What resources are available on optimizing productivity and engagement, and mastering time, time pressures, and anxiety about time?
Coaching and consulting -->
Coaching is available for individuals and groups—take advantage of a free, half-hour needs assessment interview via phone or Skype. For more information, click the link above and fill out the request form for a free needs assessment, or simply email Steve Randall at: steve@manage-time.com The link above leads to additional information about coaching, including an Autobiography with Respect to Time.
Webinar and Video offerings -->
Click the above link for time-related webinars and videos.
Seminars, workshops, and presentations -->
Predesigned seminars, workshops, and presentations related to time are listed below. We
customize presentations and training to fit the needs of participants and
organizations.
Books and tapes -->
Click here for books and tapes related to time.
General online resources -->
Click hee for related websites, blogs, social groups, a time management prescriptive guide, and information about a popular 'time movement',
Articles
Below is a list of articles on time. If you have questions or comments about any of the readings, please email Steve Randall at: steve@manage-time.com
A Full Spectrum of Remedies for ProcrastinationAlso on my Peak Performance blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-2q There are many different ways of trying to handle procrastination, depending on the way we see it, and on the way we have structured our experience of time. The major part of dealing with procrastination is learning to face and fully experience feelings that we don't like. Procrastination is essentially the repression or suppression of an unpleasant feeling in order to temporally separate oneself from a task. To procrastinate, we presume time is structured into past, present, and future.
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Beat the Clock Before You Run out of TimeSee http://wp.me/ps9h2-2x for a detailed article discussing how we can change our experience of time pressure and the feeling we don’t have enough time, The methodology described in this article is built into the workshop on Mastering Linear Time.
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Beat the Clock by Changing Your Personal Time: A Key to Doing Anything Faster While Improving Well-BeingOriginally published in The ASTD Reporter (Golden Gate ASTD chapter newsletter), November, 1998. The Networker (ISPI chapter newsletter, Silicon Valley), December, 1998.
Like a personal space, we all seem to have a personal time, the time it typically takes us to process a bit of information. We’re used to this processing speed, and may not notice it unless we’re affected by emotions, heat/cold, drugs like caffeine, or a near-death experience, which can speed us up or slow us down, affecting the rate at which we do everything. Is there a way to ‘control’ personal speed other than by external manipulation? What if we were able to function at twice our ‘normal’ speed without getting anxious or feeling pressured? Would we be better able to ‘keep up’ with increasing work demands? Personal time is like a frequency of awareness, a cycle time that we can learn to speed up and slow down, opening up new levels of performance and well-being. The ordinary ego is incapable of keeping up with the accelerating changes presented by time. However, awareness need not be subject to limitations of ego: “By learning to be sensitive to the infinity of 'time' available within any clock-time period, we can begin to appreciate more fully the value and possibilities life presents.” (Tarthang Tulku, Dimensions of Thought) This “infinity of ‘time’” cannot be discovered by hurrying, conventional time management, corporate ‘best practices’, or habits or values of peak performers—these usually show up within the same inflexible time flow. But there are numerous proven ways to challenge the apparently constant and purely external momentum of time. And these ways provide a self-actualizing means of continuous improvement no matter what we’re doing. |
Boosting Productivity, Quality, and Well-Being
How deepening personal experiential involvement drives productivity, quality, and well-being of the worker. Originally published in The Systems Thinker, 13, No. 10 (2002-2003), 7-8.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
Build an Engagement Playing Field to Foster Peak PerformanceYou can drive balanced, overall personal and organizational progress--including improving quality, and employee well-being--if everyone focuses on increasing their own engagement rather than focusing on the scoreboard, productivity, or the bottom line, all of which are partial, superficial, and lagging indicators. (Moreover, focusing on material results sometimes simply leads to burnout.) We thus have an approach to optimal work and peak performance which fosters a natural, unimposed meeting ground for both personal fulfillment and organizational results.
Published on my blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-2t and also at this business applications page. |
Essential Time MasteryWhat's necessary and essential to master time pressures, anxiety about time, and the simple feeling of time passing away? This short seminar introduces essential definitions; inquiry about the zone, personal time, and the source of time pressure; and two powerful methods that can be useful for mastering time. The script for this seminar is at http://wp.me/ss9h2-187
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Exploring the ‘Zone’ of Peak PerformanceToward a balanced, general vision of optimal work, with a focus on experiential facets and performance values of the zone of peak performance. An article on pp. 171-196 of The 2007 Pfeiffer Annual: Annual (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2007).
Available upon request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
Finding the Eye of Our Whirlwind of ActivitiesWe’re in a race against time, and many of us feel like we’re losing. But by examining our experience and seeing how time flows and is broken into past, present, and future ‘rooms’ in experience, time’s character gradually changes. Time shows itself as the dynamic process at the source of all experience and movement—the powerful, creative aspect of life. We are not stuck with balance as an alternating between trying to keep up with the rat race and then dropping out for a while. At any moment we can find, and perhaps remain ‘within’, the most peaceful, yet most productive ‘zone’ at the center of our activities.
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Gambling with Deadline PressureThis is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Results in No Time. You could do the Card Sorting Exercise before or after reading this excerpt.
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Going Beyond Managing Stress—Seeing the Stress Development Cycle in ActionIncluded on http://www.tskassociation.org/stress-management.html
An inquiry and an exercise that allow participants to discover the different stages of the stress development process (SDP) in order to see how to immediately stop the process and transform stress as it arises, rather than wait and deal with it after it has already ‘solidified’ as a problem. |
Got Time? Beat the Clock before You Run Out of Time!
This is the script for a YouTube video (at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suki-Jg27qc ) that depicts the habitual Western problems with time pressure and the feeling of not having enough time, identifies common ways of not dealing with the problem, and then suggests that there are ways to change our personal time (like a personal space). The methodology, including an article and workshop, is available at http://www.tskassociation.org/mastering-linear-time.html
The script for this video is at http://wp.me/ps9h2-3a |
Handling ProjectsSteps in how to deal with large or complex projects.
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How Do You Measure Progress?
Two very different, useful, and complementary ways to measure progress.
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How Sense of Time Flow is Created
Phenomenological examples to show how our sense of time passing is created and reinforced.
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How to Stop Procrastinating
Originally published in the San Jose Mercury News, November 22, 1987, Professional Careers section, p. 1.
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Inner Time ManagementAn article summarizing the new discipline of inner time management that I started in 1985. Originally appeared on pp. 94-117 of A New Kind of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 2004).
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Linear TimeAbout the way we 'normally' experience time in Western countries
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(Linear) Time is bad for our health and well-being!Published on my blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-3C
"Until we learn to control time consciously, our lives will continue to speed away from us, and we won't even notice the beauty or the events around us. We'll simply be left with the feeling that something's missing, something's disappeared." (p. 14, Time Shifting) And it's not a matter of just feeling stressed out: "By living in mental time--in a speeded-up world--with the resultant repression of emotional issues, we increase the chance of disease." (p. 171) However, "If we can think of time in a different way, if we become aware that it contains myriad rhythms and that any individual moment can be expanded or contracted under our control, then I believe we can make time our servant--and in doing so, fill our lives with happiness and health to a degree most of us don't experience and cannot even imagine." (p. 3) "The misuse of time in today’s society should lead to a 'time movement'.” (p. 226) Such a movement has been started--see http://www.tskassociation.org/time-movement.html |
Managing, Producing, and Evolving By Continuously Actualizing ValuesPublished on my blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-3n
No matter what we do in life, it has two aspects, our ongoing experience, and the recording of our intentions, goals, and actions. As a shorthand analogy to a sporting event, we might call these two aspects of the ‘game of life’ the experiential field and the scoreboard. To facilitate progress toward personal and organizational goals, each individual can define performance values to measure his/her involvement along one or more dimensions of the experiential field. As we act to accomplish our goals, we can then periodically measure these values as a way to evaluate and drive our progress. Then, assuming that individuals periodically make suitable redefinitions of their performance values, the following two practices should optimally drive and sustain long-term individual and, for those involved in organizations, organizational progress--including simultaneously improving productivity, quality of services and products, worker well-being and work capacity: (1) The primary practice, related to the experiential field: Make increasing-involvement 'moves' in the field as often as one can, while: (2) Acting and keeping one's scoreboard “at the back of one's mind.” |
Mastering the Deadline Demon: Powerful Tips for Relieving Deadline PressuresPublished on my blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-2W Originally appeared in The Learning Curve, November, 1996, 4-5. The ASTD Reporter, November, 1996, 8. The Networker, December, 1996, 1-6.
Identifies the sources of time pressure and suggests six exercises for handling it. |
Mastering the Deadline Demon: Staying Calm under PressureAn article on pp. 9-13 of Vol. 1 of The 1998 Annual (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 1998). Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com
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Performance & Well-Being Depend on the Paradigm of Time
Originally published in The Networker. August, 1997, 1, 3, 5-6. The ASTD Reporter, August, 1997, 4.
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Plan by Turning Time Around
Side-effects of planning within the structure of linear time. Published in 2004 Pfeiffer Annual. Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com
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Principles for Breaking the Limits of TimePrinciples and suggestions for breaking through the apparent limitations of time.
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Reversing Time: A Planning Exercise (in Consulting Today, 2005)
The article appears on the lower part of the webpage.
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Review of Results in No TimeA review of the book Results in No Time
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Scheduling
How to schedule your tasks using various lists, project maps, etc.
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Stop Time's Flow Instantly
Can you stop time's flow? We can change time pressure and anxiety by directly exploring our own experience of time passing from moment to moment. Between two moments in the passing of time, see whether you can find a third moment. (For a narration of this exercise on YouTube, see “The Moments Between Moments” exercise at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMHjguvuvRo .) What happens to the usual momentum and pressure of time?
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Summary of Experiences with Marriage of Sound and Breath Exercise
Published on pp. 230-233 of Volume II, Dimensions of Thought, eds. Ralph Moon and Stephen Randall; Dharma Publishing, 1980.
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The biggest misconception in time management
Some people believe that “Time Management” is one of the biggest misconceptions of all, because there are only twenty-four hours in every day and we can’t stretch or shrink time. In the sense that we don’t change physical time itself, I agree that we do not ‘manage time’. But does time management only work with physical time? Besides clock and physical time, there is also psychological time, which we can learn to expand and contract, or to change to a sense of timeless flow during peak performance.
To my mind the biggest misconception in time management is that time flows linearly, and we need to somehow just adapt to this flow. Scientists have never found any flow ‘out there’ in reality. It’s just an unhealthy mental and physiological habit taught as we grow up in different cultures, and we can learn how to gradually break the habit. Also published on my blog: http://wp.me/ps9h2-3y |
The importance of handling feelings of urgency
CTM seminars sometimes emphasize distinguishing what feels important vs. what feels urgent or pressing because often we mistake feelings of urgency, anxiety, or pressure for importance. Covey's solution for this problem is to focus on the tasks themselves and categorize them by means of four quadrants. This procedure might be sufficient to prioritize any particular task, but it should be noted that thoroughly dealing with the feeling of time urgency itself is of utmost importance, since this is the symptom of hurry sickness and the predecessor of chronic disease. CTM often recommends categorizing things as urgent or important, but this does little if anything to reduce the fundamentally troubling momentum associated with all our tasks, which requires an investigation of time's momentum in general, and understanding and directly seeing what makes time go.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
The Most Important Time Management Practice
For most of us, pressure and anxiety about time are produced by an imbalance in the heart, head, and throat energies. But if these energy centers are balanced, experience becomes timeless--not that events in physical time stop happening, they just are no longer accompanied by pressure. How can you balance these energies? The best single antidote I’ve seen for time pressure and 'time poverty'--the feeling that we don’t have enough time--is a balanced way of breathing used in a number of martial arts.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
The Well of Working Well
Without focusing just on results—which can lead to burnout--how can we be more productive, and continuously improve our well-being as well as the quality of what we produce? This paper includes a workable example of defining performance values for the general involvement dimension.
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There's Time Pressure in Africa, Too?
Even in Zimbabwe, almost everyone in three workshops I taught experienced time flowing relentlessly, linearly, and at an apparently constant rate. There was a noticeable difference, however, between the Shona Africans and those of European ancestry—those with Shona blood seemed much less pressured than the Caucasians. In the seminars I presented my belief that time pressure is proportional to how separate we keep ourselves from what we’re doing. Perhaps with this insight the Caucasians’ pressure would diminish, and the Shonas might not fully develop the ‘hurry sickness’ being exported along with modern business practices and attitudes by Western countries.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com Originally published in The Learning Curve, November, 1997, 1, 4. |
Three Faces of Time and the Spectrum of Time Management
Published in The Learning Curve, April, 1998, 1, 4, The Networker, April, 1998, 1, 4-5, and The ASTD Reporter, April, 1998, 4.
The purpose of conventional time management (CTM) is to help us produce more and decrease the anxiety and pressure we feel about time. Although time management seminar graduates have been able to accomplish more as a result of their training, there is growing recognition that they still feel like they don’t have enough time. Instead of focusing just on events in time, on what we’re doing, it may serve us to also explore how things are going—the range of experience from feeling overwhelmed and pressured, to things flowing so well we’re not aware of time passing. Exploring how it’s going, the quality of time, is the domain of inner time management (ITM). For people in all but the most routine jobs, learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is both valuable and often necessary in order to continually improve our lives both personally and professionally. For most of us neither CTM nor ITM by itself resolves our issues with time. But by combining the discipline of planning and organizing what we do with methods of improving the way we do things, there is no limit to our productivity and well-being. Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
Time Management Doesn't Work -- and What to Do about it
This short seminar introduces the Mastering Linear Time workshop, and points out some limitations of traditional time management. It also introduces the full range of benefits possible with time management and time mastery, and introduces some principles and a few methods that can be useful for mastering time. If you've taken conventional time management (CTM) workshops, you'll probably find that little or none of this seminar is covered by those workshops, in spite of the importance of this material for practical time management and for optimizing our well-being.
The script for this presentation can be found at: http://wp.me/ps9h2-37 |
Turn Time Around
An excellent exercise to turn procrastination around.
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Video Games As Learning Tools?
Video games can definitely be used—and already are ‘informally’ being used—to learn to break through the limiting ways we experience time, a habitual cultural ‘skill’ at the foundation of everything we do and experience, in every field and endeavor. Though there certainly can be an element of avoidance, many young people feel a measure of fulfillment in gaming, and are very likely learning how to break through the restrictive cultural way of feeling time, finding a sense of freedom from time pressures and anxiety—even while increasing the speed of their actions!
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
What Drives Optimal Work?
How deepening personal experiential involvement drives productivity, quality, and well-being of the worker. Originally published in The Networker. January, 1997, 1, 3, 5.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
What Guarantees Optimal Productivity and Well-Being?
Most businesses these days like to call themselves "results-driven." In a typical company the primary concern is on productivity and the bottom line. However, by focusing on results without a balanced attention to their well-being, employees may produce a great deal, yet burn out in the process. Optimizing results does not guarantee optimal employee well-being. So what does?
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
What Happened Next Year? Turning New Year's Resolutions Around
On my blog at http://wp.me/ps9h2-2T Originally published in The Networker. January, 1998, 1, 5. The ASTD Reporter, January, 1998, 3. The Learning Curve, February, 1998, 4. North Bay Bulletin, March, 1998.
Making resolutions is often a matter of will power and guilt while ‘looking forward’ to the coming year. Instead, as much as possible, get into the experience that the year is over. Then write whatever happened in past tense. Besides insights about your goals and plans, you may get a sense of relief or peace while breaking through your habitually off-balance way of seeking happiness "up ahead," or “going forward.” |
What We Teach About Time
What ideas, principles, perspectives, and habits about time do we inculcate in those residing in Western societies?
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What’s the ‘Zone’ of Peak Experience and Performance?
Zone experiences are characterized by a remarkable absence of persistent structures of experience. Zone experiences can be characterized by the words flow, glow, and zero: qualities of unobstructed flow (time dimension), luminous presence and positionless knowing (identity/knowing dimension), and pervasive, nonextended, and undivided openness (space dimension), with varying proportions of these attributes in different experiences. Any activity is optimized during absorption in the zone.
Earlier version originally published in Pfeiffer Jossey-Bass The Annual, 2006. See http://wp.me/ps9h2-19 (Called "What's the Zone?) |
Where Does Time Pressure Come From?What are the sources of time pressure? Where does it come from?
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Zone Performance Questions
Twelve questions to help determine whether one is in the zone along twelve important dimensions of experience. Meant to accompany my full-length articles on the zone.
Available by request. Email steve@manage-time.com |
