It’s making great progress! My next book should be out for public purchase on January 1st, 2015. For early notification and all the bonuses that will be made available upon launch, make sure you have signed up on my update list on the front page, or right here:
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Here’s a short blurb about the book.
More demands on your time – that’s just a fact of modern life. How do you stay ahead of the rising expectation that you should be able to meet all your obligations, even though you are doing the job of more than one person, dealing with an onslaught of information and slowly realizing that 24-7 technology only makes things worse. In the face of these increasing pressures, what do you need to do to maintain your peace of mind?
This book is primarily written for productive professionals who have already found a way to achieve positive results. They aren’t clueless – time has been an important concern and they have been able to manage their affairs well enough to get through school, hold a job, keep a family and enjoy material benefits. However, they share a concern: how can they be successful in the future, given the hot pace of change they see around them every day? Doing more of the same seems an unlikely answer. So does the conventional wisdom around time management and the popular reliance on one-size-fits-all solutions.
While the books has lots of specific, practical suggestions for new behaviors, at its heart is a four step approach that preserves the advances that you, as a productive professional, have already made in your career:
1> Evaluate your current skills against best-in-class standards, discovering strengths and improvement opportunities.
2> Set realistic targets for new behaviors in line with your goals and commitments.
3> Create a plan from these new targets that allow you enough time to succeed, taking small steps.
4> Set up a habit change support environment.
Perfect Time-Based Productivity covers a broad range of ideas based on recent research and case studies in a number of fields, including psychology, management, brain science and engineering:
Part One – The new ideas you need to pull together in order to shift from trying to manage time (which is impossible) to managing time demands – the individual, internal commitments you make the complete actions in the future. Once these ideas are understood, you can see that all professionals manipulate time demands in similar ways, subject to the limits of human capacity. There is, in fact, a common process we all use, although it’s implemented in very different ways from one person to the next, because we are almost entirely self-taught.
Part Two – Using a number of forms provided in the book (and available for download) you perform an evaluation of your core skills: Capturing, Emptying, Tossing, Acting Now, Storing, Listing and Scheduling. Each evaluation is the precursor to creating a mini-improvement plan built on small steps. Ultimately, you create a single a master plan that outlines the journey you will take once the book is finished to improve your habits, practices and rituals at a pace that preserves your peace of mind.
Part Three – You’ll learn about other advanced skills and perspectives needed to be effective in today’s world. For example, Flowing – your capacity to stay in the flow state defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – is described as an important skill to master given the modern pressure to multi-task unproductively with electronic gadgets. Also, you’ll learn why corporations are struggling with time-based productivity: they don’t push for the right tools for employees and have allowed individual effectiveness to become a matter of chance, versus policy.
The book closes with a number of links for already productive professionals such as project managers, time advisers, Type A businesspeople or personal improvement fans. Several hundred academic papers were consulted in the writing of this book and the References provide a useful guide to the tapestry of ideas this book is based on.