Some food for thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X7c9TUQJ8

Well, I don't think that CRIMPing qualifies as "procrastinating on purpose" - at least as Rory Vaden sees it. :-)
Interesting video, though.

I was thinking more of his reference to automation; to me, CRIMPing is the search for tools that, among other things, help us automate certain aspects of the information management process, which represents a substantial part of a knowledge worker's time.

What is the crux of his argument (sorry, haven't got the time to watch the whole thing, but if you have, would appreciate your summary of the key takeaway)? Cheers.

The crux of his argument is...

You can't manage time, you can only manage yourself. But you can "multiply your time by giving yourself emotional permission to spend time on things today that will give you more time tomorrow."

This is what he calls the third dimension of time management. The first two are: Urgency and Importance. The third is Significance, which he defines as how long will what you do last? As an example, he uses setting up online bill paying. It may be hard to say I need to spend two hours setting this up, but if you do it, you'll save yourself a half an hour a month and within four months you've recouped your time investment and you will then start "multiplying your time."

There is no doubt something valuable to what he is saying, but I'm not sure it is the game changer he wants us to believe it is. I suspect most people factor in "significance" when they are evaluating "importance." But a good reminder.

Steve Z.

Dr Andus wrote:

What is the crux of his argument (sorry, haven't got the time to watch
the whole thing, but if you have, would appreciate your summary of the
key takeaway)? Cheers.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

This is what he calls the third dimension of time management. The first
two are: Urgency and Importance. The third is Significance, which he
defines as how long will what you do last?

Thanks for the summary, Steve.

My 2 cents concerning this: My problems seem to be not about time management but about attention management (as you normally have more time than ability to concentrate in a day and in a weekly cycle, so the limited resource is attention, or energy, not time).

As for urgency, importance, and significance, the big issue is the quality of judgement that goes into determining what is urgent, important, and significant, and perhaps even more importantly, the answer to the question "Why should it be me who needs to do all this?" (i.e. could the task be delegated to someone else?).

Sadly, our usual task management software are not geared towards helping us how to make these judgements.

In fact, they might even distract us from them, by instead compelling us to develop huge todo lists, which then create a sense of urgency to clear the list, when in fact it would be more important to decide what not to do or who to delegate it to...

Or maybe I'm just not familiar with those tools that can help with judgement and delegation? At some point it's obviously a cognitive decision, though maybe with the rise of Artificial Intelligence one day we won't have to be making decisions either...

Interesting points. A corollary would be the built-in inflexibility (despite developers' best efforts) of most task management software. I've been using Things 3 for a while, which is a lovely piece of software in many ways, and more flexible than many alternatives. But even so - once something is pinned down as a "task", it's remarkably difficult to reformat it as anything else (note, maybe-to-do, possibly-important-once-I've-had-time-to-think-about-it, etc.), and even more difficult to assign it to that grey zone holding tasks that need to be done soon, but not that soon. You've pinpointed one of the most problematic areas of task management - how/when do you decide what's important, and in particular, how/when do you decide whether one thing is more important than n other things, where n tends to infinity...

I was using TaskPaper before that, having customised its filters fairly heavily to allow for the above-mentioned flexibility. But TaskPaper has its own irritating limitations (from my point of view), even though it's very good in many ways. Notably a lack of iOS client (that does the same things, pace TaskMator, which is very capable).

I think tagging is probably a key element in such a system, in which case tags like "evaluate" or "important?" or other interim options could offer a useful approach. I also like the Kanban approach taken by some task managers, at least as one (of several) perspectives on time/priority-sensitive data. Tagging is, of course, handled in all kinds of fascinating ways by many different task managers. And again, flexibility is an issue, as well as the fundamental issue of tagging, which is remembering what all your tags are/how they interact/interrelate!

And that's why we CRIMP, of course.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

>This is what he calls the third dimension of time management. The first
>two are: Urgency and Importance. The third is Significance, which he
>defines as how long will what you do last?

@ Steve: many thanks for the great summary; I wrote my original post in between project deliveries, hence the excessive brevity!

I would add that, in turn, Automation forms part of a broader approach: Eliminate / Automate / Delegate. In brief, Vaden advocates reducing one's tasks, vs. simply prioritising them. In this context, his approach is similar to Mark Forster's.

Dr. Andus wrote:

My 2 cents concerning this: My problems seem to be not about time
management but about attention management (as you normally have more
time than ability to concentrate in a day and in a weekly cycle, so the
limited resource is attention, or energy, not time).

@ Dr. Andus: Speaking for myself, and though recently diagnosed with ADD, I beg to (partly) disagree: not all hours in the day are created equal. And the hours when I can do deep productive work are precious few.

As for urgency, importance, and significance, the big issue is the
quality of judgement that goes into determining what is urgent,
important, and significant, and perhaps even more importantly, the
answer to the question "Why should it be me who needs to do all this?"
(i.e. could the task be delegated to someone else?).

Indeed, see my note to Steve above.

Sadly, our usual task management software are not geared towards helping
us how to make these judgements.

To be clear, when referring to CRIMPing and Automation, I was mostly implying information management tools.

In fact, they might even distract us from them, by instead compelling us
to develop huge todo lists, which then create a sense of urgency to
clear the list, when in fact it would be more important to decide what
not to do or who to delegate it to...

Wholeheartedly agreed; that is why, among other reasons, following my diagnosis, I now take most decisions off-screen.

Or maybe I'm just not familiar with those tools that can help with
judgement and delegation? At some point it's obviously a cognitive
decision, though maybe with the rise of Artificial Intelligence one day
we won't have to be making decisions either...

Possibly (or AI). In other respects, as I am now working with a larger team, I find groupware useful for maintaining an overview.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

@ Dr. Andus: Speaking for myself, and though recently diagnosed with
ADD, I beg to (partly) disagree: not all hours in the day are created
equal. And the hours when I can do deep productive work are precious
few.

Hi Alexander,

I'm not sure if we're disagreeing, as I think I was trying to make the same point. Indeed, pure productive time differs not only during the day, but also across the week (at least for me).

So the limited resource that needs to be managed is my attention, which sadly is shorter in supply than my actual daily work hours.

The ability to make good judgements about what not to do and what to delegate is also a rare resource and is very likely related to the daily/weekly stock of attention.

It is probably also related to some other skills (understanding the problem, understanding the organisational context, ability to communicate with people (emotional intelligence) and convince them to take on the delegated task, and then manage them instead).

I guess this is also related to one's journey across time and the ability to accumulate experience that allows one to emerge as some kind of a leader.

So these are rather soft skills, but it would be nice if one could use IT to develop them. Unfortunately my anecdotal evidence suggests that people in leadership positions are often quite poor in terms of their IT skills, so maybe the soft skills are more important after all.

Interestingly, my wife, who was a senior (enterprise) manager for many years, uses a paper-based time management system by preference (the bullet-point system mentioned elsewhere in this forum), precisely so she's always reassessing priorities, urgency etc.

I've looked at it, tried to love it, but can't be doing with it at all, at all!

The system that seems closest to resolving the flexibility thing is maybe moo.do, but then again, maybe not. Many people swear by Todoist, but despite its apparently streamlined design, I find the actual task annotation features remarkably finicky. Same applies to OmniFocus.

I used a bullet journal for over a year and found it fairly effective. But three main problems with the system caused me to abandon it: If you lose it, you have no back up. There is no "search" function, and keeping the information adequately indexed is a job in itself. And when you move to a new notebook, you no longer have all that useful information from the previous notebook easily at hand. I've tried recreating a bullet journal system with an app, but it just isn't the same. You lose the tactile experience that makes the paper notebook so pleasurable, and which invites me to keep using it. (Some apps come close: TheBrain and NotePlan are the two best I've found for mimicking a paper notebook bullet journal.)

Steve Z.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Interestingly, my wife, who was a senior (enterprise) manager for many
years, uses a paper-based time management system by preference (the
bullet-point system mentioned elsewhere in this forum), precisely so
she's always reassessing priorities, urgency etc.

I've looked at it, tried to love it, but can't be doing with it at all,
at all!

Quote Alexander Deliyannis:-----------------------
Some food for thought
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X7c9TUQJ8
Unquote:-----------------------

I don't understand.
The video clip is only about 18:30 mins long. I watched it and re-watched it a couple of times more, making copious notes and following up on any references the speaker made, just to check whether I was understanding it correctly - though it wasn't difficult to understand,
The talk in that video seems to be rife with all kinds of wrong and confused nonsense. At first, I thought it might be intended as some kind of a joke, as no-one could take it seriously. However, it wasn't done on April 1st or anything like that. It just seems to be mostly all facile BS.
The speaker is reported as being "Rory Vaden, MBA, Self-Discipline Strategist" and the clip as having had 1,263,269 views so far - which information may speak volumes.

MadaboutDana wrote:

But
even so - once something is pinned down as a "task", it's remarkably
difficult to reformat it as anything else (note, maybe-to-do,
possibly-important-once-I've-had-time-to-think-about-it, etc.), and even
more difficult to assign it to that grey zone holding tasks that need to
be done soon, but not that soon.

The most flexible approach I've found in this respect is Kantree's https://kantree.io/

You've pinpointed one of the most
problematic areas of task management - how/when do you decide what's
important, and in particular, how/when do you decide whether one thing
is more important than n other things, where n tends to infinity...

I believe that some kind of long term reference/context is required, i.e. this is where goal management, principles, basic needs etc. enter into play. We all have such references, the question is whether it is conscious or not. For example, the tendency to respond to others' (interruptive) requests may be explained, among other factors, by one's need for acceptance.

Slartibartfarst wrote:

At first, I thought it might be intended as some kind
of a joke, as no-one could take it seriously. However, it wasn't done on
April 1st or anything like that. It just seems to be mostly all facile BS.

What can I say? It was definitely not my intention to waste anybody's time, as I have great respect for the contributors to this forum, even if I rarely have the time nowadays to post here myself. In any case, my impression is that the video did spark some interesting discussions and I do hope that in the end some people will have benefitted from the relevant exchanges, much as I have benefitted myself over the years.

To summarise my view, while the Eliminate / Automate / Delegate approach may sound like common sense (to me at least, YOMV), it is rarely highlighted during discussions on task management and, even more rarely, consciously followed by knowledge workers--unless they r othemselves have a managerial role over other knowledge workers. Automate, in particular, is in my opinion of interest to this forum--not so much in the context of task management, but rather in that of task implementation. My understanding is that the CRIMPers' holy grail of information management is a tool that allows one to leverage their information / knowledge / idea / concept / etc. organisation and processing power, much like a physical lever or other machine allows one to leverage their physical strength. The end result of such a tool would be to effectively multiply the knowledge worker's time.

In this context, when CRIMPing, one may be "giving themselves emotional permission to spend time on things today that will [AD: hopefully] give them more time tomorrow".

Again, your opinion may vary.

I am glad you posted the link, Alexander. It was interesting. There is a smattering of BS in all such schemes, if you ask me. It all comes down to discipline. Any scheme works well if you are disciplined about following it. This is why none of them work very well for me.

Steve Z.

Ah, that's very much the Honest CRIMPer, Steve!

Let's face it, if we were all Very Disciplined, we would all have found one system and be sticking with it.

But I like to think our visionary/idealistic tendencies outweigh any minor flaw such as a lack of discipline...

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

to discipline. Any scheme works well if you are disciplined about
following it. This is why none of them work very well for me.

Hi Alexander! Nice to "see" you again!

Wow, yes, kantree is lovely - I have great respect for kanban-style approaches, but haven't found any multi-platform variant that really works well (i.e. offers multiple perspectives - including calendar - plus simple notes, subtasks etc. and syncs across desktop and mobile devices). I've been playing with Kanbanier on Mac and iOS, but it's rather limited in its current incarnation. Kantree is, unfortunately, online only, which is a bit sad...

Gingko is pretty cool as a task management app, but it's not optimised for that purpose. However, I've experimented with that as well.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Wow, yes, kantree is lovely - I have great respect for kanban-style
approaches, but haven't found any multi-platform variant that really
works well (i.e. offers multiple perspectives - including calendar -
plus simple notes, subtasks etc. and syncs across desktop and mobile
devices). I've been playing with Kanbanier on Mac and iOS, but it's
rather limited in its current incarnation. Kantree is, unfortunately,
online only, which is a bit sad...

Another interesting (alas, online only) tool is Barvas https://www.barvas.com/ from the makers of the mindmap desktop software MindGenius. The commercial version has recently been launched, and integrates mindmapping, kanban style task management and, since one week, timelining (Gantt charts).

Barvas seems similar to Concept Draw's suite -- desktop apps with cross-app integration: Concept Draw MindMap, Draw, and Project -- and online Concept Draw Plan team collaboration. Good products -- rather pricey.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Let's face it, if we were all Very Disciplined, we would all have found
one system and be sticking with it.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>to discipline. Any scheme works well if you are disciplined about
>following it. This is why none of them work very well for me.

Not all systems are created equal, nor is it possible for all to suit everybody. I've been reading a lot about ADHD in the last months, and am fully convinced that the term 'lack of discipline' is most often used in an oversimplified manner--please note that I am not implying that discipline should be underestimated, only that it should be put in context.

In parallel to my readings, I attended an online course based on the teachings of top executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. Here's a relevant direct quote from him: "We grossly underestimate our need for help and our need for structure. Self-discipline is greatly overrated. We all tend to be close, we all tend to become depleted, tired."

Spurred by the course and some other readings, I found my way to Dr BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits method http://tinyhabits.com/ which I can't recommend highly enough; it gives an 'undisciplined' person a whole new perspective.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I used a bullet journal for over a year and found it fairly effective.
But three main problems with the system caused me to abandon it: If you
lose it, you have no back up. There is no "search" function, and keeping
the information adequately indexed is a job in itself. And when you move
to a new notebook, you no longer have all that useful information from
the previous notebook easily at hand. I've tried recreating a bullet
journal system with an app, but it just isn't the same. You lose the
tactile experience that makes the paper notebook so pleasurable, and
which invites me to keep using it. (Some apps come close: TheBrain and
NotePlan are the two best I've found for mimicking a paper notebook
bullet journal.)

A personal breakthrough for me was the switch to miniature sticky notes (38x50mm) on a portable cardboard. I can quickly jot down the basic info on any task or idea that comes to mind, even during focused work and discussions--quickly enough to ensure recall afterwards, without losing my focus at that point. I can afterwards decide whether to Do, Delegate, Defer or Delete it. Unless I Delete or Do it in a couple of minutes, it will have to somehow enter my electronic system, even if this means sending a brief email to somebody. There on, there will be some kind of record for future recall and follow up.

With regard to "lack of discipline".
As a coach I've been working with a lot of people - often writers in trouble or procrastinating writers. Many of them told me they lacked discipline, stamina or willpower.
In my eyes, the didn't. They had a lot of discipline, often too much. Their problem was not lack of willpower or stamina. They were exhausted (or as Goldsmith says "depleted"). They were stuck mostly because they had tried too hard or because they had run into dead-end road or because they had come off track with their project. They were stuck because of inner conflicts. Some simply had acquired habits or ways of working that were not really useful.
None of them was lazy or weak. On the contrary.

Just my 5 cents.

Alexander: Thanks for the hint to Dr. Fogg.

To quote from his site:

"Only three things will change behavior in the long term.

Option A. Have an epiphany
Option B. Change your environment (what surrounds you)
Option C. Take baby steps"

Exactly. Though I wouldn't speak of "options". What works for me: Change the environment AND establish small new habits (it's way more exhausting to establish new habits in the old environment).

This thread is such a perfect example of what makes this forum special and why I value the people here so much!

Steve Z.

Absolutely, Steve.

The various insights into discipline are fascinating - not least because sports coaches are now looking very seriously at the nature of discipline as expressed through willpower, and finding that humans, generally speaking, only have so much willpower. We do indeed deplete it, and the more vigorously we apply it, the more quickly it goes. I can't remember the references off-hand, but I'll look them up and post them here. There's been a fair amount of research into this aspect of our biological makeup.

Cheers,
Bill