Art of Progress

In my last blog post, I discussed my take on Stephen Covey’s four generations of time management. In this post, I’ll go more into depth on the first generation of time management: Reaction.

Generally speaking, when it comes to time management you want to reduce time spent reacting. Yet disruptions happen all the time, from the drop-in coworker to the barrage of daily phone calls and emails almost everybody has to deal with. You can minimize the need to react, but you can’t make it go away. It is important not only to minimize disruption, but to deal effectively with it so that new information isn’t missed and emergencies are addressed swiftly.

With that in mind, let’s take a two-pronged approach to reactive time management:

1. Minimizing disruption.
2. Maximizing response effectiveness.

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Recently I put together a small workshop on time management at the request of a coworker. While researching the topic, I came across a summary of Stephen Covey’s four generations of time management. Having read a lot about time management but nothing by Covey, I decided to take the four generations summary and “make it my own” for the workshop. Here’s what I came up with; each generation will be a likely topic for more in-depth future blog posts:

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Several people I know subscribe to multiple email newsletters, but would prefer RSS because it’s more convenient and doesn’t clutter their inbox. Unfortunately, despite the Web 2.0 craze, a lot of good content still isn’t available via RSS. By the way, if you are a content provider that needs help syndicating your email newsletter as an RSS feed, I’m available for “nights and weekends” consulting.

There’s no reason you should be prevented you from getting your favorite email newsletters via RSS, thanks to this simple GMail hack. Here it is, step by step: (more…)

I recently had some success with what might be called the Stone Soup strategy. I first came across this strategy in a book called Pragmatic Programmer. For those wondering what Stone Soup is, its a fable that goes something like this: (more…)