Newsletter Archive Now Available

You can now access the archive for the Final Version newsletter by using the “View our Archive” button underneath the subscription box in the right margin.

Q&A Session postponed

Due to continuing demands on my time, I am having to postpone the Q&A session again. I’m not going to arrange a new date until things have settled down a bit.

New date for Q&A Session: April 23

Due to personal reasons, I am having to postpone the Q&A Session conference call for a week. The new date is April 23. The time remains 8 p.m. UK Time.

I originally intended it to be a free session, but I wanted to limit the attendees to 20 so everyone on the call would have a chance to speak. Unfortunately past experience indicates that when a session is free of charge there is a tendency for people to book but not turn up. This prevents people who do want to attend from being able to. I’ve therefore decided to charge a nominal fee of £5 (approx US$8). This will have the additional advantage of testing my payment and booking procedures.

Booking will open in a few days. I will announce it on the blog and in my newsletter.

Final Version a great success!

The Final Version has now gone out to over 4,000 subscribers and the feed-back has been uniformly good. It seems to have really caught people’s imagination.

I’m now in the process of writing the second issue of the Final Version newsletter which should be out in a few days.

Other projects which are featuring large in my FV list are getting the booking opened and other preparations finalized for the Q & A session on 16th April and drawing up a schedule of further teleconfence calls and seminars.

View from the verandah

This is the view from the verandah (when it’s not raining) as I work on The Final Version in the depths of the Australian outback.

Free Q&A Session

There will be a FREE Q&A Session about the Final Version by teleconference call on Monday April 16th at 8 pm (UK Time). Numbers limited to 20. Pre-registration will be required. Details soon.

More Holiday Tasks

Here’s some more tasks residing on my holiday FV list:

• Redesign the About page so it majors on FV [done]
• Make the About page the Home page again [done]
• Publish a schedule of teleconferences
• Set up an ordering system for teleconferences
• Plan further marketing
• Continue to write book

Discussion Forums

I have introduced a new discussion forum FV Forum solely for discussing issues related to the Final Version time management system. I’ve closed the Comments on the last two blog posts in order to direct comments to the Forum.

The existing forum has been renamed General Forum and is for issues related to time management in general and previous time management systems of mine.

For an experimental period both forums are accessed by Captcha - I hope this will be sufficient to keep spam to an acceptable level (i.e. none at all). If this doesn’t prove to be the case then I will have to re-introduce posting by registered members only.

I’m also for an experimental period removing moderation from blog comments and relying on Captcha only.

Final Version Instructions now issued

If you have signed up for the Final Version newsletter, check your email. The first issue, which contains the full instructions for the new system, was issued at 10.30 a.m. Queensland time today March 13th to 2,007 subscribers.

If you haven’t already signed up, then you can do so by filling in the Subscribe Email Newsletter box in the right margin. Some people are finding the sign-on instructions a bit difficult to follow since they don’t mention the Final Version (I don’t have much control over the wording) - just answer every question positively!

I intend to send out the instructions at least once a day to new subscribers who missed the first distribution. Please be patient - this is not an autoresponder.

The Final Version is here!

My long-awaited Final Version time management system is ready for release, and the good news is that it will be free of charge. I am starting a new newsletter for the purpose of distributing the initial instructions for the new system - and later on the newsletter will include in-depth articles about it.

To sign up for the Final Version newsletter, fill in the Subscribe Email Newsletter form in the right margin. If you are already a subscriber to my existing newsletter, you will be asked whether you want to update your profile. The answer is yes, you do!

Please note that the instructions will not be distributed in my existing newsletter, nor will they appear on this website, so if you don’t sign up you won’t receive them.

The instructions will be issued to all subscribers to the Final Version newsletter within the next few days.

Every issue of the newsletter will contain an Unsubscribe link, so you can unsubscribe even more easily than you subscribe.

(And btw the new system is called the Final Version not because it’s the final word on time management for all time, but because it’s definitely the final time management system that I will be producing!)

New thoughts on the Final Version

I’ve had a radical rethink about the marketing of the Final Version. Instead of releasing it by publishing a book, my plan is now to release it free of charge as instructions only in an issue of my newsletter. I may start a new newsletter for the purpose, so wait for further instructions before signing up if you don’t already receive it.

I will then run a programme of reasonably cheap teleconferences and/or seminars to fill in the reality behind the instructions and deal with questions and difficulties.

I haven’t decided on a release date yet, but since it no longer depends on my getting a book written there is no reason why it can’t be sooner rather than later.

Final Version Situation - 2

There’s not been a lot of progress since I last posted due to the fact that I have been travelling constantly and it’s not been helped by my lap-top breaking. I’ve now reached my location for the next month, a fairly remote part of Queensland, so I now have the opportunity to get on with the book without too many interruptions - apart from the expected birth of a grandchild sometime in the next few weeks!

In the meantime I am very grateful for the many suggestions which the readers of this blog have left concerning the marketing of the book once I have written it. Please continue to make these!

Final Version Situation

I’ve got to the point with the Final Version that I am ready to start writing the book in which the system will be described. I intend to do this over the next six weeks while I am on holiday. The book will only be as long as is necessary to give a full description of the system and the principles behind it.

During this period I will also be deciding what format the book will be published in. It is not my intention at the moment to have the book published by a conventional publisher. But I’ve made no further decisions.

Methods I don't recommend (revisited)

When I recently revised the About page (which previously was the Home page), I left out a large chunk of text which I didn’t feel necessarily agreed with my current thinking. Bear in mind that the page was written before I had designed any systems subsequent to Do It Tomorrow (which is still a really good system by the way!)

Having hidden the text away in Evernote, I decided just now to have another look at it and comment on its continuing relevance or otherwise.

So let’s have a look (original text in italics):

Prioritizing by Importance
Prioritizing by importance is a cause of bad time management, not a cure for it! Just how impressed would you be if your new car didn’t have wing mirrors because the factory thought the engine was more important than the wing mirrors? If it needs to be done, then it needs to be done, period.

I still agree with that 100 per cent. However perhaps it needs adding that Importance is the right way to decide what your commitments should be in the first place. You commit to what is important to you, your work and your life. However once you have made the commitments Importance is not the right way to decide in what order to do the resulting work.

Prioritizing by Urgency
Ok, so we sometimes have real emergencies which need an immediate response. You will recognise these when they happen - you don’t need to sit down and allocate them a priority. But let’s face it, all your other “urgent priorities” are only urgent because you have left them to the last minute. And why have you left them to the last minute? - because you are prioritizing by urgency, that’s why!

I hadn’t appreciated an important distinction about Prioritizing by Urgency when I wrote the above. This has since become clearer to me.

The reason Urgency has got a bad name is that people think that it means that we only take action on a task when it becomes urgent.

However what “Prioritizing by Urgency” should mean is that we do things according to the degree of urgency they possess. The degree of urgency may fall anywhere between Must be Done This Second to Not at All Urgent. Where a task falls on this continuum is the deciding factor. This is a sensible method of prioritizing.

To Do Lists
A to do list is the finest known way of ensuring that you never get to the end of your work. The proof? How often have you ended the day with more items on your to do list than you started it with? Me, I finish all my work, just about every day. And I can teach you to do the same.

I still agree with this if one is talking about the standard To Do list of most people’s imagination. However there are various sophisticated ways of working a To Do list which are a great improvement. In order to avoid confusion I have usually given them a different name for my own systems, e.g. The Will Do list (Do It Tomorrow) or the Autofocus list for (for my various Autofocus systems).

Another good question

Bernie asks in the comments for my post A Good Question:

Can you tell us how the Final Version improves upon DWM?

My answer

1. It doesn’t rely on expiry deadlines to provide the motive power.

2. It’s much more immediate in producing the right task at the right time.

3. It doesn’t leave you with an indigestible chunk of difficult tasks which have to be done or lost.

4. It deals with all tasks on the same basis.

5. It produces a much greater degree of psychological readiness.

6. It’s easier to keep the entire list under control.

7. It doesn’t allow tasks to build up resistance.

8. It works equally well with a short list as a long list.

9. It’s easy to extract a shorter list (e.g. for travel) and use the same methods to process the shorter list.

I’m sure I can think of some more if I try!

Autofocus 1 now in Romanian

Thanks to Vaida Bogdan for translating the original Autofocus instructions into Romanian. The translation can be found here.

Jak si splnit sny

How to Make Your Dreams Come True has now been translated into Czech, thanks to the efforts of Víťa Šmíd. You can download it from his website here.

Víťa has also put an interesting article called 5 Things I Learned Translating “How to Make Your Dreams Come True” on his English language blog.

Taking My Own Advice?

Several of my past articles have been reproduced with my permission on the new Pitstop for Business website. They are:

Urgency: The Natural Way to Prioritize

Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way

Whole Hearted Living

Dealing With Projects That Don’t Have a Deadline

Looking at these articles again, outside the context of my own website, caused me to wonder how much of my own advice I was currently following. Of course with the hundreds of articles on my site it would be physically impossible for one person to put into effect every suggestion or piece of advice. But these particular articles are ones that have been selected by someone else as being particularly relevant. So how do I measure up myself?

Urgency? Yes, that’s fine. I am building urgency into my Final Version time management system as part of the way that it prioritizes. It’s not “pure” urgency as such because other factors are taken into account, but it’s probably more urgency-friendly than any other system I have come across.

Expanding my ideas by repeated drafting is something that I don’t use as often as I ought to. It is a method that works, and works very well - especially with article-length passages. I do still however have a tendency to write the article in one draft and use later revisions only for tidying it up. In fact that’s the way that I’m writing this article. I’m conscious though that quite a lot is missed out by doing it that way. Working gradually up from one or two short phrases gives a more rounded end product. Memo to self: start using this again.

Whole-hearted living? Of course being retired is the ideal time for whole-hearted living. Free of the constraints of bosses and clients, I’ve now got the time to do the things I really want to do. So am I doing them? I’ve written before that my idea of retirement was that I would spend my time walking, reading books and maybe take up something like learning a musical instrument. Is life like that? No! Memo to self: ask myself how much of what I’m doing at the moment I am doing whole heartedly.

Projects that don’t have a deadline? This is advice that I’ve been neglecting, especially the bit about doing them one at a time. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that running several of these projects at once is faster. The number of languishing unfinished projects I have is ample evidence that it’s not! Memo to self: follow the four-stage process in the article.

Oops!

I’ll have run off the yellow-brick road with my walking goal by the end of today. That means that I’ll have to take out a contract with Beeminder to continue the goal.

I could easily have stayed on track because to do so would only have required me to walk 5 miles or so, which I would have no problem doing. But I have two excuses (they don’t qualify as reasons):

1) The temperature has been below freezing with snow on the ground. This has encouraged me to sit at home in my nice centrally-heated house - at least it did until the heating broke down on Thurday night!

2) I want to see what happens when there is a contract, i.e. I pledge real money in order to stop myself from going off-track. Is this a good motivating method which might have other applications?

Pushups with Beeminder

Some time ago I tried the 100 Push-Up Challenge, but found it a bit too much like hard work pretty early on!

I’m trying a new pushup challenge now: how many pushups can I do in a minute? And I’m doing it with the help of Beeminder and the Final Version.

Here’s the progress so far. From 8 to 12 in 8 days (including a missed day), a 50% increase. I haven’t set myself a target yet, as the idea is to find out the rate that fits you and then set the yellow brick road to keep yourself on track.

 You can follow my progress live by clicking here.