Applied Learning from 2Time Labs
Amazon.com is running a promotion from their store – my book, Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure is now free for you and your clients, their families, their companies, your cousin, your accountant…
Anyone you can think of with a computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet or Kindle. So grab a copy but don’t stop there.
An article that I wrote for the International Coaching Federation was just posted on their site.
Here’s the link that has everything to do with the mindset that we as coaches enter the coaching relationship with.
Why Improved Time Management Requires Baby Steps.
Francis
This week I was interviewed by Andrea Sharb, a professional organizer, CPO-CD and ACC, former CPA and someone who serves on the executive board of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization.
We focused on “The Bill Book” book, and what makes it different from the other time management publications. It was a general interview, so it didn’t touch on the difference it makes for time advisers who want to use it with their clients – a separate topic that we’re tackling on a call next week. It’s bound to be interesting – hopefully we’ll come up with a few guidelines that I can share soon.
Here’s the interview with Andrea on Bill’s Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure.
I just finished reading yet another article on time management written by an author who has nothing new to say.
Yet another.
They are all over the place, apparently, willing to recycle old bromides and cliches to those who, they think, have never heard them before.
Case in point:
The Urgent-Important Matrix popularized (but not invented) by Stephen Covey has been repeated ad nauseum, but not a single writer I have read has pointed out how that information is supposed to be used in practice… “Keeping it in mind” does not qualify as a practice as it can neither be observed in practice nor measured.
Most of the amateur articles I have read have the exact same theme: “these habits work for me, so therefore they should work for you.” Even those authors who admit that their recommendations might not work for everyone, never go deeper than this and tell us why it won’t work, how to find aspects that do work, how to adapt these aspects into our life, etc. They leave it all up to the reader.
Perhaps the word “amateur” is a bit harsh, but these writers ignore a basic fact throwing new practices at at area in which people have ingrained habits hardly ever works. Yet, that’s what I read every day in time management articles from around the world.
As time advisers who are keen on developing our expertise, it’s our job to inform the world that there’s much more to the problem of time management. Treating our readers as if they have never thought about the subject is a big mistake.
They already know that time can’t be managed. They have already seen the Urgent-Important matrix. They have already been told to stop procrastinating. The help they actually ned – the stuff that makes the biggest difference – is not the stuff that amateurs write about. We need to demonstrate our knowledge and sophistication over and over again, and deepen our knowledge so that we help people solve difficult problems with extraordinary thinking.
When we take the same road as amateurs we have no right to be treated by our clients as special. A book I read about ten years ago by Alan Weiss – How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession – speaks eloquently to our need to provide expert value, especially in an area in which our clients already believe they know a thing or two.
Given the number of amateurs throwing around time management advice for beginners, our prospective clients have every right to ask themselves “Are you going to waste my time telling me stuff I already know?”
We need to bring them to the next level. As you probably know, Time Management 2.0 is my expression of unique value. What’s yours?
There’s a reason why it’s so important for executives to model learning behaviors, and this article I wrote for the Jamaican newspapers uses time management as a premier example.
Use this article to tell your executives why they also need to be learning time management skills.
The work we do here at 2Time Labs is driven by research. Due to the lack of time spent studying time management in academia, I often have to go searching in adjacent fields of study to come up with suitable evidence. It’s an ongoing process that’s often pretty tedious. What’s worse is that once a particular piece of research has been completed, more often than not the researcher moves on to something unrelated.
As a time adviser, it means that your field remains cluttered with bad ideas that just don’t work. For example, I just saw a video with a time management coach boasting that she was great at multi-tasking. Her 2 minute video has received 85,000 views on YouTube since September alone.
I have tried to bring some order to this unattractive state of affairs, and have described the hypotheses that underlie Time Management 2.0 in the Prezi presentation below. None of these hypotheses have been conclusively proven directly, but the major ideas have been supported by related research in other areas.
If all this academic/research talk appeals to you in any way, come join us over at a new group I have started on LinkedIn for academics and researchers: Time Management for Academics and Researchers.
Take a look at the interactive presentation below – switch over the full screen viewing after starting it up, and use the arrow keys to move from one slide to another.
The fact is, there are so many resources here at 2Time Labs that I sometimes get confused… so I can’t imagine what a first-time visitor must go through in order to get some simple questions answered.
As a time adviser, I imagine you probably don’t have time to browse, search and hunt for what you need among my different websites and other online repositories of content.
I have tried to make things easier by creating a visual tour of the 2Time Labs “ecosystem.” Take a moment to view this Prezi video which you can step through using your arrow keys. It’s best to view it on a full-screen, if you actually want to read all of it!
I just had my first article on the International Coach Federation blog. It’s entitled, The new coaching for time management.
What I now call “The Bill Book” is now in its final journey to the copy-editor. Once she fixes the mistakes in grammar, spelling and phrasing, I’ll pop it into the right format and submit it to Amazon.com.
It’s been a long journey, from a tentative, sample chapter / blog post I wrote back in March 2009 to the point where it’s on the verge of being released to the public. I have learned so much in this process, on a number of fronts – no single post can cover it all. The learning curve has been steep.
What it has forced me to do is coalesce a disparate amount of content into packages that people can recognize, use and benefit from. It’s been a tremendous force that’s helped me focus time, energy and attention on the places where I think it will make the biggest dent in the universe.
It certainly has helped me deepen my commitment to the certification of Time Management Advisers. There’ll be much more about this in the months to come.
In the meantime, my team of volunteer beta-testing-editors is waiting for the final product to give it one, final read. It will be the very last before it’s born into the world, warts and all.
If you’d like to sign up for immediate notification when the book is released, visit this link. You will also find a short summary of the book, and see why I’m so excited. Scared. Nervous. Happy. Relieved.
I sometimes get this question from time management advisers – “How do I help someone who knows everything in every time management book ever written?”
It’s an intriguing question that can be addressed in complex ways – as long as you are living in the old world of time management advising.
You know the old world – conduct a search for the best system out there and struggle to apply to your life. That’s the approach our potential clients expect, and the one we have grown up with. It’s the reason why we have a challenge as advisers because the authors of the best books in the field don’t want us to use their stuff to make money for ourselves. many expressly forbid it, in fact.
That leaves us stuck, either using their stuff without permission, or being forced to create our own stuff… and who has the time or inclination to do that? (OK, I do…! But it’s taken 7 years…)
The new model offers us some relief. Our expertise doesn’t need to lie in knowing all the best systems out there, or even in having one of our own to get them to follow. Instead, it can lie in our ability to help clients see their current way of operating so that the areas of weakness (and improvement) pop into view with such clarity that our clients are blown away.
By illuminating these areas of weakness, we can also help them see the impact on their lives of leaving these weak skills in a relatively under-developed state. When they take immediate action to close these gaps, they can then produce faster-than-ever gains.
The art and science of showing a client the holes, gaps and weak spots in their current systems is an ability that most coaches, consultants, professional organizers and trainers have used at some point, and can develop further. They don’t depend on this year’s hottest productivity book. Instead, they are more about our ability to listen in carefully to our client’s world in a way that no-one else can, before making suggestions that move them steadily forward.
No need to be intimidated – we already know how to do this!