Tag Archives: Hobbs

Time Management = Emotional Control = Stress Management.

13 Monday Jan 2020

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The first paragraph of TimePower by Charles R. Hobbs (Harper and Row, 1987) reads thus:

“How often do you have the kind of day when you feel like you hold the world on a string? It’s the kind of feeling you would probably like to enjoy more often. The moment when you feel this way is the moment when you are most in control of the events in your life: most in control of what you are doing, most in control of your relationships with others. As your ability to control events increases, those exalted moments become more frequent.”

The counter philosophy to that paragraph must therefore be that you are most stressed when the opposite is true – when you feel least in control or, worse, when you feel completely out of control in terms of the events in your life and your relationship with others.

Note the use of the word ‘feel’ in both of these paragraphs. I spotted it for the first time when I read the paragraph last night. Then I realised:

To be content with your control of your time and relationships, you don’t necessarily have to be in control.

You just need to feel that you’re control.

Quite profound.

I had a supervisor, once. We called him a shit magnet. (Sorry.) When he came into work, it was as if all the robbers, rapists and murderers had been waiting for him before acting. Oh, and all the wanted persons in Wales got arrested, too. All at the same time, but hundreds of miles apart.

He never skipped a beat. He would quietly look at what was happening around him, decide what needed to be done, and then quietly delegate or act with an appropriate level of urgency. For those around him, his calm was catching. And part of his process was to think with a pen and a book in his hands.

Despite the fact that there was no way he could be in complete control of what was going on, he took enough action to feel as if he had it all managed. Maybe more than enough. But he felt in control, and his calm attitude and approach manifested itself in the rest of his team feeling as though they were in control, too. We didn’t feel stressed, either.

The only truly effective way to ‘feel’ this way is to have a complete, systematic approach to ‘stuff’ that means you can prioritise what needs to be done, dump what need not be done, and fit anything else around those decisions.

What this lesson says to me is that, to a certain extent, time management as most people would understand the term is a key technique for emotional- and stress-management. One which few counsellors, coaches and managers seem to realise, promote and/or teach.

Traumatic incidents aside, stress is frequently the result of a build-up if unaddressed issues. It’s not the pile of paper that needs dealing with – it’s the way you feel about that. It’s not that appointment you won’t manage to keep, or which you aren’t prepared for – it’s the way you feel about being late or unprepared. It’s not that conversation you need to have but the way you feel about what happens if it doesn’t go well when you finally manage to have it.

And all of those feelings can be controlled by taking the ‘time management’ actions people like Hobbs, Covey and Smith promote. Deciding what needs to be done, making a plan that helps you act on that decision, and then executing that plan. Once you have that level of appropriate control, your feelings about those events change for the positive.

Go learn time management.

Covey/Hobbs Vs GTD – a War not Worth Waging.

18 Sunday Feb 2018

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Some of you will have no idea what that title means, so that’s as good a reason as any to READ THIS BLOG, is it not? 😊

The title refers to what may, on first glance, be conflicting time management methodologies. GTD is ‘Getting Things Done’, explained in the excellent book of the same name by David Allen. (Make sure you buy the 21st Century update.)

GTD is a list-based system. (Now it gets complicated.) The idea is to collect all your unfinished business, including ‘projects’ which Allen defines as anything that requires more than one step to complete. Having done that, you go through the list and complete all 2-minute jobs. Then you are left with a list of things which you can (usually) only do in a certain place, at a certain time, with a certain person, etc. For example, some of the things may be tasks you can only do ‘At Computer’ so they would then be listed on a list entitled ‘At Computer’. Or ‘At Shops’ for shopping, or ‘In London’, and so on. Time- and day-specific tasks – and ONLY those – go on a calendar (diary page). The lists should have on them only ‘next actions’, the things you have to do next to get the projects done.

That really is an idiot’s guide, and Allen’s system has a lot of thought/psychology and method behind it which this little blog can’t cover.

The Covey/Hobbs system is values/mission-based, and further sub-categorised into Roles. Your mission dictates your activities, which are carried out through the roles you perform in life. For example, I am a trainer, investigator, driving coach, speakers club president, company director unconnected to those other roles, and family bod. You create your goals in role-context, then plan execution of bits of your goals into your planner as priorities. (I’ve explained this before and it’s explained fully in my FREE BOOK.)

Zealots in either case would argue for their preferred option. GTD-philes would argue that lists equate to freedom while Covey/Hobbs is restrictive. Covey/Hobbs would argue their way supports a sense of meaning and peace, while GTD is ‘just’ about productivity, and productivity is not as important as meaning. Deeper analysis would identify further objections to the opposing philosophy, and more supporting evidence for the preferred way. Who has time?

I have a different outlook. I think the GTD Way of collecting all your incompletes, doing the resulting 2-minute jobs and planning the others is an excellent way to get control, while the Covey/Hobbs method is an excellent way of keeping control once you have got it.

My evidence?

People have asked me how I manage so many responsibilities (job, home, family, IAM, IPI, Cardiff Speakers Club,) and my answer is that I can do this because of my mastery of the Covey/Hobbs method, but if I was to take on those responsibilities all at once I would start with GTD until I got things compartmentalised.

I feel this way because both GTD and Covey/Hobbs promote

  • planning at the start of a week,
  • scheduling the things that can or could be done at a particular time (your priorities, which can include your personal priorities),
  • then making lists of the things that need to be done but which have no appointed time.

Both require knowing the end result in advance and deciding what to do about it next. Overthinking it may identify one as requiring ‘task-to-objective’ thinking while the other would be seen as having an ‘objective-to-task’ perspective but in all practicality, they end up being the same process, which is asking “What I gotta do to get what I wanna get?” and then planning to do that action, somewhere.

GTD would have you put them on separate lists, whereas Covey/Hobbs would have you actually plan them into a day. Both philosophies advocate carrying the system with you. GTD would say separate lists obviate re-writing that which is not done, while the alternative is to rewrite unfinished tasks in the next day’s list. (Which takes seconds, or even less if you’re a digi-planner. Oh, the time saved……)

And that, lorries and gelatines, is the only difference. Which is hardly a difference over which one should declare war.

As always, my advice would be to master your preferred method and leave the other well alone, because there is a tendency to try and do both at the same time and when you do that your head gets cluttered – which defeats the objective of either style.

Pick one. Master it. And reap the rewards.

 

Oh, and unlike all those GTD examples of people who get an e-mail a minute (and I have never, ever met one), I get about 10 a day. Makes life a tad easier.

100-Day Challenge, Day 44. And about a ‘Cure’ for Stress.

13 Sunday Aug 2017

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This week I have been mostly exercising every two days, eating sensibly and producing like a dervish. I discovered that ‘being on holidays’ equates to ’90-120 minutes a day dealing with voluntary tasks’, in that two days of this week felt like I was one of those CEOs who claims to get a million emails a day. Every single one I dealt with generated two more, I swear. Hence this input on Stress.

Stress is self-imposed. (Cue anger.) Okay, let me temper that a bit.

On Monday I went to Cardiff Yes Group, a post-Tony Robbins event ‘alumni’ event where personal development lecturers keep the audience ‘on track’ with their commitments. All are welcome, and there are UK-wide events available.

The speaker suggested that (one of) the reasons for stress arise from overwhelm and an inability to cope with change and pressure because life/we/bosses etc haven’t allowed time for our neurology to get respite from the constant changes of direction (e.g. from interruptions like constant demands for attention from emails). That inability to cope can be genuine and physical, or it can be a perception. By that, I mean that the stress is all too real to the sufferer but if they weren’t so pressured they’d realise they could control it, if they only knew how.

In other words, the stressed individual says, “I have 101 things to do and I just can’t see a way to do it.” The individual with a control strategy says, “I have 101 things to do today and 8 hours in which to do them. Do-able.” That is 480 minutes – about 4.5 minutes a ‘thing’, and for every ‘thing’ that takes a minute, that rate expands.

Time management might seem like a management cliché but in my opinion, from years of applying it, time management properly taught, accepted, encouraged and applied is an absolute – yes, absolute – cure for stress.

Please understand, I am not talking about stress resulting from trauma, accident, disaster, relationship failures and so on. That’s different, even if some relevant TM training can help. I am talking about task overwhelm in work and in the home.

Charles R Hobbs, in his epic book ‘Timepower’, suggests that high self-esteem is served by the ability to be in control of events. I am fairly confident when I suggest that those with genuinely high levels of justifiable self-esteem (as opposed to ego) rarely suffer from work-related stress. And that is because they are, or they feel they are in complete control of what’s ‘appenin’, OR they know that they can take control – even of the unexpected. They have techniques and approaches that enable that control.

In the mid-1990s I had what I call ‘an episode’ where this 6’ tall, macho, fightin’, drivin’, chasin’, action-man copper left a boss’s office in tears and went home before his shift was due to start. (Short version, I think it was slow burn.) Fortunately, I had been reading The 7 Habits and books like Timepower for years. I went home, took the wife and kids out for a family meal, and took stock. I recognised that what was happening was a stress build-up.

Then I took control and decided what I was going to do about the situation. I was back at work within 48 hours asking for what I needed to regain control. And got it. Never happened again.

We all know of people who do the tears thing and aren’t seen for months. They lost control and didn’t or couldn’t get it back, and that was because they didn’t know that there was an alternative to pills.

Values-based time management – might not be penicillin but by all that’s holy it’s a damn good treatment for what ails a lot of people.

Try it out. My book or theirs, you decide. It’s you who controls your decisions if you want to.

 

Computer or Paper Planning?

31 Friday Oct 2014

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I’ve just been reading “Effective Time Management Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your Work and Personal Life” By Lothar Seiwert and Holgar Woeltje. Luckily I bought it ‘Used and New’ from Amazon for under £3 because to be frank, it’s hard work.

I am a great believer in and user of a paper planning system, but as someone who uses a computer all the time I was interested in seeing how I could use Outlook as a time management tool, not only to see if it would be of benefit but also because I am a quasi-time-management consultant in my own mind and it pays to be familiar with alternatives.

It may have been poorly translated but although I pride myself on having a slightly above average IQ (about 101?) I spend half my time re-reading paragraphs to understand what the book is trying to tell me to do. Occasionally the book introduces a concept as if you know what the writers mean, then says ‘we’ll explain later in the chapter’, leaving you wondering whether you should jump ahead and learn something so you can follow what you just learned.

Anyway, I have concluded that while life management through Outlook or other computer planning systems has its place for those who sit at a computer all day and have no life away from it, and it IS a good system IF you can understand and fully utilise it – to be fair it’s a good system if you can only use half its facilities – you cannot beat a paper planning system for simplicity, adaptability and portability. I could understand Charles Hobbs Timepower and Hyrum Smith’s “The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace” in one or two readings. The same applied to Dave Allan’s Getting Things Done, another simple system.

The only caveat is repeated appointments and tasks can be done once on a computer, while they need to be repeated on a paper planner. And you may have to wait until October to start planning next year properly. But how lazy do you have to be to be unwilling to write something more than once? And if it’s repeated often enough and is routine – why do you need to rewrite it anyway?

Paper for me. Probably always will be.

Don’t get me started on driverless cars.

Bringing Behaviours into Line with Values – or Bringing Values into Line with Behaviours?

19 Sunday Oct 2014

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Just musing the other day I considered one of my favourite Hobbs concepts, which is that of Congruity. He describes Congruity as being a core element of successful self-management, and used this diagram to show what he meant.

Consider these two Circles. One is representative of how we behave and the other is representative of our personal values, those things and states of being we consider to be important. In this diagram the two circles are quite far apart although there is an overlap. This illustration shows someone whose behaviours are often quite separate from what they believe in.

Congruence

Hobbs (and Smith and Covey) all agreed that the ‘ideal’ state of being is when the two Circles wholly overlap, when what we say and what we believe in is completely demonstrated in how we act. When we walk our talk. Hobbs called them ‘Unifying Principles’ because when what we valued became our behaviour, we were unified. We had integrity.

This got me to thinking as I traipsed around London looking at the self-help (ugly term) sections in the better bookshops – which activity comes first, the chicken or the egg? In our efforts to improve, do we or could we first choose Values or Behaviour?

I concluded that there are 5 approaches to this concept.

  1. We can do nothing about any of it.
  2. We can accept the values that we have learned over the years, and behave in accordance with those values.
  3. We can identify our values, and then ignore them whenever we decide it is convenient to do so.
  4. We can identify what our behaviours are first, and then identify what values our behaviours represent.
  5. We can design our lives by making a conscious decision on what our values should be if we are to get what we want in life, and then act in their accord.

Taking each in turn:

  1. We can do nothing. Many who decry the self-help drive are those who live in the moment, who give little or no thought to what their values are and who would probably have trouble identifying more than three if they were pressed. This isn’t necessarily bad but it isn’t the best. But their lives are often dependent upon circumstances rather than intent.
  2. We can accept the values that we have learned over the years, and behave in accordance with those values. This is probably the most common state of affairs. This is what Covey called ‘determinism’ in various forms, but the crux of it is that when we live like this we are ‘being lived’ by our upbringing and by the standards of those with whom we spend our time. This is fine if the people we spend time with are not unprincipled, dishonest, unfaithful, or demonstrate any of the other self-destructive and undisciplined behaviours that we know, in our conscience, will not serve us or anyone else. It may suit you because the people you mix with are disciplined people of great character. If this is so, you can identify your values from theirs, and live accordingly. But then you have still made a choice by not choosing – see 5.
  3. We can identify our values, and then ignore them whenever we decide it is convenient to do so. This is a poor way to live, and is possibly one great cause of personal stress and/or guilt – the knowledge that we are deliberately not living according to the rules that we actively set for ourselves.
  4. We can identify what our behaviours are and then identify what values apply. This is the life of the person who can misbehave, err, pre-judge and generally act as he or she feels because whenever challenged they will find an excuse for what they just did. It’ll be ‘freedom’, ‘liberalism’, ‘identity’, or ‘to put it to the man’. It is willing defiance of authority just for the sake of establishing their independence, while wholly ignoring the interdependence of life. It is the telling of rational lies.
  5. We can design our lives by making a conscious decision on what our values should be if we are to get what we want in life, and then act in their accord. This is the only sensible option and the one representative of a higher intellectual approach to living (in my opinion), but it is often the hardest one to carry out. First of all, identifying the values themselves can be difficult because finding the right words with the right meaning can be problematic. Then, assuming we’ve defined our identified values appropriately, we come up against the obstacles of peer-pressure, societal norms and our own convenience when trying to execute on them.

Hobbs called them Unifying Principles, most others call them Values. One writer called them ‘valuables’ but I suspect he’s one of those who uses different terms for the same things just to seem (annoyingly) different while not actually being different, but I digress.

“Unifying Principles”. To wholly mix up philosophical terms, the objective is to live in accordance with your own identified and defined, timeless, understood, self-evidently true and extrinsically existing ‘truths’, rather than constantly bob and weave between doing the right thing one minute and having to make excuses the next.

I’m still trying. Are you?

Weekly Challenge

Decide which of the 5 you are compliant with, conclude number 5 is the only sensible option and make sure you identify and define your Unifying Principles/Values if you haven’t already done so.

For those who have done this, watch your behaviour throughout the week and see if the circles are, or are not overlapping!

Blog Part

Mixed week. I have been running in accordance with the plan with the exception of a day off to rest a twisted back, only to try to run on the same twisted back the next day. Interestingly, running on the twisted back made it better. The weight loss continues, but we’ve just spent 2 days in London – stuck with Slimfast on the first day but eating in a diner meant a risky calorie load – or not, I just don’t know yet!

Yesterday I was able to provide service for my Institute with two business meetings so I’m glad I can still contribute despite ‘retirement’.

Self-preservation through Unified Living

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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Living your values, it is generally accepted in the personal development field, is the best way to ensure high personal self-esteem and life-long happiness. Charles Hobbs (TimePower) and Hyrum Smith (FranklinCovey) both specifically address how living in accordance with your highest universal principles – your own set of genuine, conscience driven rules and standards – is the best way to feel successful, because it is intrinsic (part of you) and no dependant on outside approval, social acceptance or material wealth. Living your values means serenity and peace. And violating them brings anxiety, guilt and even depression.

How do I know this? From experience, that’s how.

A couple of days ago I was merrily driving along, using the correct driving principles as taught to me by skilled police drivers, and adhering to the speed limit when a chap drove up behind me so close I couldn’t see his headlights. Considering we were in a 30mph limited road which was on the approach to a roundabout this seemed a bit silly, but I didn’t bite. I just raised my hand in a circle, separated the finger and thumb, and indicated thereby that perhaps the driver may consider pulling back a tad. He did so, and I gave him the thumbs up. Just as he accelerated hard and overtook so that he was still on the wrong side of the road as we came to the bollard at the roundabout entrance.

Now, if I had been proactive and used the stimulus/response gap to think ‘he’s a nutter so I’ll give him space’, things would have been fine. However, in that instant, I chose the ‘oh, we’ll see who can get to the gap first then, shall we?’ reactive technique. As it was, there was just enough – by inches – space so that no collisions occurred and I was able to add a verbal description of the driver through our mutually open car windows before we went I our separate directions.

And for the rest of the day I felt really off.

I felt off because I had failed to act in accordance with my unifying principle ‘I demonstrate high levels of skill and patience in driving.’ I felt off because I had not considered that circumstances like this lead to potential confrontation and while I am not fearful of ‘it’, confrontation is such an open ended activity. If I win the immediate confrontation I have no guarantee that it stops when it is over, especially these days when violence and revenge and utter stupidity seem to be the watchword of people whose first response is reactive thuggery, rather than being dragged slowly towards that end. Would I find that he would torch my car, find out where I live and threaten my kinfolk? If there had been a rumble, even if I had won what could the legal consequences have been? Was I prepared for them, did I want or need such inconvenience? And if the road hadn’t been wide enough, was I prepared to spend money and time repairing my car because I was reactively miffed?

Over the remainder of the day (and my reaction still irked me at bedtime) it occurred to me that, occasionally, it is not the highest ideals that we find hard to live up to, but the tiny ones. Say we choose to study, and do so diligently towards a professional qualification. It’s hard, but it’s doable. At the same time we resolve to be patient, and then someone jumps into the front of a queue and we go nuts. In many ways the patience objective is the easiest – easy to understand, easy to see ourselves doing it, easy to define – but the stimulus to challenge it can be too sudden and we have no time to think (correction, we do not take the time to think) and so we fail.

It’s a lesson we should all consider to be valuable. We have failed, so next time we won’t. It’s a demonstration that we are compliant with both the First and Second Resolutions. We discipline ourselves to be patient, deny ourselves the counterfeit sense of righteousness that the offending behaviour can engender within us, and our character shines through (with some competence in patientology).

Next time – just drive off ahead of the tailgater, or let him go. Let him offend and endanger someone else – I am too important to me and to my family and friends to suffer because of my own ego.

As are you.

Blog Part
Only two pounds lost this week but the running programme continues apace (see what I did there?). This weight loss means (if it continues at 2lbs per week) I may miss my 1/9/ target but as the months differ in lengths I anticipate that any slide back will be compensated for by 1/10/14. The diet remains easy to comply with, too.