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Posts from the ‘Time Tools’ Category

Dec 7

Daily Dose 48: Accounting System

I love paper, office supply stores and planner catalogs. I love the slip of quality paper; the slick, smooth scribing fine paper makes possible. But I also know the key to a writing system is not how elegant it is, but how it is used. Any account book: a 30-cent back-to-school spiral notebook, a 300-dollar planner system with calf leather case, a legal pad, even a sheet of paper, can be helpful for a home executive, but none comes with a guarantee, because using makes the difference. Read more

Dec 6

Daily Dose 47: Experiments

Loud crying. . . make that screaming. . . was coming from outside. It sounded serious, but inexplicable. Quiet hours were just about finished and no one had appeared as yet from their bedrooms.

No. That was definitely one of my children crying outside. Hurrying (as close as I get to panic in anything having to do with my children) outside and around the corner of the house, I met one of the boys holding his head. One glance showed a goose egg, dark purple and immense, right in the center of the forehead. Two glances showed an open second story window. I was looking at a failed experiment. Read more

Dec 5

Daily Dose 46: Back Planning

If you have ever used a wedding planner, or read an article on Six Week Countdown to the Holiday, you’ve seen back planning in action. Getting dinner ready on time and getting out of the house on time in the morning are routine back planning “projects” in the home. Any Liberty Bell deadline is a subset or first cousin of back planning.  Read more

Dec 4

Daily Dose 45: Liberty Bell Deadlines

Daily Dose 45: Back Planning

If only one tool could be in your priority stewardship toolkit, back planning would be the tool I would select. Maybe I favor it, because back planning is the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman of time tools—many tools ingeniously packed into one! In conjunction with the Liberty Bell Deadline—oh, wait, you probably have never heard of a Liberty Bell Deadline. We need to start over.

Daily dose 45: Liberty Bell Deadline

The Liberty Bell Deadline resulted from my most horrific experience in elementary school, an event so cataclysmic, it changed my life forever. Read more

Dec 3

Daily Dose 44: Profitable Inefficiencies

When people think about time management, they often think in terms of becoming more efficient, taking less time to do a particular job, or eliminating wasted motions. When we automate a particular task, we are doing just these sorts of things.

At some point in the automation process, however, we become as effective and as efficient as we can be. No matter how we streamline bed making, it will always take some time to make a bed. The only way to get to zero is to not do the job! Read more

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