How To Avoid Time Management Technique Hoaxes
Time Management programs, tips and techniques offered across the Internet are full of smoke and mirrors.
Do you remember the kids story about ‘the boy who cried wolf’? It was a hoax right…
Well as an efficiency trainer and time management coach I’ve found many time management techniques taught are good ideas but fail under the pressures of real life.
Before I show you someone’s big time management tip and rip it apart before your eyes, consider this hope that many people have. ‘More free time’. In fact it’s a big new years resolution. ‘Have more free time’. But is it accurate or actually adding to the problem?
Well consider this… You do NOT actually want more free time - What you want is more QUALITY time - which means more productive and more enjoyable.
The fact is that if you enjoyed your time more, you wouldn’t be after ‘free’ time as you’d be happy with what you do in the majority of your time anyway.
The problem is dissatisfaction. It’s a terrible approach to life to begrudgingly get through the daily chores only to hope for scraping the barrel of the day for a little free time to your self right at the end.
That’s no way to live. Certainly not the lifestyle of efficient organized living and well managed time.
Here is one time management technique I strongly disagree with that I found published on a time management program web site. This kind of thinking creates trouble for your natural time management skill and blocks your success.
Let’s take a quick look at this so called Time Management Technique from a time management site:
> Limiting choice: Most self help books start by saying
> make a to-do list. It asks to dump everything you need
> to do on a piece of paper. But what this inadvertently
> does is overwhelm you.
Who says it overwhelms you. Whose ‘you’. Speak for yourself buddy. It might overwhelm you. But for me personally if I don’t write down a full list of things I have to do, then I’m mentally stressed by them all floating around my head.
David Allen, renowned personal productivity expert and author of Getting Things Done (GTD) explains that we have a certain capacity in our ‘psychic ram’ for storing information. The best place to store things is not in our head, it’s on computer or paper. The head should be used for making decisions.
So all those ideas floating around your head. I recommend getting them down in lists. Worry about how you could possibly handle all those things once you have perspective and can actually see them face to face for what they are by them being in black and white in front of you.
His time management technique continues…
> I've sat down to create to-do lists. Written down
> 40 things to-do. Got overwhelmed and thrown the
> to-do list in the dustbin.
What a sucker! By limiting the things to do to 6 items, do you really stop yourself from getting overwhelmed?
Perhaps for a limited time, but you might lose your job, or get evicted, forget to pick your kids up, or not have anything in the fridge when dinner time arrives.
Be very careful of how you use time management techniques.
Do you remember the kids story about ‘the boy who cried wolf’? It was a hoax right…
Well as an efficiency trainer and time management coach I’ve found many time management techniques taught are good ideas but fail under the pressures of real life.
Before I show you someone’s big time management tip and rip it apart before your eyes, consider this hope that many people have. ‘More free time’. In fact it’s a big new years resolution. ‘Have more free time’. But is it accurate or actually adding to the problem?
Well consider this… You do NOT actually want more free time - What you want is more QUALITY time - which means more productive and more enjoyable.
The fact is that if you enjoyed your time more, you wouldn’t be after ‘free’ time as you’d be happy with what you do in the majority of your time anyway.
The problem is dissatisfaction. It’s a terrible approach to life to begrudgingly get through the daily chores only to hope for scraping the barrel of the day for a little free time to your self right at the end.
That’s no way to live. Certainly not the lifestyle of efficient organized living and well managed time.
Here is one time management technique I strongly disagree with that I found published on a time management program web site. This kind of thinking creates trouble for your natural time management skill and blocks your success.
Let’s take a quick look at this so called Time Management Technique from a time management site:
> Limiting choice: Most self help books start by saying
> make a to-do list. It asks to dump everything you need
> to do on a piece of paper. But what this inadvertently
> does is overwhelm you.
Who says it overwhelms you. Whose ‘you’. Speak for yourself buddy. It might overwhelm you. But for me personally if I don’t write down a full list of things I have to do, then I’m mentally stressed by them all floating around my head.
David Allen, renowned personal productivity expert and author of Getting Things Done (GTD) explains that we have a certain capacity in our ‘psychic ram’ for storing information. The best place to store things is not in our head, it’s on computer or paper. The head should be used for making decisions.
So all those ideas floating around your head. I recommend getting them down in lists. Worry about how you could possibly handle all those things once you have perspective and can actually see them face to face for what they are by them being in black and white in front of you.
His time management technique continues…
> I've sat down to create to-do lists. Written down
> 40 things to-do. Got overwhelmed and thrown the
> to-do list in the dustbin.
What a sucker! By limiting the things to do to 6 items, do you really stop yourself from getting overwhelmed?
Perhaps for a limited time, but you might lose your job, or get evicted, forget to pick your kids up, or not have anything in the fridge when dinner time arrives.
Be very careful of how you use time management techniques.