Amitabh Sharma, Features Coordinator

Anyone who wants to accomplish anything in life must deal with how he or she manages time. Those who are better at this will find more of what we all want - optimum performance, peace of mind, freedom of choices and a sense of accomplishment.

"It is critical that we learn how to manage our time," says Francis Wade, management consultant, "Time spent with loved ones - exercising, worshipping, relaxing, vacationing - all depend on how well we use time."

Wade feels that many professionals are overwhelmed, and end up with inboxes that are overflowing, spouses who are neglected, pounds that are added, promises that are forgotten, and parents who are ignored.

"This is all because we don't know how to manage our time," he says. "Our lives come to have less of the things we want, and too much of the stress that we all try to avoid."

Dividing your time

Time management, for starters, is not merely getting a PDA, Outlook or a Blackberry; it is how to effectively divide your time. Wade believes that time management is important, especially for us here in Jamaica.

"We Jamaicans have a difficult time in managing time because of a lack of role models," he suggests.

Environment also play an important role, he says.

"When you take Jamaicans and put them in the United States, Canada or United Kingdom, they magically become productive," says Wade, who owns a Florida-based management consultancy firm. Most of his clients are Jamaican nationals. "Jamaicans are known in the U.S. for their hard work and the number of jobs they hold.

Also, in the U.S., someone who manages time poorly learns quickly from the circumstances and from others around him that the consequences are dire - jobs are lost, and costs are incurred.

"Here in the Caribbean," Wade says, "we hold each other to a much lower standard, and the result is that we all let each other off the hook."

Wade is organising a one-day seminar in Kingston, titled 'New Habits - New Goals - Effective Time Management'.

"Those who attend will be taught how to invent a time management system of their own - one that fits their Jamaican circumstances, their job, our reality. Other courses teach a single approach - based on developed country experiences - that doesn't work well here,", he told The Sunday Gleaner.

'Design principles'

"This course teaches 'design principles' of the best time management systems that exist in the world," he revealed, "It's a bit like designing something like an aeroplane - when you know how to design them, you can design different planes for different circumstances. The 747's are different from Cessna's they are built on the same principles."

Wade says that he proposes to teach the 'design principles' underlying all systems of time management, so participants can design their own. These principles include 11 fundamental components, plus the latest methods for changing habits and adopting new practices, based on the latest research.

Participants always complain that is is difficult to make old habits, especially when this involves drastic changes and trying to trying to learn too many habits at the same time.

He proposes that people should learn to change habits, one at a time, and to space out the learning over several months - taking it slowly - so that the changes they make will become second nature.

Motivation

Wade has devised a methodology to keep the participants motivated. "They will receive a white belt at the start of the class, and will be given a pathway to upgrade their skills, and to receive new belts - yellow, orange, green up through black belts."

People should learn how to change and grow themselves and their system whenever they want. They often need new systems when they get promoted, have children, change jobs, get married.

"All of a sudden, they discover that the system they used in college is no longer any good, and must make a radical change," says Wade. "We will show them how to do that."

With better skills and habits, come peace of mind, the kind experienced by people who master a sport.

When we look at Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Pele as examples, they have achieved their goals by practising the fundamentals of their sport over and over. Users learn how and what to practice so that that their skills can grow and improve over time.

The course will propose to teach the fundamentals of time management to workplace professionals. Learning the fundamentals is critical, says Wade, "Anyone can benefit from learning the fundamentals and building a blueprint for themselves for the future."

For more details on New Habits - Goals, log on to http://2time-sys.com/commerce/

amitabh.sharma@gleanerjm.com