At the end of most chapters in Perfect Time-Based Productivity, I included a number of one-liners that could be used as Tweets, Facebook status updates or just as quotes wherever you may want.
I just put together a complete file of all the entries and thought that I might want to share. To download the Word file with all the entries listed, click here.
And, here they are all in a list, if you’d like to access them in bulk immediately.
94% of employees admitted that when they get more than 50 emails per day, they are unable to keep up.
The amount of information you process in a day is equivalent to the amount of data your grandparents saw in a month.
Time cannot be managed. But time demands can.
Dr. Brigitte Claessens: “time cannot be managed in any sense.”
Albert Einstein: “time is an illusion”. How therefore can we hope to manage it?
Dr. Lori Hellsten: “there is… a lack of agreement about the definition of time management and a dearth of literature summarizing time mgt across disciplines.”
“Good time management” is therefore a result, observation or assessment we make after the fact not an activity we undertake directly.
Every single functioning adult has their own time management system.
We each have a time-based productivity system we created in our teens, with little or no formal training or coaching.
Individual time-based productivity systems vary widely in terms of their quality.
Our home-grown time-based productivity systems are often uneven and overly complex.
Our habit patterns, once set, are hard to change.
Most people are unaware of their ability to craft a time-based productivity system.
Every single functioning adult has their own time management system.
We each have a time-based productivity system we created in our teens, with little or no formal training or coaching.
Individual time-based productivity systems vary widely in terms of their quality.
Our home-grown time-based productivity systems are often uneven and overly complex.
Our habit patterns, once set, are hard to change.
Most people are unaware of their ability to craft a time-based productivity system.
Time cannot be managed. Free yourself from trying. Leave confusion behind.
If time management is impossible, what should replace it?
The actions you take every day come from either time demands or habits – nothing else.
You can’t improve your time-based productivity skills without understanding the underlying theory.
A time demand is an internal, individual commitment to complete an action in the future. It’s also a psychological object.
Time-based productivity is about the management of a psychological object using engineering principles to achieve personal and business results.
Discovering how you dispense of time demands is the beginning of managing yourself with skill.
Go beyond self-management, and discover how you manage time demands.
Is a time demand a psychological object with physical properties? Or biological properties? Surprise – it’s both.
Want to or not, everyone is doing it: creating, managing and completing time demands.
Why does it feel so good to cross an item off a list that we just completed? It’s because that item is a time demand that’s made to help us accomplish stuff in life.
Daniel Gilbert in his book, Stumbling on Happiness – “The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.”
A time demand was NOT something someone places on you it was the kind of demand you place on yourself.
A time demand always comes from inside you, the individual, and never from outside.
Every human being on the planet creates time demands and tries to keep them alive
A time demand is an individual commitment to complete an action in the future.
Time management doesn’t exist – but time demand management cannot be escaped.
Have you diagnosed your time-based productivity system lately?
Great time management needs a blend of psychology, engineering, management, adult learning and more.
Don’t start with new technology – start with your gaps revealed in a great self-diagnosis.
The best diagnosis of your time management skills is one that can be captured on videotape.
Irony: once you are able to diagnose your time management skills, you’ll be shocked and humbled by what you find.
Fact: people who are trained to diagnose their time management skills are likely to deprecate them.
Are you over-estimating your time management skills? Don’t assume, instead diagnose and discover.
Human beings are limited in how we manage our time by the laws of physics, our psychology and by process management rules.
Each human being processes time demands using 7 Fundamentals – Capturing, Emptying, Tossing, Acting Now, Storing, Scheduling and Listing.
The Trainability Test: focus on behaviors that can be effectively taught to other people, or coached.
Capturing is the process of storing time demands in a safe place for later retrieval and processing.
A Capture Point is a location for temporarily storing time demands.
Capture Points can be automatic (for potential time demands) or manual (for actual time demands.)
Your mind is a terrible Capture Point… unless you don’t have much to do each day.
How can you make sure you never need to use your memory as a Capture point… ever?
Great time managers develop the habits of carrying around a Capture Point at all times.
Develop the habit of instantly diverting every time demand that you create to a Capture Point.
The Goldilocks Principle of goal planning means setting targets that are neither too ambitious nor too boring.
It’s not necessary to have the best time management skills – just the right set that suits your circumstances.
People who are great at Capturing never allow a single time demand to slip through the cracks.
The Goldilocks Principle of goal planning means setting targets that are neither too ambitious nor too boring.
It’s not necessary to have the best time management skills – just the right set that suits your circumstances.
Sometimes, the best kind of evaluation is one that you do of yourself – #PTBP
At average volumes of email, treat your Inbox like a kitchen sink – only a temporary place of storage.
Treat your email Inbox as a triage zone and you’ll never become overloaded by too many messages.
Don’t walk around each day with a mental plan – take it out and put it in front of you on paper or digital form.
Your system for time-based productivity needs to serve your needs, not anyone else’s.
I just learned I have a present time perspective – and love freedom and flexibility!
I just learned I have a future time perspective – and love structured goals and tight schedules!
Inbox Zero doesn’t mean that your Inbox is always empty – just sometimes.
Empty your Inbox when you process email and see your productivity and peace of mind soar.
Have your email practices kept up with the increased volume of message you receive each day?
Lots of time-based productivity practices work well but they don’t scale. Be wary.
When you safely stage a time demand for later completion you stop the Zeigarnik Effect from taking place, ensuring your peace of mind.
A recipe for stress: leaving time demands unsafely staged so that their incompletion can nag, ping and bother you. #zeigarnikeffect
Are you someone with a future time perspective or a present time perspective? Knowing this makes all the difference.
Sometimes, it takes courage to willfully abandon a time demand.
Revoking a time demand can be the start of a new freedom.
Once you capture a time demand, you don’t have to complete it – just delete and move on.
Many people are hoarders because they keep too much stuff around as reminders of their ToDos.
At some point, visual, physical reminders don’t work, and must be replaced by digital reminders. Are you there yet?
Aggressively get rid of dead time demands and feel your load lighten.
There’s a limit to how much stuff you can keep around to remind you to engage in time demands.
Emptying is so important, it should only rarely be interrupted.
Acting Now should always be limited.
Remember to return to Emptying if your detour to Act Now takes longer than it should.
Don’t try to prevent Acting Now – it’s a useful way to get stuff done.
Paper storage is more risky than its digital counterpart.
Password management is fast becoming a professional requirement.
A professional’s skill at managing information must change to keep up with new technology, and increased volume.
Using your smartphone as a scanner is a great way to store information instantly and safely.
Information overload is a function of your commitments, not your technology.
Paper storage is more risky than its digital counterpart.
Password management is fast becoming a professional requirement.
A professional’s skill at managing information must change to keep up with new technology, and increased volume.
Using your smartphone as a scanner is a great way to store information instantly and safely.
Information overload is a function of your commitments, not your technology.
You can go from from using no lists whatsoever, to using a single list, to using lots of lists, to using only a few lists while becoming more productive.
Time-starved people who use detailed schedules still need lists.
There’s a limit to the number of time demands that can be managed using lists. Be wary.
Lists play a subordinate role for professionals who are time-starved. Their schedules maintain center stage.
Using a paper ToDo list has its dangers – there’s no backup.
If you store your time demands in a cloud you can use all kinds of apps to view them in different ways.
Not everyone needs to be using advanced Scheduling skills – only if you must.
The learning curve for adopting advanced scheduling skills is steep.
Managing a paper calendar is becoming far less efficient than managing an electronic calendar.
Beware of scheduling with the planning fallacy – underestimating how long things take
Avoid hyperbolic discounting – working on stuff that you like right away just to get a dopamine rush… it can wait.
Not everyone would be better off using techniques that allow them to handle the maximum number of time demands. Irony.
An implicit tag is one that we keep in mind to tag a time demand. We can make them explicit by writing or typing them out.
Managing your free time is positively related to your quality of life.
Adding to your free time doesn’t help if you don’t manage it well.
It’s better to try to change one habit at a time.
The main output of Perfect Time-Based Productivity is a simple plan for immediate implementation.
It’s better to break down a complex new practice into small steps.
A plan for changing habits should be based on small changes taken gradually, one step at a time.
Tune in to hear a time management trainee improve his skills from White to Yellow to Orange Belt in 18 months. http://goo.gl/6AAeOv
Your best work is done in the flow state, which doesn’t happen by accident. It must be planned.
Schedule time to enter the flow state and take advantage of peak moments of productivity.
Don’t allow the flow state to be something you enter by luck. Use your schedule.
Negotiate time with other colleagues and family to enter the flow state.
Lead the charge in your company to educate your colleagues about the flow state.
Manage your mobile tech so it doesn’t interrupt your flow state.
Turn off all the notifications you aren’t actively using so that your flow state isn’t randomly interrupted.
Avoid continuous partial attention – always scanning the horizon for something better or more important to focus on.
Use white noise to help you stay in the flow state.
Deliberate practice can help you develop critical skills rapidly – focus your improvements on the hard
stuff.
The executive function in our minds tries to keep track of all the stuff we have to do, but it often fails when there’s too much to do.
Don’t trust your executive function to remember – use visual, audible and kinesthetic reminders instead.
Programming interruptions is an important counterpart to using the flow state.
Deciding what to do next is a critical next step in managing your time.
Switching to the most urgent item at any point in time is a recipe for stress and kills your productivity.
A task is never full finished until the tasks that result from it are safely accounted for.
While you are working on a task, don’t watch the clock – use another mechanism than memory.
Switching tasks is an easier activity to perform if you use your schedule to manage most of your time demands.
It’s important to end an activity by carefully Capturing all the new time demands it creates.
Pausing after each time demand is complete is critical for maintaining high performance.
Your time management system needs care: it won’t just take care of itself.
Your time management system must be maintained so that it performs its intended function.
Look out for signs that an improvement is needed in your time management system.
Build a Warning system that indicates whether or not your time management system is about to break.
Let’s lobby software makers to develop an early Warning sign for our digital productivity systems.
In Perfect Time-Based Productivity, there is no Black Belt – it remains to be defined.
Habiting is defined as the skill of unlearning an old habit and/or learning a new one, and it’s critical for learning new behaviors.
Willpower is overrated as a mechanism for changing habits.
Habits change more easily when the right environment is in place.
Knowing when it’s time to implement a habit versus a single change in behavior is a key to long-term success.
Time-based productivity is all about knowing and then changing your system of habits, practices and rituals.
New time-based productivity habits are hard to learn because the ones you have in place are hard to change.
Good habits become bad habits when the environment changes – it’s up to you to see this coming.
Seeing which of your habits is currently making you unproductive is a sign of mastery.
Change a complex habit by breaking it down into small behaviors, then change them one at a time.
Upgrading your time-based productivity is about retiring old habits and learning new ones, which isn’t easy!
Before adopting new technology, figure out where your real productivity gaps lie and address your attention to filling those gaps first.
Don’t be the first to buy a new gadget – be the first to understand the gap it fills in your system.
Should we become trapped by new technology, or drive the changes we make from intelligent diagnoses?
Avoid the Zeigarnik Effect by putting your time demands in order.
Don’t focus on managing time – that’s a futile effort. Instead, here’s something you are already managing: a time demand.
Keep your commitments alive by creating and managing time demands.
Creating your own ladder for improving skills is sometimes the only way to achieve superior results.
When you are both the coach and coachee step back and create a ladder of skills to carve a pathway to excellence.
The easiest skills to learn are those that we can place on a videotape.
The hardest skills to learn are those that can’t be observed and therefore can’t be measured.
Any new skill we encounter can be converted into a ladder of smaller skills but we need to study it in depth.
A good system that supports your change in habits doesn’t rely on your memory, or anything internal.
Coaching yourself is sometimes the only option, and if it is, use best practices to achieve superior results.
Who says the software/hardware combination you use to manage time demands doesn’t matter? It does!
Professionals who manage their lives through their schedules have a difficult time with software that’s not built for their methods.
Developing great software to manage time demands remains a huge challenge!
Time management tools have a long way to go to meet the needs of users.
Mona Haraty – People have different needs and preferences when using software tools to (manage their) daily tasks
Mona Haraty – People’s changing needs and desire to improve lead to changed behaviors.
Mona Haraty – Without being given the right time management tools, people will be forced to live a ‘default life’ dictated by their tools.
Mona Haraty – The design of (personalized tools) for accommodating behavioral differences is largely unexplored
Dezhi Wu – Most people select their time management method through random choice rather than assessing their time management needs.
Dezhi Wu – People adopt the tool or combination of tools to meet their needs without much judgment.
Productivity tool designers need a clear philosophy before they start developing products.
The format that a time demand arrives in is much less important than its contents.
A sure productivity killer – require that employees respond to email within the hour. It’s a great way to turn them into morons.
Many companies need a Chief Individual Productivity Office – a CIPO – to help protect employees from unproductive influences.
In most companies, individual productivity is no-one’s concern, which means that it’s adversely affected by everyday decisions.
Tracking your time usage is a great way to improve your productivity.
A great administrative assistant help make 85% of the best time managers most effective.
Employees have a professional obligation to make wise time choices.
Give an employee a smartphone and watch… will they develop unproductive habits?