Episode 25 - Time Management Mastery: Interview With Francis Wade from 2Time Labs
Francis Wade is the author of 2 books: Perfect Time-Based Productivity and Bill's Im-Perfect Time Management Adventure. He's the founder of 2Time Labs which he leads from his home in Kingston, Jamaica where he's resided since 2005. A graduate of Cornell University with a graduate degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, he uses the latest research to pioneer the ideas comprising Time Management 2.0. In his consulting work with companies, he helps leaders remove the obstacles to employee productivity and greater profitability. He also works extensively with coaches, professional organisers, trainers, and consultants to apply the best thinking available to their client engagements. Today, we discuss time management mastery in more detail.
You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.
Nathan Simmonds:
Welcome to Sticky Interviews. My name is Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. The idea of these interviews is to be sharing great minds, great ideas and great people with you to help you be the best version of you. Today, I've got the pleasure of having a second, third conversation with Francis Wade, time management expert, guru, aficionado, helping to uncover some of those myths and fallacies that we come up with against our own time management.
Nathan Simmonds:
Short bio from him. He's a columnist. He's the founder and creator of the CaribHRForum, which is a volunteer-based professional network. He's a consultant. He solves tough productivity problems for corporations. He's an author. He's a speaker, and he is helping those people that think they're time starved. He's helping the busiest 1% get even more efficient in their day through his skills. Francis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for doing this interview. Really appreciate it.
Francis Wade:
Thanks, Nathan. It's great to be with you and your audience.
Nathan Simmonds:
I'm looking forward to this because we had a really large conversation previously, and that just went backwards and forwards, and we got all these different ideas and concepts. It was a really fluid, flowing dialogue, and I'm looking forward to getting some of these ideas shared with more people in this moment.
Francis Wade:
Great.
Time Management Mastery
Nathan Simmonds:
I'm going to dive straight into this because people... I'm not sure how much of the audience we have know you, so I want them to find out more about you, and then we'll dive into what you're good at, your areas of expertise and your zone of genius. First and foremost, why do you do what you do?
Francis Wade:
Whoa, that's a big question. I guess I've always been interested in being productive as an individual. Long story short, I lived in the United States up until 2005, when I returned to live here in Jamaica. So I'm based here in Kingston, in the hills over Kingston here in Jamaica. It was really the transition that I made back from the US to living in Jamaica that got me to this heightened level of interest. It had been a passing pastime, I guess. I had led courses. I had done training. And I imagined that moving back, changing countries from a developed country to a developing country, wouldn't be all that hard. And I was wrong.
Francis Wade:
I discovered that my productivity plummeted, and I didn't know why. So I went looking for answers. At the time, in 2005, I was Googling for things like how do you manage your time in a time of conflict, in a war zone, under stress? I tried to find, okay, when you change your environment dramatically and all of a sudden, you find yourself at wit's end because you're not getting things done that you believe that you should, where can you get help?
Francis Wade:
I couldn't find any help, so I started actually writing, blogging based on the insights I was having because I was struggling. And that was 15 years ago. That kicked off 15 years of very intense research, two books. I have a number of training programs. I have online training. I have assessments. I held the first Time Blocking Summit earlier... Actually, that was last year, yeah. No, it was this year. Sorry. Time is warping. I swear to you. The whole COVID business just has me like... That was this year. That was March. Geez.
Nathan Simmonds:
Great. In this circumstance we find ourselves in, everything is being magnified and funneled, and you're just losing track of stuff. It's been eight weeks now for us as a family in the situation. It's just gone in a blink of an eye.
Francis Wade:
It's amazing. Today is Monday, and this weekend I had the feeling like, "Uh, what day is it?" I was like, "Where did the week go?" It's this weird experience, and it comes from the changing of our behaviors and our routines. They've all gone up in the air. What we used to do and the way in which we did it has now been changed without our agreement.
Francis Wade:
So this is a little bit of what happened when I moved back to Jamaica. All of a sudden, I had to adapt these new behaviors, and I had to do it in order to be effective, and I struggled to adapt them. So I figured anyone who is going through a change like the one I went through, not necessarily from one country to the other, but someone has to move houses, for example, or change jobs, or has a dramatic increase in demands on their time, there's that period of struggle and sorting out as they have to put an extra effort in to change behaviors to deal with all the demands on their time. And it usually happens when there's an increase. So you take on a new project, or you have twins, or you go from single to married, or you buy a house. When these transitions take place, all of a sudden, the number of demands on your time increases, and you've got to find a way to cope. And that question has fueled my curiosity and my work for the last decade and a half.
Nathan Simmonds:
A phrase that I learned a few years ago was the thing that you lack is the thing that you need to give. It's a life mantra. It's that thing that actually you feel like you're lacking out on or actually it's causing you the biggest amount of friction, that's probably a clear indication that that's the thing you're meant to or need to be giving in order to bridge it for yourself as well as the local community and the people that need to hear that message as well.
Francis Wade:
Oh, yeah, definitely, we are summarizing my story. Yep.
Nathan Simmonds:
There's part of me that comes back to that stereotypical island lifestyle. So we talked a little bit before we went live about what does time mean to people? Did you find that as a transition from coming from an everyday metropolitan American lifestyle coming back to an island mentality, is that where the fiction happened, or what [crosstalk 00:07:11]?
Francis Wade:
No, I really wasn't living in a metro area. I was living in Florida.
Nathan Simmonds:
Okay.
Francis Wade:
So I wasn't going from New York City to... Although I imagine that that would have been even more severe.
Nathan Simmonds:
Yes.
Francis Wade:
It happens when people move from New York to Florida, or New York City to Florida. I believe they go through something somewhat similar. But what it was was partly because life in a developing country is so hectic and so unpredictable. So it was the move from regularity and high structure and high predictability to its opposite. So you take that all away and all of a sudden, things break, things don't work, people don't do what you think they're going to do even though they said they would. You're in an environment where your mind now has to think ahead three or four times further than it used to because you're now compensating for things that you didn't predict or didn't expect. So that causes you some cognitive load that didn't exist before.
Francis Wade:
Because the way I put it, going through working in the States was every day was the same. It was in some ways boring. Where I lived, life was never boring. This is one series of... If you're from the outside, it's exciting as all heck because every day something is disrupting what you think is going to happen that day that you didn't think would happen. Something unpredictable is going to happen.
Francis Wade:
So the unpredictability throws up more commitments for you because you have to know, say, okay, that person isn't going to show up. I need to plan to do A, B, C, D and E. So you are compensating for it, but what it works out to in the end is a heavier load. All of a sudden, you have more commitments than you ever had before, and some start falling through the cracks. Feelings of overwhelm, other things that tell you that something is not quite right. I call them unwanted symptoms, but they are signs that the methods that you're using are insufficient for the current situation.
Nathan Simmonds:
And I think there's something to be said that there's a balance of both of those things. There's that need for certainty and a certain amount of security, but if you have too much, life becomes very boring. And if you get any curve balls and you have no flexibility, you start getting serious amounts of anxiety and depression start kicking in because you can't deal with that flex.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you go too far the other way for the uncertainty,
