t actively expanding our individual TemQ, why should our companies thrive and our economy grow?

Ecuadoreans had a similar challenge, estimating that lateness costs them 4.3 per cent of GDP. In response, they launched a national tardiness campaign.

The good news is that, unlike our IQ, we can all easily begin to improve our TemQ with practical improvements. There’s no reason for us to continue joking about a matter which has sharp life-or-death consequences.

It’s time to invest, on a personal level, in the productive Jamaica we want to become.

– Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of ‘Perfect Time-Based Productivity’. To receive a Summary of Links to past columns, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com.

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How to Escape the Zeigarnik Effect

Have you ever found yourself unable to fall asleep during a trying time at work? Or distracted in the middle of a conversation or meeting by thoughts about other stuff you still need to do?

If so, you may be a victim of the Zeigarnik Effect. Its exotic name comes from the Russian researcher who discovered it in the 1920’s while observing the behavior of waiters in a restaurant. Their ability to recall pending orders, but not the ones they had just delivered, caught her attention.

The disparity relates to the effect which bears her last name. It’s the nagging feeling you get once you mentally create a “time demand”: an internal, individual commitment to complete an action in the future. Your subconscious, which stores each one for later retrieval, does more than sit back and wait for you to act. Instead, it begins to ping your conscious mind with a stream of reminders.

If this were to take place on rare occasions, it would be a cute phenomenon. However, if you are someone who is ambitious, you may find the reminders increasing until you start to experience a sense of overwhelm. After all, her research states that the way to get rid of the Zeigarnik Effect is to complete the task. For busy people, it’s impossible – they create hundreds. Like everyone else, they can only finish one at a time.

So, is there an escape? Fortunately, there is, according to recent research conducted at Baylor University.

Dr. Michael Scullin and his team compared two bedtime behaviors in laboratory experiments. Before falling asleep, one group of subjects wrote their to-do list for the next few days. The other recorded the tasks they accomplished during that

day. The result? This small change in technique helped the first group fall asleep faster by over 9 minutes. Why did this happen?

To understand the underlying reason, we must visit the University of Florida. Drs. Roy Baumeister and Ed Masicapmo added to Zeigarnik’s research, showing that the effect disappears when a person has a trusted system in place to manage time demands. This makes intuitive sense. There’s no need for your subconscious mind to interfere if it believes that all your tasks are being properly managed.

How does this apply to falling asleep faster? Well, offloading your tasks to a written to-do list is one way to assure your subconscious that you are on top of all your commitments. In other words, it trusts a piece of paper more than your ability to remember. Satisfied, it leaves you alone, allowing you to doze off.

But what if you possess a high IQ, genius-level memory? Can’t that be used? The answer is short but elegant – “Sure… if you happen to be a kid.” While I doubt that any readers of this column are under 12 years old, we should understand why they are an exception. The fact is, they only have a few time demands to recall. Plus, they have teachers, parents, friends, and siblings reminding them what to do.

It’s only later, when they get older, that problems occur. But they aren’t caused by age which is not a factor until their retirement years. Instead, long before then, the challenge is to find a method to cope with the relentless swell in time demands our generation faces.

What else can be used beside paper? Digital devices also work. In addition, some people offload their tasks to other folks, like their children. “Remind me to pick up your cake tomorrow, Junior.”

But the only approach which succeeds in the long term isn’t a single technique or tool but a mindset of continuous improvement, plus specific knowledge of how humans use such tools. Start by getting committed to implementing ongoing upgrades. Then, understand that your choices need to follow a pattern.

While researching the latest edition of my book I found that improvements happen in serial fashion, but they all start with an attempt to use mental reminders. When that technique fails, we graduate to better skills one step at a time, following this sequence.

Level 1 – Memory

Level 2 – Paper Lists of Tasks

Level 3 – Simple Digital Apps

Level 4 – Complex Task Management Apps

Level 5 – Digital Calendars of all Tasks

Level 6 – Administrative Assistants / Autoscheduling Programs

As you look over this list, identify your current level. With this knowledge, you can prepare yourself for the next upgrade – the one that will help you stay abreast of your dreams and aspirations.

However, be aware: the Zeigarnik Effect shows up at any level. It’s a fantastic warning mechanism which lets you know when a change is overdue. Unlike your friends, colleagues and even your conscious mind, it can’t be fooled. It will do its job, preventing you from falling asleep quickly until you wake up to its incessant, nagging call for greater personal productivity.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. Missed a column? To receive a free download with articles from 2010-2016, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20180128/francis-wade-how-escape-zeigarnik-effect

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Podcast on Time Demands with Maura Thomas

While I was writing my book, I had the chance to sit down with productivity expert, Maura Thomas. The topic of the conversation was one of my favorites – “time demands.”

You should find some provocative, new ideas that later made it into my book – all based on the research I pulled together from different fields.

Tune into the podcast here.