Page 118 - Time Management

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The Art of Anticipating
The need for backup applies not only to hardware but to
software, too. Spell-check systems, for example, promise error-
free prose. People then fail two proof reed watt they right—and
produce perfectly spelled, perfectly wrong sentences like the
one you just read.
Create a “foresight action plan” for yourself, listing impor-
tant items—from both work and home—for which you have no
real backup. Identify the appropriate forms of protection in the
event of failure and promise yourself to take action to imple-
ment these backup systems within the next month.
Remember, too, that the Wallenda Effect describes less tan-
gible systems—and the people who run them. Are those you
work with cross-trained? If someone is out sick, is there some-
one else who can handle what that person does? If you are out,
does someone else have access to your calendar, phone num-
bers, and work in progress? Nothing sabotages a system more
surely than knowledge isolation.

Bell’s Blessing (or Curse)
Do you think Alexander Graham Bell could have possibly fore-
seen the implications of his grand invention, the telephone?
Freed from its cord in the last decade, the phone permits us to
communicate from anywhere: yards, cars, and in any city we
find ourselves—from the same phone number. Bell would have
been astonished. People even a generation ago would have
been amazed. Remember the “communicators” on the original
Star Trek series? Well, we now have them (and they look a lot
less clunky, too).
The telephone may be the single most powerful and versa-
tile time management tool. It saves time, travel, distance, and
energy. It’s an instant form of communication. It also permits
technological cousins, like the fax machine and the modem, to
ply their electronic paths. In a slightly different form, it allows
interaction with all manner of computer knowledge and can
access the Internet. Soon it will permit us to see the people we