Presentations, Seminars, and Workshops

Beat the Clock While Improving Well-being

A one day seminar.

Do you race against time? Does time flow too fast, with pressure somehow built into it? Is there some aspect of time that we can change to lessen pressure? Does pressure somehow depend on our perspective, or on how much we're involved in what we're doing? Is there any way to eliminate time stress? Is there any peaceful 'zone' in time, like the eye of a hurricane?

Most time management seminars don't ask these questions, which are necessary to deal with our time issues at their root. In this workshop we'll explore the sources of time pressure, identify different types of time, and discuss the full range of what can be done about time stress. We'll review conventional time management (CTM)-ways of determining goals and priorities, and scheduling efficiently. Although people usually find CTM helpful, some find that it turns up the speed of time's treadmill. Can we use CTM in a way that won't accelerate time?

Are there tools besides CTM? Yes, inner time management (ITM), which directly transforms pressure, overwhelm, and anxiety about time into effortless energy flow. Combining ITM with CTM, we avoid the driven feeling that often accompanies CTM's preoccupation with results. And we open up new levels of performance and fulfillment that are simply unavailable with CTM alone.

You can learn:

• You can simultaneously get results and improve health and well-being
• Conventional time management usually promises more than it can deliver
• There is one kind of time we can't change and a type that we can change dramatically
• You can directly cut through various feelings that waste time--confusion, tiredness, indecision, scatteredness, time pressure and anxiety, and negative emotion
• There are six different levels of mastery of time pressures
• Peak performance has an element of timelessness
• Tracking feelings of time flow is a means of continuous improvement
  
  

Possible Benefits :

You can learn:

• How to access a comprehensive, web-based guide to articles and mental and physical exercises that are effective to handle time management tasks and issues
• How you can combine an emphasis on organizing for bottom-line results with an emphasis on simultaneously improving health and well-being
• How conventional time management--including that offered by Franklin-Covey--usually promises more than it can deliver. Its effectiveness is limited by being based on the idea that time flow is an objective reality (rather than a result of personal learning)
• How you can extend the typical scope of time management by learning to directly cut through various feelings that waste time: confusion, tiredness, indecision, scatteredness, time pressure and anxiety, negative emotion, and our ordinary feeling of time flowing
• That peak performance has an element of timelessness, and tracking and diminishing our feelings of time flow is a self-actualizing means of continuous improvement
• What to focus on to simultaneously optimize productivity, employee well-being, and quality
• That true peak performance is possible only if we continually consider how we do things in addition to what we do.
• Characteristics of six different levels of mastery of time pressures, levels that outline our approach to peak performance
• How to access a leading-edge, free online book and workshop on deadline pressure
• What training is available in methods that go beyond conventional time management

 

Highlights and Key Points:

Conventional time management (CTM) usually deals with breaking down the workload, determining goals and priorities, planning, scheduling, and procrastination. CTM doesn't work directly with emotions, confusion, scatteredness, or tiredness. CTM tries to handle time pressure and anxiety indirectly by dealing with which activities we will do, but it usually cannot work directly with time pressure--or even makes the pressure worse!--since it is usually unnecessarily based on a paradigm presuming the 'reality' of linear time flow.

Covey suggests an 'alternative paradigm' based on the importance of what we do, rather than the urgency of tasks. However, Covey's purportedly new generation of time management is not qualitatively different: (1) it still focuses on what tasks we do, and (2) tasks are presumed to occur within an objective flow of time. No matter whether tasks are judged by importance or urgency, and no matter whether determined by means of core principles or not, by keeping the focus on "what you do and why you do it," the underlying paradigm of linear time is left intact.

In the inner time paradigm, the enormous variety of our actual experiences of time and timelessness are considered very important experiences to be transformed, because rather than measuring or mirroring some 'external flow', our feeling of time passing (FTP) measures how much we're separate from, or even resisting what we're doing, and is the aggregate result of resisting past negative experiences. Only this paradigm can open the door to true peak performance.

Research has shown that tracking and diminishing our FTP turns out to be a self-actualizing means of continuous improvement that simultaneously drives productivity, employee well-being, and quality.

My web site offers a guide for almost all time management issues, including a leading-edge, free online book and workshop on deadline pressure. To my knowledge, no one else is offering anything like these resources.

We simultaneously optimize productivity, quality, and health and well-being by continuously increasing our involvement in whatever is at hand, whatever we're doing, whether work or play. We notice the transition points where our involvement could either increase or decrease, and then choose a direction of increasing involvement. Isn't this the natural way that we make progress without even thinking about it?

Tracking involvement as an indicator of progress has none of the side-effects of using simple productivity as a measure of progress.

Different levels of mastery of time pressures are possible:

• One level is being completely at the effect of the pressure, perhaps thinking that it's normal. It results from not knowing and practicing CTM skills for determining priorities and organizing work.
  
  This is like being at the mercy of tornadoes, with no way to escape their fury.
  
• Another level involves practicing CTM skills. However, there's still time pressure. This seems to be the level where a good part of the workforce is today.
  
  This is like having a vehicle so you can drive away from tornadoes. You don't really affect or change the tornado, but you're no longer completely at its mercy either.
  
• Another level involves knowing that it's possible to transform virtually all time pressure into invigorating and productive energy. Very few people see this as a possibility--this is taken up in the Taking the Pressure Out of Deadlines.
  
  This is like finding that a tornado has an off button. However, you don't know where the button is, so you still can't significantly affect or change the tornado.
  
• Another level involves the ability to take a break from whatever you're doing and focus on building pressure and reduce its intensity by 50%. This seems to require some consistent practice of the methods in Taking the Pressure Out of Deadlines.
  
  This is like knowing how to turn a tornado on and off.
  
• Another level involves being able to reduce the intensity of time pressure by 50% while maintaining or improving your original level of productivity--without taking a break. This seems to require a natural and stable balance resulting from long-term practice of methods taught by the TSK Association.
  
  This is like knowing how to find the peaceful yet most productive eye at the center of a tornado.
  
• There's a final level where pressure never even gets firmly established in experience.

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