Perfect Time-Based Productivity: A unique way to protect your peace of mind as time demands increase

by Francis Wade

More demands on your time - that's just a fact of modern life. You may be doing the job of more than one person and facing an onslaught of information, only to realize that ubiquitous, 24-7 technology has only made things worse. How do you stay ahead of the expectation that you should be able to meet all your obligations, old and new? In the face of these increasing pressures, what do you need to do to maintain your peace of mind?

This book is primarily written for productive professionals who have already found a way to achieve positive results. They aren't clueless - time is an important concern and they have been able to manage their affairs well enough to get through school, hold a job, keep a family and enjoy life's benefits. However, if you belong to this group, you may share a concern: how can you be successful in the future, given the hot pace of change you see around you every day? Doing more of the same seems an unlikely answer. So does the conventional wisdom around "time management" and the popular tactic of following one-size-fits-all solutions.

While the book has lots of specific, practical suggestions for new behaviors, at its heart is a four step approach that preserves and builds on the advances that you, as a professional, have already made in your career:

Step 1> Evaluate your current skills against best-in-class standards, discovering strengths and improvement opportunities.
Step 2> Set realistic targets for new behaviors that meet your unique, evolving needs.
Step 3> Create a personalized plan from these new targets that allow you enough time to succeed, by taking small steps.
Step 4> Craft your own habit change support environment.

By the end of the book you will have completed these steps many times, giving you an easy way to improve any skill that's important to your peace of mind. To complete these steps effectively, Perfect Time-Based Productivity takes you through a broad range of new ideas based on recent research and case studies in fields such as psychology, business process management, adult learning, brain science and industrial engineering.

Part One - You discover the concepts needed to shift from attempting to manage or control time (which is impossible) to managing time demands - the "individual, internal commitments made to complete actions in the future." Once these ideas are understood, you discover that every person manipulates time demands in similar ways, subject to the limits of human capacity. However, your implementation is unique because in this area of life, humans are almost completely self-taught.

Part Two - Using a number of forms provided in the book (and available for download) you perform an evaluation of 7 essential skills: Capturing, Emptying, Tossing, Acting Now, Storing, Listing and Scheduling. Each self-evaluation is the precursor to creating a mini-improvement plan which goes into a Master Plan, made up of small steps, that outlines your improvement journey. It's one that will change your habits, practices and rituals at a pace that preserves your peace of mind.

Part Three - You'll learn about other advanced skills and perspectives needed to be effective in today's world. For example, Flowing - your capacity to be in the flow state defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - is an important skill to master given the pressure to multi-task and become distracted. Also, you'll learn why corporations are struggling with time-based productivity: they don't push for the right tools for their employees and have allowed individual effectiveness to become a matter of chance, versus policy.

The book closes with additional resources for already-productive professionals such as Type A business-people, fans of productivity improvement, project managers and time advisers.

Everyone who picks up this book will learn a new definition of "perfection": To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Winston Churchill.

Genres: Productivity

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Francis Wade is an innovator, content author and management consultant. He owns Framework Consulting, a firm headquartered in Hollywood, Florida and spends much of this time in Kingston, Jamaica, a place he's called home since 2005. Francis is a graduate of Cornell University in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, where he earned Bachelors and Masters Degrees. Most of his attention is spent on Time Management 2.0 and turning new productivity research into practical ideas that leaders of companies can use. He has done marathons and several triathlons, including one Ironman-distance race.

Reviews

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good ideas in this book, but they feel too few given its length. Reading it it's quite a slog: there's a constant telling you what the book is going to tell you and then telling you what the book has told you. That's a good rule for presentations, but not so good for books. All in all, I would not recommend, but set it at 3 stars because as I said, some of the ideas are good and worth checking.

[Scott Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably Helpful

Francis Wade does an amazing job of presenting a set of tools to help you get from where you are in your personal and time demand management to where you want to be in ”Perfect Time-Based Productivity."

He doesn't try to sell you a bill of goods that is going to fix everything in your personal and professional life regarding your commitment management. Instead, he helps you build a plan to take you from your current system, whatever it happens to be, to where you want to be. He doesn't tell you where he thinks you need to go and how if you do exactly what he says everything will be fixed.

Francis provides a realistic and helpful viewpoint in the world of time and stress management. I wish I had found this book years ago.

[Gloria-Jean Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating Journey Through Time

Having Read “Bill’s Imperfect Time Management…” and taken the Rapid Assessment; no way I wasn’t reading Perfect Time-Based Productivity. It did not disappoint. Read this and be prepared to take a journey and learn ways to improve where you need to but with the knowledge now of why you act as you do. I became interested to see how I matched up in the 3 assessing phases of Francis Wade’s products. What will your journey be?

[Catarina Vilarinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book and almost gave up. Besides repeated pages in the printed version, the first 100 pages have almost none information, always repeating why the majority of these books don’t work and why this one is different.

But then, things started to get interesting. The methodology presented is intelligent and had me rethinking and reviewing the way I manage “time”. It is a really practical book, which makes you think about your habits and how to improve them.

That said, it could be half the length and have exactly the same information and the printed version needed to be better but the content and concepts it presents are still good.

[Anders Gränfors]

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