Page 9 - Time Management

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Preface
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can reside in a cool, patterned, and neat little environment,
practicing the one true religion of time management.
If only it were so easy or true. But you know better.
More often, you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, defeated. You
probably even feel guilty taking the time to read one more book
on time management—this one. But there is hope. That’s what
this book is all about.
The Right Way and the Wrong Way—Maybe
Tiffany loves computers. She took to them like a duck to water.
So when she needs to shuffle among five documents, she finds
that the easiest, most effective way to do so is to open five win-
dows on her computer and click among them, going from one
document to another, then back again. She can edit them, copy
and paste sections from one to another, or combine them into a
single document, all with the simple click of a mouse.
Jim, on the other hand, is a pen-and-paper kind of guy. He
prefers to lay out hardcopies of the five documents on a work-
table and label sections of the various documents for change.
He makes notes and additions and repaginates by hand.
Sometimes, he even cuts and pastes them with tape into a new
sequence. Finally, he types his final draft—or, if he has the luxu-
ry, he sends it out to be retyped or edited by someone who real-
ly gets computer formatting.
Neither way is necessarily the “right” or “wrong” approach
to accomplish the task. Tiffany and Jim have each developed a
way of working that accomplishes what they need to do with the
least possible stress, in a manner that makes them feel confi-
dent and in control.
A good case could be made that using a computerized sys-
tem is inherently more time saving than a manual approach.
But if we require Jim to do his editing on the computer, we may,
at the same time, force him into thinking more about the way
the computer works than about the job. While Tiffany’s instinc-
tive and immediate grasp of the intricacies of word processing
enables her to do the job most efficiently, Jim’s lack of empathy