I’d like to share with you a discovery I recently made and why I’d like you to join me in a private Beta Test.
Some may have noticed that I have disappeared, dropping from my regular routine of updating my blog and podcasts. The reasons aren’t happy ones, but I learned a lot in a short space of time about how to manage time demands when a major disruption occurs. (If you were even a bit annoyed at my unexplained disappearance, I offer an apology.)
The sad news is that I lost my father to pancreatic cancer in the span of just a few weeks. It was a sudden and stunning experience – the first time anyone close to me has ever passed away. So, it’s no wonder I was surprised by the effect it had on my life, starting from the moment he was diagnosed in early July.
There were a host of new emotions to contend with, many of which came on sharply – without warning. I found myself riding a roller-coaster of ups and downs, laughs and tears as I started to adjust to his permanent absence.
While these unexpected emotions were taking their inevitable toll, there were extraordinary events to plan, manage and execute. A viewing was first, followed by a funeral, cremation and a ceremony to scatter his ashes. Then his will and estate needed to be sorted. Fortunately, he left his affairs in immaculate condition, but they still needed to be handled in accordance with his wishes.
In the background, of course, there was a job I had to do as a consultant – that didn’t stop being demanding because a close family member had passed away. I still had to travel to work on projects overseas.
The net effect is one that you may recognize if you ever been hit by a personal tragedy. As Allen Saunders said, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” In an instant, a host of new “time demands” must be created and managed.
If you haven’t read my book, here is a short primer: a “time demand” is an individual, internal commitment to complete an action in the future. It’s different from what we call a “task” which is defined by the Webster-Merriam Dictionary as follows:
task (noun): “a piece of work that has been given to someone, a job for someone to do”
The key distinction is that time demands are only created by the individual, with full agency.
In the instant my father passed, my routine shifted from visiting him each day in the hospital to handling a number of new time demands. Now, there was time to be spent mourning, planning, disposing assets and supporting family members. Whatever other plans I had beforehand were now constrained; the 168 hours the make up each week were simply not enough. Some time demands had to be “Tossed” or discarded, to my surprise.
I realized that many of the ones I created before my Dad passed had to be revoked or rescheduled. As I saw myself struggle, I noticed that I was undergoing something new. To understand it better, I took an idea from my book: human beings gradually evolve new methods of managing time demands. I now see that there are four main ways to respond to a tragedy, depending on the practices you happen to be using when it strikes. Fortunately, as you will see, I had some help.
Method 1. Mental Overload
When a person has my book calls “White Belt” skills in most of the 7 fundamentals, (Capturing, Emptying, Tossing, Acting Now, Storing, Scheduling, Listing) they try to manage time demands using their memory. This is a difficult place to start, as you may imagine. In the event of a sudden tragedy such as the one I experienced, the mind becomes a disorderly place. According to Dr. Augustine Nwoye, prospective memory (used to manage time demands) becomes something to be “healed” in the grieving process.
I saw myself losing track of time demands that weren’t well-captured to begin with. That is, if they were only being kept in memory, they were likely to disappear. It helped me confirm a major premise in my book – that the number of time demands we can store effectively in memory is sharply limited. During a major tragedy, that number is further reduced.
Furthermore, as you shed time demands, the worst place to do that from is memory. At moments, I wound up feeling as if un-managed time demands were flying around me like a swarm of insects… out of control and taking up valuable energy and attention.
Method 2. Infinite To-Do Lists
When a tragedy triggers a surge in time demands, people who use one or many To-Do lists often respond by simply adding new items to their lists. This approach is better than using memory, for at least the items are being stored in a safe place.
If the number of time demands on the list is small (e.g. less than 10) then this technique might work well. However, the Type A person with 100+ time demands, perhaps shared between 10+ lists could experience a problem. Lists, are by design, infinite in length with respect to the time they consume. It’s quite possible that, under stress, someone is likely to add more items to their lists than they could possibly complete in a timely fashion.
Just adding more time demands invites disaster as the individual is forced to make a gut decision about how much time is truly available. The most likely result is over-commitment, which leads to stressful failures.
Method 3. A Manual Schedule
In my book, Perfect Time-Based Productivity, I lay out the case for replacing single or multiple To-Do lists with a single schedule/calendar of time demands, but only when there’s an increase above a certain point. Some of the experimental evidence I provided comes from work done by Peter Gollwizer and others. Their work shows that a time demand with a due date and/or pre-allocated time-slot is more likely to be completely than one without.
However, in reality, given our current tools, there is an inevitable scaling problem. Managing a lot of time demands with a calendar is difficult and my anecdotal evidence suggests that most people who try to teach themselves how to do so end up failing. The overhead activity required to lay out a calendar and change in response to life’s interruptions is just too hard.
In my case, I had a major interruption that represented the tip of the iceberg. What followed were multiple interruptions that led to days filled with surprises. Manually manipulating a schedule under these circumstances would have been almost impossible, even if it were done in digital (rather than paper) form.
Method 4. A Breakthrough – An Auto-Scheduler
Fortunately, I was a bit lucky. Early in February a colleague of mine shared a post with me related to a new software program she was using. She was achieving great results, she reported, with SkedPal.
I started using it amid great confusion. I had heard of it before, but the on-boarding materials left me further puzzled. As I struggled on, however, a clearer picture gradually emerged.
In short, SkedPal is a calendar optimizer. With the click of a button, it reschedules your calendar according to your preferences. Therefore, when your carefully laid plans are disrupted, (which happened to me multiple times per day right after my father passed away) you can survive by simply clicking a button and starting all over again.
How it does that was a revelation to me.
Firstly, SkedPal preserves your fixed time demands (i.e. appointments, meetings, conference calls, etc.) and only reschedules your flexible time demands. It can do this by relying on Outlook and Google calendar’s multiple calendar features. (It’s the first program to exploit these features that I’m aware of.)
Secondly, it translates your current preferences, practices and heuristics into what are called Time Maps. (An example might start with my habit of doing my best, creative work from 8 AM – 10 AM). Time Maps are easy to create, “heat maps” of your current practices and represent a powerful way for you to translate today’s behavior into rules that SkedPal can use. Therefore, when it’s rescheduling your calendar, it’s not just shoving stuff randomly into the future… it’s really optimizing your calendar. (This “little” feature took a few professors and several programmers thousands of hours to perfect. If you have a background in Artificial Intelligence or Operations Research you may understand that “little” is an understatement. It’s a breakthrough application that’s currently being patented.)
The results are outstanding. In a few seconds SkedPal’s engine pumps out a new calendar.
This means that you can click the Reschedule button as many times per day as you want and watch things fall into place, according to your Time Maps. As you go along, you keep refining your Time Maps so they become a better reflection of your priorities – as you discover what’s really been important to you all these years. You just never had the time, energy or bandwidth to put into words.
I found the time saved to been awesome. But there’s more. As my days went off in unpredictable directions, I found a new peace of mind. For the first time, I didn’t panic because I wasn’t hovering over my calendar, scrutinizing it as the day shifted unpredictably.
I learned that I could always check into SkedPal, and with a single click, have a brand new, feasible schedule. Even on those crazy days when I didn’t get to my calendar at all I was still OK. For the first time in my life, I had a calendar system that could forgive my inattention. All my time demands were sitting there waiting for me when I returned.
Everything I had to do was off my mind, managed in a system I could trust with all my time demands.
Thankfully, this whole episode confirmed a decision I made only weeks before my father passed away – one that I never had a chance to share with him. Based on my copious feedback to SkedPal’s founders, I was invited to join their Advisory Board.
If you have read Perfect Time-Based Productivity you may recall my rant… that developers had it all wrong by not focusing on the right things… i.e. time demands and the 11 fundamentals. Privately, I feared that it would be years before some decent software comes along.
Little did I know… while I was pushing my book through to its completion, SkedPal was releasing its Alpha version. Thanks to Melanie, I was rescued.
These are all reasons I asked for permission to open up a free, private Beta trial.
The fact is, we need some help from someone like you.
As may tell from its Beta status, SkedPal is far from perfect. There is a long list of changes that need to be made to ready it for the general public, including changes to its Graphical User Interface (GUI), on-boarding assistance and help features. Part of what we hope to learn is which of these changes are most important – a piece of information that can only come from real, live people like you using the product for your benefit, while giving us feedback.
So here’s the deal. In exchange for feedback, SkedPal is offering you free access to the current version. You’ll use it for your own benefit and see for yourself why I have become more than a fan.
Also, you’ll be joining a group / online community that I’ll be personally guiding. I’ll help you make the most of SkedPal and its features, plus learn from others who are just as productive as you are. There are a bunch of smart people out there who are using manual methods instead of SkedPal, and we’ll all be making the transition to higher productivity together.
Plus, you’ll share the direct link I have to SkedPal’s developers – a hotline for tech support that the public doesn’t receive.
If you would like to join my private Beta group called “Masters of Scheduling”, click on this link – http://wp.me/P3hu5l-eX and access my signup page. This community will form the core of those who Beta Test the program in this early stage.
Thanks for reading – I know these disruptions happen to everyone, but perhaps the struggle with a demanding schedule doesn’t need to be so hard.
See you inside the group,
Francis
P.S. If you want to forego my private Beta group and just try the current version of the software on your own without assistance, visit http://SkedPal.com. However, you will miss out on some good things… such as free lifetime upgrades.
P.S. 2018 Update: SkedPal is out of Beta and is available on a subscription basis. There’s a two week free trial.