Time management when retired

I had a vision of what it would be like when I retired - I would basically just potter around all day doing the things I enjoyed doing. I would take lots of long walks and visit lots of interesting places. I would at last have time to learn a musical instrument, would perfect my French, Spanish and German, and read loads of books.

Some of that’s happened, but the sense of unlimited time available for what I want to do has so far eluded me. In fact I am so busy most of the time I don’t know how I ever fitted full-time, or even part-time, work into my day. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - just not what I’d envisaged.

One of the problems is that I don’t seem to be able to switch my mind off inventing time management systems. I’m always getting brilliant ideas, and when I get a brilliant idea I want to try it out. And if I’m trying it out then I want to tell other people about it, and discuss it with them and get them to try it out too. So before I know it, I’m doing almost as much work for nothing as I was previously doing for money.

The above is just a preamble to saying that I have now come up with yet another new time management system. It is however very different in the way it works from the Autofocus and DWM systems which I have introduced over the last sixteen months or so. About all it has in common with them is that it uses one long list.

What it does do however is what the Autofocus systems aimed to do, but never quite achieved, which is to autofocus - to zoom in on the things which really matter while not neglecting the mundane but essential tasks which are part of everyone’s lives. So I’ve actually started to get moving with the walks, the music, the languages, the trips and the books. And I may even be able to find time without too much difficultly for that fund raising project which my church seems keen to get me involved in.

How does it work? It’s too early to go into detail, but it is basically a new way of combining some of the time management principles which I have worked on over the years, plus some new ideas.

More soon.

P.S. I almost forgot to say that I think it will work just as well for those who are not retired!

Structure v. No Structure

I’m getting back into the swing of things now by using the Do It Tomorrow methods, but it’s brought back to me that there is a definite tension between having a methodical system for one’s work and being spontaneous and creative. It’s very easy to become a ‘prisoner of the system’. That is in fact the reason that I have spent the last year or more trying to find a more intuitive and spontaneous way of working. The fact that I failed shows how necessary it is to have structure in one’s life.

Nevertheless it is immensely important to preserve the creative aspects of working without preconceived structure. So the solution is to wear the structure lightly, but also to be able to avoid doing nothing more than drift when the structure has been relaxed. How can we do that?

In my article Feeling Good I wrote about how using a simple method to monitor one’s state of mind could have a major effect on one’s productivity and effectiveness. Basically it consisted of asking oneself at regular intervals “How good am I feeling right now?” and then marking oneself out of 10. I described in my article how I even succeeded in curing myself of a fear of flying by using this technique.

I’ve discovered an even more powerful question to use in this way. The question is “How much resistance am I feeling right now?” Just as with the “feeling good” question, you mark yourself out of 10. However in this case you are aiming for a low score rather than a high score!

What does the question mean? You may be saying to yourself “resistance to what?” The answer is resistance to whatever your mind is subconsciously telling you would be the best thing for you to be doing at this precise moment. You are either doing it, or resisting doing it.

So for instance this morning instead of getting on with the next item on my list I started following up a thought I had just had by googling it. Instantly my resistance went up from 0 to 7! And it took a while to fall back to 0 even after I had stopped surfing. By contrast when it was time for lunch I felt the resistance grow because I was working instead of relaxing.

Like the Feeling Good method, it is important you don’t try to force this. The idea is simply to monitor your level of resistance and let it adjust itself. The process of monitoring itself will cause the resistance to fall overall. You will soon begin to discover what sort of things make it rise and make it fall. You will also discover that they will be different things according to the time of day or the circumstances.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

The Four Quadrants (A Different Version)

Those of you who are familiar with my materials will know that one of the subjects that I frequently write about is the resistance principle. This is the principle that the thing you should do first is what you are resisting the most.

I have often contrasted this with Steven Covey’s Quadrant 2 theory (from “First Things First”), in which the principle is to do what is important first.

Covey talks about four quadrants: 1) Important & Urgent, 2) Important & Not Urgent, 3) Urgent & Not Important and 4) Not Urgent & Not Important. According to Covey the problem most people have is with Quadrant 2, the important but not urgent. The reason they have a problem is because the important gets submerged under what is urgent.

Although I can see what Covey means, I have never really felt that his theory reflects how most people actually think when they are working. In my experience there are plenty of people who are just as capable of putting off something that is important and urgent as they are of putting off something that is important but not urgent. Frequently the same people will fill their days with stuff that is neither important nor urgent.

In other words the reason important things get forgotten is not because they get submerged by urgent things – though it may sometimes look like that.

As I have frequently said, prioritising by importance doesn’t work, because the question is not how important something is but whether it should be done at all. If it needs to be done, then it needs to be done and, all other things being equal, it doesn’t particularly matter what order it’s done in as long as it all gets done.

So I was pleased to read a book by Ken Blanchard (of One-Minute Manager fame) in which he says very much the same thing. The book is called The On-time, On-target Manager (One Minute Manager) In it, Blanchard gives a different quadrant from Covey’s. It’s one which in my opinion is much more geared to the way we actually think.

His quadrant is 1) Have to Do, Want to Do 2) Have to Do, Don’t Want to Do 3) Don’t Have to Do, Want to Do 4) Don’t Have to Do, Don’t Want to Do.

People don’t have any problem with Quadrants 1 and 4. If they have to do it and they want to do it, then they just get on with it. If they don’t have to do it and they don’t want to do it, then they just don’t do it. The problem lies with the other two quadrants.

What tends to happen is that people tend to do things in the order Quadrant 1), Quadrant 3) and only then Quadrant 2). The result is that a lot of things that don’t have to be done get done, while a lot of things that do have to be done don’t get done. Sound familiar?

The solution is to change it so that you do them in the order Quadrant 2), Quadrant 1) and forget about the other two quadrants.

To use this simple method of prioritising, write a list of all the things that you feel you must do, should do or could do. Then to the right of the items put two columns HAVE TO DO? and WANT TO DO? Then tick each item in the relevant columns. Challenge yourself fiercely about whether each item really needs to be done or not.

You then do the items which have a tick only in the first column. And only when you’ve finished them do you do the items which have ticks in both columns.

And then go home!

[The original version of this article was published in my newsletter in August 2004]

The Resistance Principle and Colley's rule

A few weeks ago I said that I was intending to have another go at the Resistance Principle. How have I been getting on with it? Well, the truth is that I found it exactly the same as in my previous attempts. After an initial period of success, my mind started to rebel against it and I found myself most days achieving only trivial tasks - and sometimes not even those.

However I then changed tack a bit. Instead of asking myself “What am I resisting (now this moment)?”, I changed the question to “What am I resisting the most (overall in my life)?” To be able to answer this question satisfactorily, I found it necessary to work off a task list. By marking the resistance I felt to each item on the list out of 100, I ended up with an ordered list of things to be done.

This worked brilliantly in getting some major outstanding projects completed. However the problem with this sort of approach is: “When do the low resistance items get done?” If writing an email to a friend has to wait until I’ve cleared all the items I’m resisting, my friend isn’t going to get many emails from me!

So what I am trying out now is an adaption of Colley’s Rule. For those of you who haven’t come across Colley’s Rule before, it is a method designed by a 19th Century mathematician for making decisions. It enables one to come up with a high quality of decision without all the stress of trying to find the “best decision”. According to the rule you draw up the specification for what you want, i.e. a four bedroom house within two miles of the nearest primary school, etc. and then take the first house you are offered as a benchmark. You do not buy this house, but instead buy the next house you are offered which is better than the first one. This has been shown mathematically to produce a very high quality of result.

You can apply Colley’s rule to all sorts of decisions. I’ve used it myself for such things as chosing a restaurant in a strange town, or deciding what to do on my day off. How can I apply it to the list of items I am resisting?

Well, in this case what I am doing to apply the Rule is to take the top item on my list as the benchmark, and move down the list until I come to a task which I am resisting more than the top item. Once I’ve completed that I take the next item on my list as the benchmark and move down the list until I come to a task which I am resisting more than the new benchmark. I continue working my way round the list using the same principle.

I find that this works very well. It ensures that all the high resistance items get done, while giving a chance for lower resistance items to get cleared too. As items tend to rise in resistance the longer one leaves them, there is a natural balance built into it. Using this method one can reduce the average resistance of one’s to do list very quickly. The lower the average resistance is, the quicker you can get through the tasks on the list.

As always, I want to stress that I am trying this out, not recommending it. That will come later - if it works for me!

The Resistance Principle

Those of you who have read my book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play will know that in the last chapters I mentioned an “advanced” method of time management that I called the Resistance Principle. I even gave an example of how the principle worked out over several actual days in my life, written in real time as I was finishing the book.

I also warned in the book that it was difficult to keep to the Resistance Principle and that, when one wasn’t feeling totally on top of it, it would be necessary to revert to more formal methods of time management. And so it proved: I was never able to keep the Resistance Principle up for an extended period of time. And although I kept coming back to it, I never quite got it to work. I am not aware of anyone else who has done so either, though quite a few people have told me it has been extemely useful in specific circumstances.

I have always remained convinced though that the Resistance Principle is worth further exploration. So now I have decided to give it another go. This time I am going to try to spell out a bit more precisely the theory behind it.

My original idea was that if one always went first for the things in one’s life that one was resisting hardest, then resistance as a whole would diminish and one would end up on top of everything. I found that worked well in specific situations, but if carried on too long my mind fought back and resistance actually increased.

I then developed a rather different concept of how the Resistance Principle might work. My idea was that at any one particular moment of time, there is one right action we humans can take which is perfectly fitted to our individual circumstances and will take us perfectly in the right direction. What’s more, we know in our heart of hearts what that one right action is. I’m not talking high-falutin’ stuff here, like “save the world”. The One Right Action might be something as simple as “get out of bed”, “make a cup of tea”, or “write a blog entry”. As soon as we have done that One Right Action, there will be another One Right Action for us to do.

Now my theory is that, if there is One Right Action that we should be doing at any given moment, in that given moment we are either doing it or we are resisting it.

We can therefore easily identify what the One Right Action is by simply asking ourselves:

What am I resisting?

If I do that, the answer is going to be either “nothing” or whatever the One Right Action is. If the answer is “nothing” then I am doing the One Right Action. If the answer is “Write a Blog Entry on the Resistance Principle”, then all I have to do is carry it out. If I ask the question again while I am writing it, the answer will be “nothing” (unless something else has come up in the meantime).

So there should be two results of asking the question:

1. I learn what the best action would be for me at this precise moment in my precise circumstances
2. I learn what it feels like to be doing the right thing

So I am starting to ask the question continually in my daily life again. The difference this time is that I am going to put my emphasis more on result 2. than on result 1. Let’s see how it pans out.

I want to make it very clear that I am trying this out, not that I am recommending it. I intend to describe how it works in my daily life. It may work or it may not - I’ll keep you informed either way!