• Opportunities in Strict vs. Loose Scheduling

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Laying out daily schedules in 15-minute increments enables you to run on autopilot; even so much that taking advantage of anything unscheduled is all but impossible.

    For those who are overwhelmed by a schedule, and would like to take a more open approach, I suggest minimalist time management.

    Me too.

    Whether you schedule strict times and tight frames determines your ability to encounter and embrace opportunities emerging along the way.

    How many interesting things, creative hooks, and potential successes piled up in order to be forgotten and later purged, ironically handled for a second time only to be discarded since their best before dates had long expired.

    [...]

    Instead, your missed opportunities are, from now on, conscious decisions to not participate.

    Obviously, an understanding of what's exactly important to you is somewhat of a requirement in either strict or loose scheduling of your time.

    Sometimes, more often than not, momentum builds up over short periods of time, momentum that, when directed properly, would lead to huge changes, dreams fulfilled, and goals met rather unexpectedly.

    Ignoring momentum, any momentum, makes you stumble and trip since the impact is there, whether you intend to make use of it or not.

    What do you do with unplanned input, circumstances, surprises, developments? You have to stay on track, right?

    The trick is -- of course -- to not only dealing with urgent matter but, spontaneous, ad-hoc, taking care of important ideas which show up now and then, according to your excellence and more or less disguised.

    Schedule the big and the really important stuff but make sure to leave room to juggle whatever comes to your mind in between the fixed appointments. Don't even make explicit appointments with yourself, just make enough loose time to enjoy yourself, cherishing the moments as they come.

    For example, do not schedule off-days but instead schedule the on-days and take, maybe, one day off for every three days on. It doesn't have to be 3-1 though, you can just as well decide to go 6-2, or 3-2-3, that's loose scheduling, getting your important stuff done plus having a great time.

    Think dynamic weekends. You cannot efficiently schedule the exact dates for when you need rest, be it from business or from training. You can however, determine the ratio of work to rest and decide to rest spontaneously, upon exhaustion, ideally, shortly before.

    Embrace your opportunities instead of your schedule. Avoid using your schedule as an excuse to yourself. Do not set fixed times and try to fill in the spots with actions. Determine what you want to do, then sort through it and find out when to do it. Keep your day open.

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  • Single-Handling vs. Missed Opportunities

    edited by Alexander Becker

    Single-handling is the high-speed, high-performance productivity concept of dealing with tasks, material or immaterial, on first sight, encounter, or touch. Get it out of the way as soon as it comes up, without ever looking back again.

    Here is a short exercise: Analyze your missed opportunities for a given timeframe, say last year, and determine how much stuff you wanted to get back to. How many interesting things, creative hooks, and potential successes piled up in order to be forgotten and later purged, ironically handled for a second time only to be discarded since their best before dates had long expired.

    The intention of building an archive containing reference material, material dedicated for later, unspecified, potential use, will leave you with constructive insights -- you will find things you long thought lost, only to notice that you manage to live without them, leading to the eventual, logical consequence to finally throw them away.

    Deal with everything immediately, as soon as possible and do not attempt to preserve anything for later. It will be too late. Everything which you do not act upon immediately gets never acted upon at all. Yes, there are exceptions but considering the results of the exercise above -- the list of missed opportunities is long and the ratio of exceptions to misses indicates a negligible count of exceptions -- you have to triage for ultimate productivity.

    If you can decide to deal with it later, whatever it is, you can as well take an additional moment and get it done on the spot. Yes, that's similar to the 2-minute rule from David Allen's Getting Things Done. In fact, it's even easier because it focuses on the yes-or-no decision of acting upon or discarding really fast.

    • If you have to read it anyway, read it now.
    • If you need to make the decision, why not make it now?
    • You first want to prepare ... in order to ... Do it now!

    The advantage of trashing over burying is that, when the time comes to go through the archives, you are not confronted with missed opportunities anymore. Instead, your missed opportunities are, from now on, conscious decisions to not participate.

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