Time Mastery, Part 3 of 3
How to integrate Time Mastery with ‘Getting Things Done’ and Improve Specific Aspects of Time
In the previous article (Time Mastery Part 2: The 12 Dimensions of Time Mastery), we introduced the 12 Dimensions of Time Mastery which Inscape’s Time Mastery tool uses to measure what is important for your current job, how proficient you are in those areas, and what you should focus on improving. Before that we looked at the influence of cultural perspectives and behavioral styles on time mastery.
Now we are going to look at how to integrate David Allen's well-known "GTD" (Getting things Done) methodology with behavioral styles, cultural perspectives, and Time Mastery.
An Individually Tailored Approach to Getting Things Done
We are a strong advocate of the GTD methodology, but at the same time we recognize that what you apply from GTD should change based on what you know about your behavioral style and cultural heritage. When you know where you stand in those areas, you are able to verify which parts of GTD will actually work for you and which parts might not. And that's important, because as we mentioned before, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to time mastery.
When you are able to integrate your behavioral style and cultural heritage into methodologies like GTD, it becomes a very individually tailored for you approach to helping you move on, so in our time mastery workshops people come away with tangible, achievable objectives: not with a "Ten Best Ways to Master Your Time" that is supposed to work for everybody.
Specific Aspects of Time
Outlook
Once people have gone through their cultural perspectives & behavioral styles (see part 1 of this series), plus a Time Mastery workshop, and a habit-based system like GTD, we offer further components that focus in on a specific aspect of time. For example, we look at an email program like Outlook, and offer a course that that improves your email productivity by at least 20% with a couple of simple but powerful techniques and tools.
Typing
Another area where you can improve how you use time is typing, believe it or not. Learning to type ten words per minute faster saves months of typing time in a knowledge worker’s lifespan. There are great self-help tools available for typing on the web (Typing Web, Key Hero, and Type Fu, to name a few).
Mind Mapping
For more advanced programs, we also train on mind-mapping. There is a sequence of little steps that you need to go through in order to effectively utilize mind maps to structure your thinking for yourself or for your team. We also go through how to facilitate meetings using mind maps, and this can go into how to use mind mapping in the online space so that multiple people can work on the same mind map at the same time.
Beyond
The number of solutions that focus on a specific aspect of time are great. There are things like speed-reading that have mixed results in our experience, and solutions that are very job specific. But we believe that bringing cultural background and behavioral style into the mix will make for more tailored solutions and higher success rates in your personal journey to time mastery.
To begin your culture learning journey, Contact us or get our mini-ebook: Inter-Cultural Intelligence: from surviving to thriving in the global space.
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