Amitabh Sharma
Features Coordinator

Everyone who wants to accomplish anything in their lives must deal with how they manage their time. Those who are better at this will find more of what we all want – optimum performance, peace of mind, and freedom of choices and sense of accomplishment.

“It is critical that we learn how to manage our time,” says Francis Wade, a management consultant. “Time spent with loved ones, exercising, worshipping, relaxing, vacationing -- they all rely on how well we use time.”

Wade feels that many professionals are caught in overwhelm, and end up with Inboxes that are overflowing, spouses that are neglected, pounds that are added, promises that are forgotten, parents that are ignored. “This is all because we don't know how to manage our time,” he says. “Our lives come to have less of teh things we want, and too much of the stress that we all try to avoid.”

Time management, for starters, is not merely getting a PDA, Outlook or a Blackberry; it is how effectively divide your time.

Wade believes that time management is peculiar to Jamaica, “we Jamaicans have a difficult time in managing time because of a lack of role models,” he says.

Surroundings also have a role to play, “when you take Jamaicans and put them in the US, Canada or UK they magically become productive,” says Wade, who owns a consultancy Florida based management consultancy specialising in Caribbean “Jamaicans are known in the US for how hard they work and how many jobs they hold,” he says.

Also, in the US, someone who manages time poorly learns quickly from the circumstances and from others around them that the consequences are dire -- jobs are lost, and costs are incurred.

“Here in the Caribbean,” he says, “we hold each other to a much lower standard, and the result is that we all let each other off the hook.”

Wade is organising a one day seminar in Kingston, New Habits- New Goals, on effective time management. “Those who attend will be taught how to invent a time management system of their own -- one that fits their Jamaican circumstances, their job, our reality,” he says. “Other courses teach a single approach - based on Developed Country experiences - that doesn’t work well here.”

“This course teaches the "design principles" of the best time management systems that exist in the world,” he informs. “It's a bit like designing something like an airplane -- when you know how to design them, you can design different planes for different circumstances -- 747's are different from Cessna's, although they are built on the same principles.”

Wade says that he proposes to teach the "design principles" underlying all systems of time management, so they can design their own, these principles include 11 fundamental components, plus the latest methods for changing habits and adopting new practices, based on the latest research.

“Participants always complain in these courses that what they learn lasts about a week,” explains Wade, “and that comes from trying to learn too many habits all at the same time - they fail, and fall back into their old habits.”

He proposes that people should learn to change habits one at a time, and to space out the learning over several months -- taking it slowly, so that the changes they make become second nature.

Wade has devised a methodology to keep the participants motivated. “They will receive a white belt at the start of the class, and will be given a pathway to upgrade their skills, and to receive new belts -- yellow, orange, green up through black belts.”

People should learn how to change and grow themselves and their system whenever they want. They often need new systems when they get promoted, have children, change jobs, get married. “All of a sudden they discover that the system they used in college is no longer any good, and they must make a radical change,” says Wade. “We will show them how to do that.”

With better skills and habits, come peace of mind that people who master a sport often report -- calm inside any storm.

We look at Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Pele for example of people who got where they are by practicing the fundamentals of their sport over and over. Users learn how and what to practice so that that their skills can grow and improve over time.

“The key is to learn what is never taught in school,” says Wade, “the fundamentals of time management.” The course will propose to teach the fundamentals of time management to workplace professionals.

Learning the fundamentals is critical, says Wade, “anyone can benefit from learning the fundamentals and building a blueprint for themselves for the future.”

For more details on New Habits – Goals, log on to http://2time-sys.com/commerce/


amitabh.sharma@gleanerjm.com