At the end of December, you can’t open a newspaper or magazine without seeing a review of the past year. What happened, who died, who won, who lost? You might be tempted yourself to have a bit of a self-audit of the year just gone, and maybe use it to cook up some New Year’s resolutions of your own.

It’s a worthy endeavour,but  I’m always reminded of a quote I first heard from Tony Robbins – [Tweet “You can’t use your rear view mirror as a navigation aid”]. In other words, you shouldn’t be using your past experiences to determine your future goals. I’m pretty sure this works for companies as well as people. A lot of what passes for corporate strategy is either re-jigging something that worked in the past or fixing a sticking-plaster over something that didn’t work, and dressing it up as innovation. No one sits down with a blank sheet of paper and just riffs on the future to create a new world of possibilities. Unless you have a coach.

A good coach will invite you to just go wild and dream, without looking over your shoulder at the Shoulda, Woulda, Couldas. The future doesn’t have to be the same as today, with the volume, contrast and brightness turned up a bit. It could be an extraordinary place. Learn from your past mistakes, by all means, but don’t rely on them to illuminate the way forward, get yourself a coach if you want to escape from the confines of your own thinking.

What are you forecasting for yourself next year? Get in touch with me if you need some help getting past your limiting beliefs and shaping a future that you want to thrive in.

Me? I’m finally going to learn the harmonica, after thirty-five years of not getting around to it.

Have a great Christmas

Time’s in your head

My earliest memory is when I was about four years old. As I remember it, there was a snowy winter that seemed to go on for ages. The snow was deep and didn’t melt for weeks – a rare thing in England. I remember making snowmen, and throwing snowballs at/ with my brother and cousin.

I don’t really know whether the snow lasted for weeks – it certainly seemed like it, but I hadn’t started at school, so time wasn’t yet divided into weekends and weekdays. It was a continuous, unstructured Present. And my memory of it now is a distorted, reconstructed version of what actually happened, fifty years ago. All of this is taking place in my head, it’s the only place I can locate my Past.

But time is obviously a thing, you say. We have clocks. We divide those years into months, weeks, days, femtoseconds. It must be a thing if we can manipulate it and measure it like that. I can see the distinction between yesterday, which has already happened, and tomorrow, which hasn’t yet.

Here’s what Einstein said:

“….the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly  persistent illusion”

Have a think about your last holiday. What kind of time did you have? Compare the quality of that time with queueing at the post office. I’m willing to bet that they feel different, even though they both had a duration that could be measured.

When you procrastinate, you’re doing some mental gymnastics to keep you from completing a task. It’s not that you don’t physically have enough time. You put off doing something important to you by choosing to do something less important. Maybe you don’t know why, but it’s definitely a mental operation.

But so what? What if time is an illusion. How does that change things back in the real world?

If it’s an illusion, we’re not all seeing the same thing. That means we’re not all having the same experience at the same time. It’s different for all of us. And that’s important at work, at home, with colleagues, friends, kids, lovers, neighbours – whoever. In the present,  we’re not having a digitally perfect “experience” being played to us, and when we remember the past, we’re not replaying the same DVD. It gets filtered, distorted and remade at all stages, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

And then we have to take into account how different cultures view time.

It’s no wonder that guy in sales never gets his monthly report in on time. If your boss is always late for a meeting, is it poor-timekeeping or disrespect? When you’re told that the meeting next Friday (8th Nov) has been moved back to Tuesday, what date is it now on? Feel free to use a calendar to work it out.

Answers on a postcard, or better still, leave a comment.

Lean Startup – Innovation at work.
Photo Credit Flickr Betsy Weber

Lean Startup rocks. If you’re starting a new business you should read Eric Ries’s book. If you work for an established business, and want to innovate, you should read it. I’ve just been listening to a webcast with Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper. They were talking about Lean Startup, and how to roll Lean Startup out into bigger organisations.

“The Future’s going to be the same as today. Right? “

Eric said something that struck me hard. That big companies (and the people who work in them) fundamentally believe –  “The Future is going to be the same as today, right?”.

As humans we need to have some dependability and predictability in our lives. That’s why people work in a big organisation isn’t it? They get security,  structure and stability in exchange for their labour. The trouble is, in the new normal, it’s not like that any more.

“Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their own extinction”

Just five years ago, Nokia and Blackberry (then called RIM) were the kings of the mobile phone industry. Today, they’re both in their death-throes. Apple launched its first iPhone in June 2007. By 2011 they were the largest mobile handset vendor in the world (by revenue) having shipped 100 million units. Nokia has recently been bought by Microsoft. Blackberry has canned 10,000 people in the last year. They’re both toast. Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their extinction.

Successful today no longer means successful tomorrow. Start ups are disrupting and fragmenting established industries by using new technology. The barriers to entry are very low. Dropbox gauged whether people were interested in its product just by getting people to sign up on a website. They knew they had a product people wanted without writing a line of code, and they had a queue of early adopters ready to buy when they launched.

“No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from”

So the security and stability of a big company, is illusory. They can’t count on the future being the same as today. That’s why today’s buzzword is innovation. No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from, but if you don’t innovate, they’ll eat your lunch and eventually they’ll eat you.

That’s pretty scary (unless you’re the one doing the eating). So it’s no wonder those firms want new ways of working that need more agility, the ability to turn on a sixpence and to change direction if it turns out that no one wants to buy their killer new product. In a big company that’s hard to do. I’m talking to you, Microsoft.

What’s this got to do with time management and teams ? Well we believe that time management is right thinking about the past, present and future. And these are three distinctive skills, that you can learn. Innovation is understanding that the future is going to be very different to the present, and it’s not one big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey wimey stuff.

Time Poor

According to a Harvard behavioural economist and a Princeton psychologist:

“If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future”

These guys have just published a book entitled “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”. It doesn’t just cover being money poor, it looks at being time poor as well.

What they found is that money and time poor people have trouble escaping from the poverty trap because they have to single-mindedly focus so much on the problem, they lose perspective. They only look for immediate solutions that will fight the fire in front of them. They can’t see the longer term consequences of something that appears to fix the problem right here, right now.

Scarcity saps your mental energy so much that you can’t think straight. You have tunnel vision. That’s why people take out pay-day loans, and borrow short-term if they can’t afford to pay off other loans – it gets them over this hump.

How did this play out with the time poor? They carried out experiments on Harvard students, with video games. They had a fixed time to answer a question or complete a task. Some were allowed plenty of time. Others weren’t, but could to borrow time (time they would also need in the future). The borrowers got into a debt spiral, and they never won back enough time to pay the debt. These very smart people behaved incredibly irrationally under time pressure.

I was thinking about the irrational things I’ve done, and seen other people do, when I’ve been so squeezed for time that I can’t see my nose in front of my face. Here are just a few I’ll fess up to:

• Saying “I haven’t got time to show someone else how to do this” and doing it myself.
• Soldiering on through gritted teeth, as proof that I’m tough
• Working stupid hours covering three time zones, instead of dropping one
• Imagining that I was making myself indispensable by working long hours

Funny that they didn’t seem so stupid at the time, but looking at them now, they’re absurd.

Which gave me an idea for a competition.

We’ll give a £20 Amazon voucher to the best true life story about how you did something that only made things worse, when you were already time poor.

Please tell us your (true) story where it says “Please Leave a Comment” below. The more ridiculous, the better. We’ll pick a winner and announce it in two weeks’ time, on the 19th of October.

We humans are really bad at forecasts.

“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” 

Daniel Kahneman literally wrote the book about the Planning Fallacy. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, even though he’s a psychologist. He’s as smart as you can get. But he still fell into the very trap he himself identified.

“But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable.” Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow

The problem is, thinking about the Future is hard. It’s a long way away for most of us, particularly Present Hedonists. It’s so far away, we have to construct it by airlifting the present and plonking it down in the general area. Maybe we’ll embellish it a little, but it looks a lot like today.

However, the Future is not more of the Present. It’s not today delayed by 12 months. When you finally arrive in the Future, it’s definitely not like it used to be. You find that your forecast failed to factor in an economic downturn; a change in management; contractual disputes; specification changes; mission creep; illness; holidays; bad weather. Plus it was just plain over-optimistic, because you needed a good business case to get your project authorised.

 So what can you do?

Tip #1. Phone a Friend. Once you have your forecast. Double it. Double it again. Then throw away your forecast and ask an experienced colleague who’s not connected to your project. Before you ask them, get them to bring to mind similar projects they have done in the past. That way they draw on real-life, rather than joining you in your over optimistic fantasy world.

Tip#2. Do a Pre-Mortem. I’ve written about pre-mortems before, here. They’re brilliant for eliminating group-think and the euphoria that pervades the early planning stages of any project. They force you to live in a dystopian future and explain how you got there. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s nice to visit, once in a while.

Have fun, and please let us know how you get on with your forecasting, in the Future.

We’re not in Kansas any more…

Read A Geography of Time, by Robert Levine. It’s a really witty, well-written book about time culture – how different cultures behave with time, based on his personal experiences and his own and his students’ experiments. We all do time differently. In Brazil, arriving at 4pm for a 1pm appointment is not necessarily being late.  Hopi North American Indians have no verb tenses for Past, Present and Future. The Spanish use one word for “expect”, “hope” and “wait” – esperar.

Levine has a unique way of measuring the pace of life, and he’s measured it in 31 different countries.

• Walking speed in downtown areas (time to cover 60ft)
• Waiting time in the post office to buy a stamp
• Accuracy of public clocks

He adds these proxies together, to rank countries by pace of life. The 1,2,3 is Switzerland, Ireland and Germany. Mexico brings up the rear in 31st place. There are all kinds of surprises in there – I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland and would describe my experience overall as relaxed, rather than fast paced. The USA is only in 16th place, when it feels like they should be higher (yes, they walk fast, but have massively long waits in the post office, and the clocks are way out of time).

So all countries have a time culture. And within countries, all regions and individual cities have different time cultures. In the US, Boston is the fastest pace of life, Los Angeles is the most laid back. In general, the North-East industrial area occupies the top slots, and California takes four of the six bottom places (together with Shreveport, Louisiana, and Memphis Tennessee).

“CFOs tend to look rearwards, at last month, or last quarter. “

What does this mean for you at work? Well, if you work for an international, or multi-national, there will be many sub-cultures, where time works differently. You’re regarded as an alien if you fail to see this, and conform to those (often hidden) cultural norms. Even within departments, it only takes a moment to imagine how differently they perceive time:

• Finance – essentially looking in the past. Last month, last quarter.
• Sales – In the present, but slightly future focussed on the next quarter
• Legal – trained to look at the past to assess risk in an imagined future
• R&D – looking way into the future
• Operations – existing in a continuous present. The past is rewritten.
• Maintenance – issues occur in the present. But they plan for the future
• CEO – Strategically working to a 3 year plan

Now imagine you’re a CFO, whose looking for their next move to CEO. This article Forward Looking CFO (pdf) by the Wharton Business School describes how CFOs find it so hard to make the transition from a rearward looking discipline to a forward-looking CEO.

Have you experienced a culture clash like this? We’d love to hear about your experiences. Leave a comment below. And read the book, it will get you thinking.

New Year Resolutions, anyone?

September is a New Year for anyone who has kids, or works in education. There’s a huge sense of time passing, as you watch your child move up a class, or make a bigger transition to a new school, or college. Time passing feels a little more tangible than it does in December (or whenever you celebrate your New Year).

September’s my favourite time of year – but it’s often tinged with melancholy at the sense of time passing, and a rare chance for me to reflect on the past year and what’s to come.

I often make my New Year’s resolutions around now, by having a conversation with my future self. It’s not just me talking to him, he gives me a clear idea of what’s needed so that he can exist, and I’m not just chasing rainbows. Or pavements, if you’re Adele. Pavements?

I’ve let him down on occasion, but I’ve also surprised him, big time, when we have our review in December.

There’s still a whole four months to go to make plans and move forward with things. Okay, three months, because no one does anything of any importance whatsoever in December any more. But if your January resolutions petered out earlier in the year, now is a great time to get some momentum going again. I believe that motivation is the engine that drives us forward, so we need to understand them first. But a period of reflection, and maybe even a course correction, can ensure that we’re looking where we’re going, and we’re going where we need to go.

When I have the next conversation with myself

As you’ll see. I’ve changed the layout of this site. We now have a twitter feed and a new email sign-up box. If you sign up, you’ll get automatic updates to your inbox, and won’t miss a thing.

More than that…. you can get a free Time Intelligence Report, worth £30, if you join the mailing list in September. We’ll send you a code to give you free access.

In the next 3 months I’ll be focussing more on the list and will be offering exclusive free content and one to one coaching to list members. Exclusive means it’s not available to non-subscribers.

So feel free to sign up, and follow us on Twitter @TimeIntell.

Even better, if you have a New Year’s resolution, please leave a comment and let us, and your future self, know where you’re headed.

Believing is Seeing

I gave a presentation titled “4 tools to smash time management” to a local Enterprise group this week. The main take away was “We live in a visual world. Use visual tools”. I borrowed the idea from Kanban, where you use a board to track the Backlog/Doing/Done phases of your tasks or projects. It’s an upgraded To-Do list, because you get a sense of movement as a task moves through the three phases, and accomplishment when it’s in the Done column. With a To-Do list, it’s either To-Do, or crossed off/not on the list. Kanban is also a great way to share information quickly within teams. You don’t have to go searching for files in cabinets, or files on a system. It’s there, for everyone to see.

The other examples I used were a Yearly Wall Planner, an egg timer and our Time Intelligence Report (TIR). Year planners work really well for people who can’t see further ahead than the next couple of days. The whole year is laid out in front of them as a picture. The egg timer was for the 45 minute sprints I talked about here. Again, you can see how much time has elapsed, and how much is still to go.

My business partner, Alan, used to be a graphic designer, and he’s done a great job with the TIR. The scoring information is all visual, and we use this spider diagram to show scoring on your Time Perspective 

Past, Present, Future

It’s a lot more digestible than the raw data, which is just columns of numbers. I’m proud of how the TIR looks, and the great job it does in making complex information easy to understand, just by looking. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a million digits.

Simplify your time management by using visual cues for yourself, and to communicate within your team. It will save you time!

I have a feeling, not backed up by any science at all, that knowledge workers get stressed about workload because they can’t see it, it looms over them as a weight and a presence, but has no physical form or appearance.

What do you think?

Business thinking about Time Management needs updating.

Did you know that we all have a preference for the way we think about time? It’s called our Time Perspective, the concept’s been around for 25 years, with tons of top-quality cross cultural and longitudinal research. People who are Future (F) orientated make sacrifices now, that they think will benefit them in the long-term. They have career plans, pension plans, insurance plans. They’re about plans. Present Hedonists (PH) get distracted by immediate gratification. They’re good at being in the moment, and live for today, who knows what tomorrow will bring? Present Fatalists (PF) feel they have little control over their destiny, someone else is in charge of their life plan. Past Positives (PP) have a rosy, nostalgic picture of the past, the good old days. Past Negatives (PN) are, well, negative about their past, and the past in general.

“Every picture tells a story”

These 5 perspectives explain how we go about our daily lives, and how we make our choices about time use throughout the day. They’re fundamental to how we use our time at work, but also to how we do our work. Let’s have a look at the diagram above. How will this character behave at work?

They’re high PH. Reactive, present, personable. Combined with Low F – not so good at making plans or being proactive. Easily distracted by something interesting that grabs their attention, so maybe not a good finisher. Low PF – they believe they’re responsible for their destiny, won’t blame things on “the management” and will manage their own development. Medium PP and low PN – they won’t have much time for the people who remember how Project X went wrong in June 1987, or who like to reminisce about when we were a start-up working out of a garage.

“You’re failing to connect the Past, Present and Future”

Why does this matter? Next time you’re driving through a change management project, and you meet resistance, it just may be because people aren’t buying the future you’re selling. You’re failing to connect the Future with the Past and the Present, and not everyone wants to live there anyway.

“Time Management and Productivity used to be the same thing”

Psychologists have been studying Time ever since psychology became a science, yet what they have discovered mostly stays in the academic world. Business  thinking about time is still rooted in Frederick Taylor’s time and motion studies, where efficiency and productivity are still the declared goals. This worked in the 19th and early 20th century, when factory output was, literally, what counted. Time Management and Productivity used to be the same thing.

Today, most people are adding value by using their knowledge, rather than being part of an industrial process, yet we still use the same words to talk about output. This leaves no room for measuring modern concepts like innovation, problem-solving, creativity, strategic thinking, collaboration and team-working.

People who use their brains for a living, which is most of us, need a better framework for managing their time and measuring their effectiveness than working faster, harder, or longer. That’s not Working any more.

If you would like to find out more about your own Time Perspective, please leave a comment below.

You can’t learn from the experience if it kills you

The first time I suggested we carry out a pre-mortem to improve decision-making in the future, the sales director nearly had a fit. We had finally won a very prestigious contract after 18 months. Now here I was, trying to get people to imagine it had gone horribly wrong. Right after he’d done his rousing Henry V speech. Why was I trying to screw things up?

A year in the future, the project has failed miserably, catastrophically.

First of all, what the hell is a pre-mortem? It’s a term coined by Gary Klein in his book  “The Power of Intuition: How to use your gut feelings to make better decisions at work”. Klein has studied decision-making for thirty years, with the military, first responders, emergency medics – people involved in potentially life or death situations. A pre-mortem is held right at the start of a project. At the project kick-off meeting, the project team has to look into a crystal ball. A year in the future, the project has failed miserably, catastrophically. Their job, in three minutes,  is to each come up with ten reasons why it failed.

You can see why the sales director was pissed-off. He wanted them to sing reasons to be cheerful, not group-hallucinate about the whole thing going titsup.

If you’re not looking, unforeseen events are always going to be unforeseeable

We’ve all seen and felt the infectious over-optimism at the start of a project. No one wants anything to go wrong, so there’s a tacit refusal to face awkward truths. No one wants to be the one to point out the flaws in the plan, so instead the Project Manager copies and pastes the risk register from the last project and everyone’s happy. Until things start going wrong and everyone starts talking about perfect storms and black swans. If you’re not looking, unforeseen events are always going to be unforeseeable.

If you give people permission to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, corporately you have a robust framework for making better decisions. You don’t need to pretend that the future will be the same as the past, plus 10% contingency. A pre-mortem encourages innovative thinking and problem solving.

There’s no need to wait for the patient to die before learning from the experience.