A Powerful Index of All Productivity Techniques

Several years ago, I stumbled across Dr. Melanie Wilson’s blog in which she was in the middle of a one year effort to personally test one new productivity technique per week. It was an impressive feat.

Fortunately. she has documented her findings in a book – A Year of Living Productively.

Her book was released in December and happens to mention the work we have done here at 2Time Labs. More to the point, if you’re a productivity coach, consultant, trainer or professional organizer, this is an indispensable resource.

In each chapter, she outlines her personal experience of each, summarizing the conditions in which the use of the tool in question would be ideal. This should save the time adviser hundreds of hours, plus bring them to a level of expertise that allows them to take care of client questions and concerns about alternate methods.

Don’t miss getting a copy of  this one-of-a-kind  resource for your shelf or reader.

Announcing: A New Podcast Format

During the month of December I’ll be undertaking a relaunch of the 2Time Labs podcast.

Gone for the most part will be the old format of interviewing an expert who has written a book, or about to publish one. In its place will be at attempt to create a useful product, service of job aid in every episode.

Or, to be more accurate, in each conversation. At the moment each one is spanning several episodes and takes more than a few hours.

Why so long?

In a nutshell, I have given up trying to cram a thought-provoking conversation into a short listening experience which amounts to little more than an infomercial. Instead, I invite an expert onto the show with an explicit goal – to solve a problem by producing an interactive “object” that a real person can use. In other words, it’s a design conversation, just like the ones I used to have as a researcher / consultant at AT&T  Bell Labs.

For those who are a bit younger, in its heyday “The Labs” were the top of the industrial research laboratories, enjoying reputation like Google Labs or similar outfits at Microsoft, Apple or Facebook. Every day, a bunch of bright people had thousands of conversations on all levels – from highly theoretical to abundantly practical. (A few won Nobel Prizes for the former.)

Way over on the latter end of the spectrum, I enjoyed these discussions. IN fact, I plan to replicate them on the podcast with my guest.

 

These aren’t short salesy chats… but you can find out more here, by listening to my introduction episode intended to describe what will happen in the next few weeks. I have taped four LiveLabs so far ranging over a total of about 10 hours and they are quite different from anything I have ever heard.

If you are a consultant, trainer, professional organizer or coach, this may be a good opportunity to hear us pull together existing ideas into sophisticated end-products. My guests and I are quite aware that each conversation is a risky proposition… our well-meaning deep dive could yield little of real value. Yet, here we are…trying our best.

Listen in here.

 

What do you tell clients to do with lots of low priority tasks? [Podcast]

A few months ago, I recorded a podcast with Augusto Pinaud on the topic of scheduling low priority tasks.

While that may sound like a trite topic, it’s anything but…these tasks accumulate leading to all worts of unwanted feelings and effects.

Tune into this recording in which Augusto shares his unique approach to dealing with tasks before they become a problem.

[Hint: The answer is NOT to just get rid of them.]

Listen in here!