Is there such a thing as a basic time management training program?

“Basic” Time Management Training? No such thing!

As a manager, you may advise a subordinate: “You need a basic time management program.” While this advice is probably well-intended, it turns out to be flawed. Today, a more nuanced picture has emerged.

Your intent might be pure. Many employees who once appeared to be capable and reliable have fallen into rough times. Even though they remain motivated, they look harried, are behind in their email and keep missing deadlines. Their reputation has taken a hit so you want to help.

But they still have to complete the new project you assigned them, in addition to their other responsibilities. None of it can be delegated—it’s all important.

Yet, their sense of overwhelm remains real. Maybe, you think, “They don’t understand the basics of time management.”

While this line of thinking sounds logical, it happens to be incorrect. Here are the reasons why.

  1. They are adults, not kids

In the world of adult learning, there’s a known fact: teaching adults differs from teaching children. Why? In most cases, it’s because the adult already possesses some capacity, prior practice, plus a motivation to solve everyday problems.

In this context, teaching people Latin isn’t the same as teaching us our local slang or dialect. We all chafe and resist when someone tries to force us to learn something we think we already know.

With respect to time management, my local research shows that you and your employees are similar to other experienced adults around the world.

To illustrate: you were taught the concept of time at age eight or nine. Shortly after, you taught yourself how to create “time demands” – your own internal, individual commitments to complete actions in the future. You stored each one in memory to prevent it from being lost or forgotten.

Over time, you evolved, having learned the superior nature of paper or digital storage over brain cells. But regardless of your efficacy, you became a functioning adult with many successful time management habits. After all, they are responsible for positive results at school, work, and family.

However, you suspect that your subordinates have not kept up with the volume of their work and suffer from some weak habits or tools… the question is, “Which ones?” Only nuanced (not basic) training can help them uncover and close these gaps.

  1.      They need personal diagnostic skills

Instead of being instructed to engage in specific behaviours (the stuff of basic programmes) adults need to learn how to analyze and improve the habit patterns they are currently using: the same ones they have been honing since their teenage years.

In the second edition of my book, Perfect Time Based Productivity, I condensed the actions required to guide this transformation into four steps, known as ETaPS.

The first step is to E*valuate your current skills. Unlike other trivial behaviours, this takes more than completing a two-minute quiz from a magazine.

Unfortunately, empirical data from local classes reveals that the combination of habits, practices, and apps you employ today are complex. For example, everyone in your office may rely on Outlook, but there’s a unique way they use the program. Over time, you each developed routines which are idiosyncratic. Understanding them enough to make changes takes some study.

Therefore, a sound self-diagnosis starts with a deeper than average knowledge. With it, you can compare yourself against a typical employee, or the very best in the world. This can be a sobering exercise, but the knowledge is priceless and produces a lifetime of steady changes. How fast should you expect to see real improvements?

  1. Instant, magical change won’t happen

A “basic” training which ignores the lingering effect of old behaviours sets learners up for failure. They go to work the next day thinking that everything will change right away.

This is impossible. It took a decade of practice to develop your current skills which don’t change overnight. To help, I recommend the remaining steps of the ETaPS formula.

–          Ta*rget new levels of accomplishment for each skill.

–          P*lan a timeline of changes to reach these new levels in months or years, taking baby steps.

–          S*upport each change so that single behaviours turn into habits. Draw on other people, reminders, and progress tracking to maintain momentum.

The idea is to break a complex, long-term transformation into small, manageable actions.

If you are a manager, help your subordinates see where a personalized plan of improvement provides a way to accomplish their goals. Then, show them how better time management could improve every part of their life:  relationships with significant others, children’s performance at school, work-life balance, health and engagement in their community and family.

Instead of trying to shoehorn them into one-size-fits-all “basic” training, give them the nuanced understanding they need to make consistent, fool-proof changes.

This article was adapted from one written for the Jamaica Gleaner.

Why Scheduling Everything is Important If You Have ADHD

Andrea Sharb (ACC, CPO-CD, COC, CPO), owner of S.O.S.~Sharb Organizing Solutions, LLC  is a professional organizer and certified coach who specializes in supporting her clients in overcoming overwhelm.

I met her about five years ago when she was serving as treasurer for the Institute for Challenging Disorganization and her business focused primarily on supporting clients in overcoming their challenges with physical clutter. In the past five years she has shifted her practice to supporting adults with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and adults who who have difficulty managing their time demands.  She’s one of the few coaches I’ve encountered who actively promotes the ideas behind Total Task Scheduling.

Schedule U/Francis: Thanks for spending time with us Andrea. I’m learning more about common traits of individuals with ADHD as a result of our conversations.  How does ADHD impact an individual’s ability to manage their time demands?

Andrea:  Interesting question, Francis.  The impact on abilities to manage time demands can vary widely.  In a nutshell, ADHD is a neuro-developmental psychological disorder whose hallmarks are inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity.  There are three presentations ADHD: Hyperactive-Impulsive, Inattentive and Combined each of which differs significantly from the others.  Therefore “ADHD” shows up differently in different people depending on which presentation and which symptoms are exhibited within each presentation.  The traits I see showing up most often for myself, as an adult with ADHD, and for my clients are:

  • Having too many time demands and getting overwhelmed
  • Difficulty deciding what to do, when
  • Difficulty estimating time needed to complete a time demand
  • Difficulty allocating adequate time in schedule for time demands
  • Difficulty with activation when needing to address a time demand
  • Difficulty completing a time demand that has been started
  • Difficulty transitioning between time demands
  • Getting easily distracted from a time demand
  • General lack of time awareness and the passing of time
  • Relying too much on memory to get things done
  • Using too many different systems to capture and track time demands
  • Inconsistent use of time demand management systems created
  • Magical thinking – Claiming “It will get done” yet not having any time allocated to do the work

 The challenges those of us with ADHD face with respect to time demand management are not that dissimilar from those that a neurotypical person might face.  The difference is that we face these challenges more often, and because of our brain’s structural and “wiring” differences we have a much harder time overcoming them.

ScheduleU: What do you mean by the ADHD “brain’s structural and “wiring” differences” ?

Andrea: First, recent studies have demonstrated the ADHD brain differs from a neurotypical brain in brain volume in certain regions.  In addition, the ADHD brain has challenges with transference of certain neurotransmitters like dopamine, resulting in a brain that is by nature under stimulated and which struggles to engage when tasks are not inherently interesting.  Dr. William Dodson reframes this by saying those of us with ADHD have an “interest based nervous system.”  If something is interesting to us, our brains engage differently and function in a more neurotypical manner.  Said another way, our under aroused, under stimulated brains are constantly seeking stimulation and this results in many of the challenging behaviors noted above.

Schedule U: What’s your experience with Total Task Scheduling?

Andrea:  It wasn’t until our conversation a while back that I realized Total Task Scheduling was a “thing”.  I had learned from personal experience over the years that if tasks and projects were going to be completed I needed to allocate time for that to happen.

Too often we, and especially those of us with ADHD, create time demands and tasks without regard for reality (i.e. the available time in our schedule).  I’ve termed this “magical thinking.”  Just saying something is going to get done doesn’t make it so.  Time must be matched with the intention, otherwise intentions wither and die or you end up pulling all nighters to get it all done.

A number of years ago, I noticed I was spending much of my free time in the evenings catching up on work projects that didn’t get finished during the workday.  Though I was sitting beside my husband on the couch in the evening, I was on my laptop finishing up session notes, writing blog postings, or catching up on email.  I wasn’t doing a good job with setting boundaries on my time and I was ignoring the most important person in my life as a result.  My magical thinking, that I could get everything done each work day, was being exposed for what it was.

That’s when things began to change for me.

I committed to overcoming magical thinking and to getting real about how many hours I had in the day.  My first step was to actively reduce my commitments and focus on what was most important to me.  I let go of relationships and activities that no longer served me and gave greater thought to who and what I wanted to focus my time on.

I began to schedule my days differently. Instead of just scheduling appointments with others, I scheduled appointments with me – for work, clients, exercise, meal planning, meal prep, laundry, connection with my family, gardening and even bedtime.  I also identified times of the day I was most productive and started to frame my days around these peak times.  I now use the 6:30AM to 8AM time slot and the 3:30PM to 5PM time slots, when my brain is most alert, for my most important work.  Getting real about my schedule has been a game changer in overcoming overwhelm.

Schedule U: Can you share more with us about your path to Total Task Scheduling?

Andrea:  Like you describe in the Schedule U course (A Course in Scheduling), I’ve been traveling along a time demand management path for many years. In college I got by using a basic calendar to track my activities, assignments, and commitments.  In the professional world, I found that as a CPA I needed a better way to manage demands on my time and purchased a black leather Dayrunner.  That tool was my life for many years.  As I rose through the ranks at KPMG I found ways to modify the components of if to better support the completion of my ever increasing time demands.

When I left the professional world to become a full time mother, I lost the structure that my career had provided and I found myself flailing around time demand management wise for number of years.  I kept a basic calendar for appointments with others, but shopping lists and to do lists ruled my world.  I got around to things when there was time, like when the boys went down for a nap.   It wasn’t until my kids started school that I was able to regain some much needed structure.

It was around that time I purchased a Visor Handspring Palm pilot.  It was blue and it was magical, in a good way, maintaining all of my lists, my contacts, my calendar and a calculator!  The Handspring was a game changer because it synced with your computer, creating a backup of your life on your hard drive!  In time I graduated from the Handspring to the Palm Zire and eventually to the first generation iPhone, etc. I kept on top of things with lists and calendars and all was well.

It wasn’t until my business started to take off in 2008 that I began losing the battle with getting things done.  There were now too many tasks for me to track using my lists and calendar.  Worse yet, I noted the busier I got the less often I was consulting the lists.  As a result, tasks that weren’t on my calendar weren’t getting done.

It was around this time I started searching for a new means of tracking the demands on my time and ended up going analog and adopting the Planner Pad as my time demand management tool.  The Planner Pad was awesome because It gave me a place to capture and visualize all of my time demands on two facing pages of paper. This visual resulted in me paying greater attention to the nature of and the necessity of my time demands.  My love affair with the Planner Pad lasted about a year, my biggest problems with it being the limited scheduling space on each page (it only had space for tracking the business day and my life was bigger than that!) and the lack of portability.

I currently use a variety of tools for my Total Task Scheduling.  The most important is an online calendar, available on various platforms, easily accessible wherever I am.  Also important is the container I use to hold my time demands.  I use a listing app, Reminders, but you may choose any of the multitude of similar apps available.  You might also choose a project management app like Trello or Toodledo.  I’ve used both, but as I’ve worked to simplify my life in the past few years I’ve found I can easily manage my time demands with Reminders.  It’s important that your time demand container, like you calendar,  be accessible across various platforms.  Finally, I also use good old-fashioned paper & pen because some days writing a list and crossing things off is extremely motivating in a way that marking tasks complete on a calendar isn’t.

Schedule U: What are the typical complaints clients share with you that indicate that Total Task Scheduling would be a part of the solution?

Andrea:  The most common complaint my clients bring to coaching is experiencing overwhelm on a regular basis.  Their overwhelm is typically significant enough to result in an unproductive pattern of avoidance & procrastination, followed by reliance on adrenaline fueled all-nighters.  This pattern may be sustainable for folks when they’re in high school or even college, but by the time they’re in grad school or the work force, habits need to change in order for them to thrive instead of just survive.  Total Task Scheduling can make a huge difference in the lives of these folks.

Schedule U: What steps do you use to diagnose their issues when you have that first set of conversations?

Andrea:   In our initial conversations it’s important for us to build awareness of the individual’s current reality as well as where they hope to get to.  We work together to better understand the nature of the individual’s time demand management challenges ( what works, what doesn’t work, the nature of execution errors, etc.)   In addition to building awareness around the time demand management component, it’s just as important to help the individual identify and understand their talents, character strengths, and values, the knowledge of which can be integral to the process of creating change.

Schedule U: How much support do you provide them? For how long?

Andrea: It depends on the individual.  Most of my coaching relationships with clients run 6-9 months.  By that time an individual has generally accumulated a number of supportive tools to experiment with and it’s not uncommon for us to shift from weekly to monthly sessions.

Schedule U: What been the toughest part about becoming a Total Task Scheduler for you and for your clients?

 Andrea:  In general, I think the toughest part is the acknowledgement of how much you’ve committed yourself to in relation to the number of hours there are in a week.  I was working with a client recently who is early along in the process of Total Task Scheduling.   At her previous session she had committed to starting the process of capturing her time demands in a spreadsheet.   She came to her session totally overwhelmed by how much she had to accomplish in the next couple of weeks and she was far from capturing all of her time demands.  She had truly backed herself into a corner of commitments and I thought she was going to breakdown and cry.

Instead she held it together and was open to learning more about getting real about her schedule.  We started by looking at her current calendar, which only included appointments with others, and assessing the negotiability of these commitments.  We opened up about a dozen hours of time by identifying less time sensitive commitments that could be rescheduled.  We next discussed what she knew about her energy levels at different times of the day and blocked out time in her schedule accordingly.  Finally, we reviewed the productivity tools she had identified thus far in our coaching that could serve her in being her most productive self.  By the time the session was over she still had the same amount of work to do, but she now had identified the time in which to accomplish it.  This was the difference between overwhelm and moving forward.

Schedule U: Given the fact that you are not an auto-scheduler user (yet!) is that a route you recommend at this time?

Andrea:  At this time I have only one client I have discussed auto-scheduling with.  He is a tech savvy individual and is always interested in the newest ways to improve his productivity.  I have another client who is highly motivated by games and I think she would appreciate a number of the aspects of auto-scheduling, though we’ve not discussed it yet.  Many of my clients are artistically inclined and have actually created beautiful paper calendars, planners and bullet journals for themselves that they use to track their time demands and lives.

These individuals have little interest in using technology to manage their time demands because the kinesthetic and artistic components of scheduling their lives are key to them following through with it. Pretty pens and heavy paper make the experience fun and more pleasurable and thus they follow through.  You and I both know that the most important part of any time demand system, no matter what level, is consistent follow through, so I think you’ve got to go with what works for the individual.

Schedule U: Thanks for spending time with us Andrea. If someone wants to know about your work, how can they find out more?

 Andrea: You’re welcome, Francis!  If you’re reading this and you’re interested in learning more about about how I might be able to support you in overcoming your overwhelm, please visit my website at  https://sossharborganizingsolutionsllc.com/