3 Techniques That Cause Total Time Management Failure In Today’s Fast Paced Modern Lifestyles
Original: 2009
It took me years. Trying, and trying… and trying to get normal time management techniques to work for me… failing miserably – until I finally realized what I have exposed in this new controversial report.
Time Management Trainers are not happy about it. Because it really exposes them as being (while well intentioned) almost at a complete loss to really give you a lasting improvement in your time management.
But it’s important that we all face facts. That popular time management techniques fail under the pressure of modern fast paced lifestyles.
When you avoid these techniques, you might find like I did, and others that I’ve shared this with… that you free your own natural time management skill that brings back the energy, passion, and vitality you can probably remember from childhood days. Time Management does not have to be difficult.
First, avoid the 3 obsolete time management techniques exposed in this report…
TIME MANAGEMENT DINOSAUR
Re-Discovered From The 1930’s Still Causing Havoc In Streets, Homes, And Offices Today!
Ok, I’m playing.
But this is actually dead serious because it’s true – I really have found a time management dinosaur. And it’s still kicking and dangerous.
In fact, it’s one of the oldest relics of time management theory… And one that still has it’s massive jaws snapped tight around your natural skill with managing time.
This will only take a couple minutes to explain…
And Charles Schwab paid $35,000 for this tip, so it’s worth knowing right? So here goes…
This TMD is a terrible technique for time management still taught by helpless time management trainers, who repeat what they read 20 years ago… that was based on training from 50 years ago… that was derived from one single 20 minute business meeting during the 1930s…
The Exact Time Management System That Steel Magnate Charles Schwab Used (To earn 100 million dollars – in the 30’s!)
And why it’s totally BOGUS for today’s modern lifestyle
Ivy Lee, an efficiency consultant in the 30s, told Schwab to make all his executives write a list of their 6 most important things they had to do for their area of work. And then to order them by priority. And to do them in order. And that’s it.
Well 3 months later, Schwab decided the results were worth paying Lee US$35,000 for. (At the time, the average worker in the US was being paid $2 per day.)
And that single time management technique made Schwab the most successful steel man in America – earning him 100 million dollars in 5 years.
So if it was good enough to make 100 million, isn’t it good enough for you and I?
Well let’s see… Just write down the top 6 priorities you need to get done, and do nothing else but them until they’re all done, one by one…
But before you ruin your life… let’s think about it just for a second.
And that single time management technique made Schwab the most successful steel man in America – earning him 100 million dollars in 5 years.
So if it was good enough to make 100 million, isn’t it good enough for you and I?
Well let’s see… Just write down the top 6 priorities you need to get done, and do nothing else but them until they’re all done, one by one…
But before you ruin your life… let’s think about it just for a second.
Schwab and his top management were able to command employees to do their bidding.
They had enough cashola to employ maids, cooks, nannies, etc.
And they lived in the 30s – known as ʻthe age of styleʼ, when times were good, and life moved slow.
Certainly nothing like our busy modern hectic lifestyles we have today.
And you probably don’t have a cook, maid, and nanny. I know I don’t.
But here’s the real kicker.
That one darn suggestion (that worked great in the 30s) has become the underlying
principle of time management techniques still taught today. And sure, it seems like common sense doesn’t it?
Make a list of what you gotta do…
Prioritize the most important one’s,…
And then do them one by one.
So if you think that will work for you… if you think that’s some kind of magic revelation… if its the first time you’ve been exposed to this idea… then by all means go ahead and give it a try.
But if you get frustrated with all of modern life’s distractions, chores, and piles upon piles of opportunities that pass you by day every day… then you’ll feel as I do (which I realized in 2007) that modern time management needs to step back from these 80 year old ‘industrial’ techniques, and come from a new modern perspective.
That’s when I made the InstaTime breakthrough. And I want you to have it too.
It’s not cheap like buying a book of time management techniques, but I believe it will be well worth your while. And I’ll happily give you your money back if you find it’s not helpful to you personally. That’s my offer if you decide – you do want to try it.
So the oldest Time Management Dinosaur (TMD) I’ve ‘excavated’ so far is Ivy Lee’s ‘prioritize by importance’ technique.
The 3 Obsolete Time Management Techniques
- Prioritize by ‘Importance’ or ‘Urgency’ (useless)
- Schedule Activities to Time (yeh right)
- Weekly To-Do Lists (forget it)
Let’s start off with…
1. Prioritize by Importance and/or Urgency?
Some trainers will tell you the ‘key to time management is to prioritize by importance… They’ll give you the ABCDE Method which has you prioritize your tasks as:
A. Top priority
B. Second priority
C. Thingsnotsoimportant
D. Thingsyoucandelegatetoothers
E. Things to take off your to-do list altogether
Up to a point it can work in your career (but not very well). But it fails miserably when you try to use it with your personal life.
At what point would we get round to things like cutting the grass, exercising, filing papers, or reading your kids night time stories?
There are always going to be A’s so when would you ever get to the B’s? (Let alone the C’s).
So the modern interpretation of ‘prioritizing by importance’ includes the notion of ‘urgency’. Now let’s see how it works in a real-life scenario…
You can watch a video of me talking you through these scenarios.www.timemanagementsystemlattice.com/videos/obsolete3
Or if you don’t have Internet access then just read through and you’ll get the gist of it.
Here’s an example of a brief to-do list you create on Friday evening ready for your weekend (play with me here).
The letters column represents how ‘important’ each item is (A being most important), and the numbers represent how ‘urgent’ they are (1 being most urgent).
Of course Friday evening is pizza and video store night, so you manage to pay the phone bill but are distracted by relaxing at the end of your hard week at work so don’t get anything else done from the list you’ve made. But at least you’ve made the list, which is more than most people manage. So…
…Come Saturday, it’s time to get some of these things done.
But since you created the list on Friday, your feelings and perspectives of the importance and urgency of some of these things have changed a little.
The point of prioritizing by importance and urgency is to get a list of things to do in order of which to do them.
So looking at Saturday’s list we have 4 items with an A-level priority. And 5 things with a 1- level urgency.
Let’s re-order our list accordingly…
This is when they’re ordered by most-to-least important:
And this is when they’re ordered by most-to-least urgent:
Erm… we still need to make a decision about which items to do, even though we’ve ranked them ‘most important’ and ‘most urgent’.
Important things are often not urgent. Urgent things are often not important.
Let’s see what we got done over Saturday by looking at Sunday’s updated list.
So we got 4 of the items done on Saturday, changed one of the items priorities to more important (Mow the lawn is now a B), and changed 2 items ‘urgency’ factor to 1.
Could you keep up that kind of prioritization every single day, for all areas of your life, with every to-do item? It certainly wouldn’t be smooth sailing would it…
But the time management trainers would have you at least try. Why? Because this is all that exists in time management circles today.
The ABCDE Method of prioritization is difficult to imagine working even with only a few tasks…
If you’ve ever tried this technique whilst trying to account for all of your projects, hobbies, interests, responsibilities, ideas, plans, etc. I’m sure you agree how difficult it is.
And the bottom line:
“Prioritizing by Importance or Urgency is unnatural, and destined to failure.”
Prioritizing by importance or urgency turns time management away from being natural, spontaneous, flexible, and fun… and towards being a chore; difficult at best… impossible at worst.
Trying to prioritize by importance or urgency creates big problems. It used to work (like in 1850!), but not today. Modern life is way too busy for such a robotic method.
The only place this works is in business, at a top level management position.
Why? Because higher management KPIs (key performance indicators) are based on very few specifics, PLUS: they have a team of managers, assistants, secretaries, and receptionists they can direct.
As such, they have fewer things to actually ‘do’. If they get too much on their plate, they delegate. Therefore they have the comfort of prioritizing by A, B and C. And Delegating what’s left (D). Or deciding not to do the things at all (E).
But for your modern personal life, or in lower management, or normal working life, or entrepreneurial projects… there is more opportunity, responsibility, tasks, chores, projects, ideas, distractions, possibilities, people, obligations, etc. than we can possibly manage by the simplistic idea of prioritizing by ABCDE.
It’s a bad technique that should not be taught any more. Except to top level directors. It doesn’t work folks. And it’s not your fault!
Let’s move on to the next technique…
2. Schedule Activities To Time
I’ll keep this one brief.
It’s easy to understand.
Many Time Management trainers would have you schedule your tasks to times of the day.
Again, perhaps that really does works for some business managers who have fewer tasks with power to delegate.
But when you’re trying to run your own life, with all your personal interests and responsibilities, scheduling tasks to time just isn’t even in the running.
It would work fine if you was a robot, and lived on a planet with no other people.
But being human… living in civilization… your mood, energy levels, focus, interruptions, distractions, changing circumstances, etc all get in the way of any kind of crisp tight military schedule of tasks planned to set times of the day or week.
Scheduling activities to time in a modern lifestyle does NOT work.
At best, these techniques of prioritizing by importance and urgency… and scheduling tasks to time… are inspirational, cool for the short-term, (because they give us ideas, and help make us more focused and disciplined) – but soon enough, we end up back in the same groove we were in before, frustrated, overwhelmed, not getting done as much as we really want.
So the last resort is to try and settle for making daily or weekly… or even monthly (yikes!) to-do lists… Thinking that it will help give us a bit more human flexibility than scheduling- tasks-to-time.
Well let’s see how weekly to-do lists works out next, as our last of the 3 most obsolete, useless, and even harmful time management techniques still taught today…
3. Weekly To-Do Lists
Consider the difference between a project and an activity.
Projects are anything you want to do that involves multiple activities, such as making
dinner for 6.
Activities are anything that can be physically done at one time, such as mixing pastry, chopping vegetables, marinating chicken, etc.
So what is a weekly to-do list? It’s an attempt to cross the border between projects, activities, and scheduling activities to time. Look…
Here’s a simple example:
You need to take your car into a mechanic.
So is that a project or an activity? It’s a project, because it’s made up of a number of specific physical tasks:
- find a number and address of a local mechanic.
- phone to book it in.
- plan your week so you can take it and leave it at the mechanic.
- work out how you’ll get by without having a car for a few days.
- arrange to collect it when it’s fixed.
Several activities are involved. But if you ‘get car fixed’ on your weekly to-do list, it would be a vague non-detailed item without clear activities.
If you’ve ever tried planning your week’s schedule using something like this, you’ll know that rather than getting done, you’ll probably have to put it, and other items, onto NEXT weeks ‘weekly to-do list’. Life quickly gets messy.
Before long you abandon ‘to-do lists’ altogether ‘because they don’t seem to work well for your lifestyle’ (something similar ever happened to you? It happened to me for ages).
Rather than being a good bridge between projects and activities, a weekly to-do list becomes a major obstacle of it’s own. Like a cattle grid in-between where you are, and where you want to go… One foot wrong, and you’re stuck.
Using weekly to-do lists is a good attempt to organize things you need to get done. But what happens is that TOO many items on the weekly list end up being mini-projects in themselves, rather than actionable tasks.
Therefore you’ll glance them over… as your mind runs for the hills.
You know it happens. You end up with an ever growing list of weekly to-do’s with a few super urgent things you absolutely HAVE to get done… next week.
BOTTOM LINE: To hell with normal time management techniques!
Prioritizing by so called ‘importance’ doesn’t work well. Scheduling activities to time also doesn’t work well. Weekly to-do lists also lead to Time Management failure.
For the 2000’s (and beyond) we need an entirely new time management system. One that is flexible and natural.
We want to maximize the productive use of our time… we want to spend our time however we like… we want to get things done… we want to be successful.
We also want to get our hair cut, mow the lawn, and get our car fixed.
This requires a new understanding of time management… where all things are considered,
balanced, and achieved.
I know I haven’t give you a lot of actual techniques that DO work in this report, but by NOT following these obsolete techniques you will begin to unlock your natural time management abilities.
A bit about me…
I spent 13 years as of 2009 researching and testing different personal productivity techniques.
In 2006 I conducted a 30 day time management holiday from a beach side hut on a tropical island in Thailand.
The InstaTime System has grown since then to an incredibly effective yet totally simple to apply system of personal time management.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this report exposing the 3 most awful time management techniques still in use today.
And I hope you will decide to continue with me on this journey to time management excellence in the months and years ahead.
