‘Produktivitaet & Projektmanagement

There are 2 posts tagged ‘Produktivitaet & Projektmanagement (this is page 1 of 1).

About Time Management for Children and the Loss of Time

Merlin points to 5 topics that children should learn in every school, and this includes time management. Unfortunately, I’m offline and can’t read up on what age this is supposed to be suitable for, but I’m not comfortable with this thought:

Learn to make a to do list. Learn to prioritize. Learn to break things down into 30 minute blocks of time. Learn about actionable items.

Didn’t it start with the fact that you had to do your homework before you were allowed to play outside? At what point do I tell our daughter that I want to check her priority list? When I’m back in the States in April, I’ll be looking for a time management book for children, maybe that’s a gap in the market next to all the Seiwert titles and thus more money to be made than with Web 2.0 books.*

At the beginning of January, an article by Matthias Drobinski, “The Loss of Time”, appeared in the SZ, about which I had wanted to blog for some time, and this article by Merlins is a good hook.

Germans have never had as much time as they do today, and at the same time the quality of this time of life has multiplied, according to Drobinski. There is no comparison between the tired seniors of the 50s and the retired people who are active today. At the same time, the lack of time is omnipresent, because the time saved by better transport connections and modern communication channels disappears through new “time-consuming purposes” instead of being used for non-purposeful purposes.

The ubiquitous facilitations are used for multitasking and give rise to the flexibilized person desired by the economy, who then has time off when the global constraints of the company allow it. But it is above all the loss of time spent together that makes the loss of time. And this will get worse rather than better in the face of economic pressures:

The acceleration processes will continue, the pressure on the individual will grow to spend his or her life as a being acting everywhere at the same time. Interestingly, it is economists who are currently talking about the acceleration trap […], who are calculating how much the curse of permanent interruption costs when employees no longer come to work because of all the calls, e-mails and Internet excursions.

Finally, Drobinski calls on politicians to ensure that the “stade Zeit” in the form of universal holidays is preserved, because after all, it holds society together. Last but not least, he emphasizes that the Bavarians are doing very well economically with the many public holidays.

As little as I believe that this is due to the holidays or the “staden Zeit”, Drobinski is not wrong on the other points. Does it really make sense to drill children for it at an early age? Is the dawdling of the kids unnatural or the multitasking of the adults?

Productivity aid: Creating notes from books and magazines

Sometimes it’s the little tricks and tricks that increase your productivity, and that’s how I felt about this “life hack“, as its inventor Phil Gyford calls it. After reading about it on 43 folders last week, I bought large post-it notes, stuck some of them behind the cover of a book, stuck one on the opposite side of the text I was reading, wrote my notes on what I read, stuck full-written post-it notes on the last page and took a new piece of paper from the front. No extra notepad to carry with you (on which you make other notes in between anyway, so that the notes on the book are fragmented); all you need is the book with a stack of sticky notes and a pen. Once you have read through the book, you can take out the notes, stick them next to your monitor and digitize what you have written. The large Post-It notes cost about 80 cents and are a sensible investment for me for people who have to write down what they have read so that they don’t forget it.