You Are at War with a Monster

The first step in any war is knowing your enemy. What if I told you that this beast you’ve created known as TIME MANAGEMENT actually isn’t one big hairy monster?

The hairy monster standing in the way of you living your dreams, producing your best work and giving your gift to the world is actually a five headed hydra.

If you want to slay the beast, you have to cut off each of the heads. You can’t just cut off one of the heads and win.

Sure, losing one of the heads off the beast takes away some of its ferocity, but it doesn’t get it out of your way completely. And depending on which head has it in for you the most, it might not do you any good at all. To beat the beast once and for all, you must attack each individual head of the beast to bring it to heal.

So, let’s look at what we’re dealing with.

Dimension One: Attention To Task – Wanderer or Laser

The first head on the productivity beast is how you pay attention to tasks. This dimension can be divided into Wanderers and Lasers. This is usually the dimension that comes to mind for most people when they think about time management.

Wanderers are the butterfly chasers. They’re happy to follow any thread to see where it leads. They love to consider connections, how one idea connects to another, connects to another and soon they are nowhere near where they started.

These are the writers that start their character research on symptoms of schizophrenia and end up on an obscure website talking about eighteenth century medical potions used on actresses with the vapors.

Lasers are the classic focused time managers. Once they get rolling on something, they hate distractions. Distractions cause stress, as they interrupt the flow. At their extreme, Lasers are a dog with a bone who not only don’t want to move on, they simply can’t until the thread they are in has run its course.

When a Laser starts their character research on symptoms of schizophrenia, they learn every in and out of every potential symptom, cure, cause, state of current research and run down to in depth brain studies.

Dimension Two: Type of Focus – Forest or Trees

This dimension refers to whether your brain would rather play with possibilities or specifics of a task. Where attention focus looks at your approach to evaluating an idea, focus looks at what you are evaluating, big ideas vs detailed ideas.

Trees are those people in a brainstorming session who always have the one detail exception for where an idea can go off the rails. They like facts and figures and prefer to only talk about one facet of an idea at a time. They often have richly detailed outlines and characters. They know their characters birthdays, siblings and favorite colors.

Forest, on the other hand love to thing about all the possibilities that come with than idea. They don’t care about all the little details that need to surround it. Those can be painted in later. They’re more interested in talking about all the places and way a particular idea can be used and implemented. These are the people in brainstorming sessions who are already thinking of ways to market the idea before it’s even a product.

Dimension Three: Structure Style – Architect or Gardner

Where the Focus attribute tends to consider the what will be created, Structure deals with more of the when it will be created.

Architects are people who like to have a system for accomplishing tasks; gardeners prefer to have flexibility in how they carry out tasks. In the world of writing, this is the classic war between the plotters and the pantsers. In technology design this is more waterfall vs. Agile. Gardeners are right now people, where as architects are wait a minute people.

This approach to structure manifest itself in all areas of production. For gardeners, time is fluid. It starts and stops when they need it to. For Architects, time is structured. It starts and stops at determined and agreed junctures. Architects won’t start until they’ve seen the blue print. Gardeners throw out some seeds and can’t wait to see what blooms.

Dimension Four: Processing Style – Serial or Parallel

I looked for words that weren’t so rooted in the tech world, but I didn’t find any good ones that did this dimension justice. This dimension is one of the great debates in time management guru circles. Multi-tasking is dead, long live multi-tasking. But some people’s brains really do require multiple projects, while others need to be immersed in a singular endeavor.

Of course, this is an area that is difficult to slay no matter what form the head of the beast takes. Unless they have a unique privilege, most people can’t focus on only one thing. Similarly, parallel processors have an upper limit of projects at which their productivity begins to degrade.

Dimension Five: Action Style – Hunter or Firefighter

This dimension is about goal orientation. Hunters love the chase, the thrill of the hunt of killing a goal. They anticipate it and savor it. They like it to be on their terms. Firefighters on the other hand thrum to the pulse of pressure. There’s nothing like a tight deadline and ticking clock to get their juices flowing. Giving a hunter a high-pressure deadline makes them melt. They might be able to pull it off, but they won’t do it as a happy warrior. Similarly, tell a firefighter to take all the time they need, and you may never see a product produced.

What Does Your Monster Look Like?

Of course, nothing’s black and white when it comes to brains or personality. These traits all live on a spectrum, like two monsters with various shades of brown fur. The most important thing to know is that for each one of us, these five dimensions combine to create our unique productivity profile, our own unique monster to tame.

How they come together creates the size of the monster to be tackled. Some of these dimensions can end up in conflict. For instance, I was married to a Firefighting Architect. He thrived under the pressure of a seat-of-your-pants deadline but had to have a meticulous plan before he could begin the fight. He was always in dissidence. On the other hand, I worked with a client who was a Laser-Tree-Architect combo. This is the trifecta of a time management demon. Her issue wasn’t getting through task, but finding the energy to be creative in the midst of all that planning and goal achievement.

We’ll talk more about energy in the next article. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, sign up for your free productivity mini makeover and we’ll get going on identifying your productivity profile so that you can start making friends with your time management monster.