Category: Coaching: Content

In my preparation for the ICD Conference in Chicago this week, I had to make a conscious decision (due to time constraints) to exclude my opinion that we consultants often assume that our clients aren’t all that smart.

How do I know we do that?

Take a group of your average clients and ask them to put together a list of the top 10 tips they would give a young professional on the topic of time management or time clutter. In your instructions, ask them not to try too hard to tell the recipient stuff they think they might already know.

Their final product might be a long list of stuff you already know, but here’s the problem: their list would look no different from the tips that are floating around in books, YouTube videos, blogs, tweets, Facebook pages, e-books, podcasts and anywhere else that content can be found in these times. These floating tips are being circulated as if they are important, new, different, important and interesting when in fact, they are nothing but recycled ideas that have been around for years. Here’s an example:

• Take the first 30 minutes of every day to plan your day.
• Take five minutes before every call and task to decide what result you want to attain.
• Block out other distractions.
• Use a calendar.

If our clients have already heard these things, and they are widely accepted and can hardly be refuted, why are they being repeated ad nauseum? Why are we treating our clients as if they just aren’t all that smart, and that they have never considered the simple ideas that we throw at them over and over again?

I believe the reasons are twofold.

1. We don’t have anything better. Here, I blame the lack of research. There are just very few places that new ideas are being generated in the field of time management, even as the technology that’s available to help us explodes. In the absence of new ideas, the old ones keep being re-assembled in lists of frivolous tips that claim to make a difference.  (e.g. “Planning is Key” – taken from a prestigious magazine for C-level executives. )
2. They aren’t implementing them. We know that in spite of the tremendous number of time management tips floating around that they make little or no difference. People who do a lot of planning already agree that “Planning is Key.” Those who don’t agree aren’t going to change their minds because the new “tip” is included in a list. The vast majority probably agree that they should be doing more planning, but have no idea why that knowledge hasn’t been translated into action, habit or practice. Apparently, the assumption is that somewhere out there, there are a legion of stupid people who have never heard the idea that “Planning is Key.” I have no idea who these people are or where they work… and I’ll bet you don’t know either.

The result of this mindless repetition of shallow tips is that potential clients assume that once they hear the words “time management” that the author/coach/professional organizer/trainer/consultant has nothing new to say on the topic. In their minds, they have already been there, done that and got the T-shirt. There is no need to chase down yet another list, article or book because the time spent reading is hardly worth the effort. Obviously, there is no need to pay your high fees to hear a bunch of stuff I already know. “Heck,” they think, “my kid could have written that Top 10 List of Time Management Tips that you are promoting!” (Some of us try to beat smart clients by making longer lists, but trust me… Top 10,001 Tips on Time Management is just a bigger mountain of fluff.)

As a result, clients show up on our radar already bored, believing that they know as much as the experts. And, they have the evidence in the abundance of tips bouncing around that proves their point.

At the bottom of it all is an incorrect mental model. Excellence in time management, or drastic reductions in time clutter don’t come from tips. Neither does world-class performance in piano, sprinting or painting. All the evidence says that it comes from hard practice.

Unfortunately, it’s far easier to write an article filled with trite tips than it is to delve into the well researched topic of hard practice. It’s also much easier to coach, train or organize someone using tips, shortcuts and tricks i.e. fluff.

The road less traveled is slow, harder to implement, un-sexy and uphill, but it’s the only thing that works. We need to challenge our clients with the truth, and trust that they are intelligent enough to be able to handle it.

I just bumped into a video preview for The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. Its explores a familiar concept that we have explored at 2Time Labs – becoming good at time management takes focused practice in order to develop the habits that are required for even the smallest upgrades.

It’s exactly what we want our time cluttered clients to do. Once they have finished listening to us, we want them to go away and practice their skills until new habits emerge. A good coach/consultant is able to produce this result over and over, while a weak one does little more than give them access to ideas, either via the written or spoken word.

It’s the very opposite of expecting magical, instant results.

Myelin is that fatty substance that encloses neurons, and it thickens in the brain and spinal cord up when actions become habitual. Myelin thickens when actions are repeated thousands of times over and over again, ensuing that your coaching hasn’t been wasted.

Take a look at these 2 short videos for more.

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As a coach, consultant, trainer or professional organizer in time management, it’s useful to return to adult learning principles now and then, if only as a refresher.

Some time ago, I wrote a post over at the 2Time Labs website in which I laid out a Pedagogy for Time Management. (A pedagogy is a teaching method.)

I’m in the process of developing an assessment that can be used to assess your consulting, teaching, coaching or organizing skills as they are applied to your work with clients. In doing so, I have been revisiting the principles of adult learning because I believe that they apply quite well to the work we do.

Here’s a great website that I found describing these principles and the precise behaviors used to support the top principles:  http://www.qotfc.edu.au/resource/index.html?page=65375

Take a look and ask yourself how you can use these principles to increase your effectiveness and impact. If you’re in a hurry, here they are, as described by Malcolm Knowles.

• Adults are internally motivated and self-directed
• Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences
• Adults are goal oriented
• Adults are relevancy oriented
• Adults are practical
• Adult learners like to be respected

As you dig into each of these principles you’ll see how easy it is to step over them while working with clients. Some would argue, for example, that there is no need to understand what the client or trainee is doing today, and that they always need to start over from scratch.

According to Knowles, that would be a big mistake.

P.S. Click here to watch the related video: Time Management Consultants – Why Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts No Longer Work.

It’s no accident that I’m leading a Post-Conference Workshop at the ICD conference in Chicago called “Baby Steps – Radically Reducing Your Clients’ Time Clutter.” The name comes from an overt attempt on our part here at 2Time Labs to bring modern thinking that’s backed by research to the way time management is taught or coached.

Most time management teaching follows the “tell them and leave them” approach. Learning the content is deemed to be the most important activity, and the materials are presented in a way that dumps a lot of new ideas on the learner or coachee.

The results are typically poor, according to research by by Therese Macan. For the most part, people end up doing whatever they were doing before the course began.

Before the work of Albert Bandura, managers and coaches would focus on building in elaborate systems of carrots and sticks in order to get the trainee to exhibit the right behavior. Bandura showed that much more is happening in the typical learning environment than simple external stimuli, and that one way to help the learner to change is to

1. break down the change into small steps
2. help them grow confidence in mastering increasingly more tasks
3. showing them models that are successful

In other words, use baby steps.

The problem with the popular approaches to teaching time management is that the materials are presented in massive chunks. This leads the trainee to think that they are a failure when, a month later, they realize that they have implemented little or nothing new.

The solution that we have taken based on our experience of seeing a lot of failures is that a coach/consultant / trainer / professional organizer should help build what Bandura calls “self-efficacy” (a sense of confidence in your ability) in two ways:

1. teaching clients how to re-design their time management systems starting from their current set-up in a way that uses baby steps; alternating new learning with immediate design activity to build the trainee’s sense of mastery
2. helping clients to make plans for implementation that are based on small steps to be taken over time, and offering supportive mechanisms so that they can see role models in action, and get help when confidence dips

As it stands, there doesn’t exist any certification whatsoever for coaches and consultants in time management, or time clutter.

There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, and if you have a moment you might check out my 2Time Labs website to see why there is also a lack of research, and not a single university has a department devoted to the subject.

This has also led to a lack of training for helping professionals in this field who end up being stuck without a single, unified source of expertise. I have started making a list of the problems and questions that coaches, consultants, trainers and professional organizers often repeat in their frustration at the lack of resources that exist today.

Biggest Problems
1. I don’t know where to start
2. I don’t have anything to sell clients
3. I don’t know what to do
4. The stuff I have doesn’t work
5. My clients forget everything I teach them
6. I don’t have enough time to make a big difference

Most Common Questions
1. How do I make the lessons I teach my clients stick?
2. How do I convert my current clients in other areas to time management clients?
3. What processes do I need to follow?
4. What content do I use?
5. How do I find new clients?
6. How can get trained?
7. How can I get certified?
8. Why can’t I just give them a book?
9. Why don’t my tips, tricks and shortcuts work?

I have been leading productivity programs for almost twenty years, and I can’t say that I don’t face these problems, or have stopped working on these questions. I do know, however, that as Time Management 2.0 evolved and worked its way into my coaching and training, I have had less of these problems and been able to move onto the causes of these questions.

Have I left off anything obvious from these lists, from your perspective? Please do let me know by leaving a comment below.

When clients come to us for help, they usually don’t have an idea of the best path to take. As professional consultants / coaches, it’s our job to direct them to the right process, and best possible set of results.

If we had the idea environment, we could help our clients to learn these lessons via interactive games. They’d teach themselves, and we’d just be expert guides. What we have is a choice of two alternatives.

In Time Management 1.0 the focus is on fixed prescriptions, and the major lesson to be learned is:  “Here are the ideal set of fixed habit patterns everyone you to follow.”

In Time Management 2.0, the lessons are more subtle, and therefore more difficult to deliver.

Lesson 1 – You are currently using a unique system made up of habits, practices and technology.

Lesson 2 – You have come to me because your system is failing you in some way.  What are the symptoms?

Lesson 3 – Your current system is a self-invention from young adulthood.

Lesson 4 – Let’s gain a deep understanding / profile of your own system’s successes and failures.

Lesson 5 – Let’s set some new standards for your system to acccomplish.

Lesson 6 – Let’s find the steps you need to take to fill the gap between the system that you have and the one you want.

Lesson 7 – Let’s sequence these steps in time so that you have a feasible plan.

Lesson 8 – Let’s assemble a fool-proof support system.

Lesson 9 – Let’s track the success and failures of your support system over time.

Lesson 10 – Let’s evaluate and incorporate new technologies, tools, theories, research etc.

At the end, under these ideal conditions, we’d have a client who is fully capable of upgrading their time management system whenever they decide they need to do so, or want to take advantage of some new innovation. We’d better move on to the next level as coaches / consultants, or we could easily run out of ways to be useful to them.

If you have ever played Angry Birds, then you know what it’s like to throw yourself into the deep end, without the benefit of any instruction or practice, and attempt to accomplish a tough objective. You also might know that in the right context, and even without any visible benefit, just the act of trying to get better at an admittedly stupid game can become quite addictive.

The game has had 450 million downloads.

Make no mistake about it… this is learning at it’s very best.

It got me thinking about the future of time management training. In the idea future, when a client comes to us for help, once the contract has been signed, what would the idea training environment look like?

First of all, they’d be playing games. Real-time, addictive, 3-D games that would immerse them in a made-up world in which the consequences of their actions would be felt in a matter of seconds. They’d be able to make and re-make choices just to see what happens, experiment with different approaches and make incremental upgrades to their current system. It would massively accelerate their learning, and allow them to examine what it would take to change habits, patterns and rituals without experiencing their failures directly.

Imagine how a flight simulator works for pilots… it would be the same thing for our clients.

Over at 2Time Labs we are taking on the challenge of coming up with that kind of training and making it available here on the MyTimeDesign blog.

Stay tuned…!

In a recent look around a well known time management guru’s discussion forums I saw a question that comes up frequently: “Can I use your stuff in my coaching business?”

The question is usually posed by someone who read the guru’s book or took his/her program, and sees how they could use it as an offering for their own clients.

The answer is usually the same: “Yes, if all you are doing is sharing information, as long as you keep our name on the stuff you use and don’t change anything. No, if you want to make any money.”

It’s a familiar song to anyone who is on the receiving end. Some do go ahead and use the stuff anyway, and hope that no-one finds out. They usually do it on a small scale, and never do more than dabble here or there. They definitely don’t accept a call from a Fortune 500 company to lead a seminar series to 5,000 people. Well, maybe some do, but most don’t: their conscience can only be stretched so far before it snaps them back like a rubber band.

Most just give up, and walk away.

For a few years, I have been looking for a decent source of training in this area without luck, making me think that most coaches are stuck delivering what I call “Time Management 0.0.”: disjointed tips, shortcuts, tricks, etc. This approach is not a rigorous one, and hardly stands up to the quality of other consulting offerings that include standardized processes, and refined techniques.

Here at 2Time Labs we have been engaged in publishing our ideas for 6+ years, and never quite intended to provide a solution for time management professions. Yet, the question we are asking ourselves is how much information and instruction should be provide to fellow coaches, and under what circumstances.

We understand fully that ideas are not copyrightable, and in our minds 2Time Labs is merely a conduit. However, when those ideas turn into language, forms, processes and training of different kinds… well, that’s another story. At some point, there will be a charge, but the question is… what’s that point?

I don’t have an answer to that question yet, and the fact is, we are better at figuring out great ideas related to time management and sharing them with the world than taking care of the commercial side of things. What we do know we have lots of stuff that can be converted into solid tools for time management coaches and that this kind of specific information is unfortunately very rare.

So stay tuned… we’ll continue to answer these questions in the next year or so.

A smart client may tell you in the very first session that there is no such thing as time management or time clutter.

They happen to be correct – don’t argue with them.

Time cannot be managed, and it also cannot become cluttered. It simply moves of its own accord from one moment to the next, and there is nothing that we can do to manage or de-clutter it.

Instead, you should know that what you ARE really doing is “time demand management,” or in other words, “time demand clutter consulting.” The objects that become cluttered, and therefore need to be managed, are time demands. (We don’t use the longer phrases because they are a bit confusing to clients, but our minds do need to be clear.)

At the same time, clients become confused by the amount that comes at them each day. They try different techniques to limit the flow, such as not using email. The problem, however, isn’t email, which is simply an efficient method of sending and receiving asynchronous messages.

The problem is that the number of time demands has increased. If you took away your email system and replaced it with paper, you’d have a similar complaint about getting too many paper memos. The problem must be solved at the right level, if it’s to remain truly and permanently solved.