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CRIMPers = prospective time multipliers?
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Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 9, 2017 at 08:12 PM
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…
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 10, 2017 at 09:12 AM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jul 10, 2017 at 10:05 AM
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.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 10, 2017 at 10:34 AM
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.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 10, 2017 at 10:46 AM
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.