We went to the travel agent and booked the holiday. I mean who would do that? We wanted to go to Ibiza in June. We did not create a project in our diaries, created a list of things to do and checked off those items. All I needed to do was go to the travel agent and book the holiday. We discussed with our friends where we wanted to go, made a decision and scheduled a time to visit the travel agent. When it came to organising my summer holiday it was simple. I did not need to duplicate that job-sheet. Was the car clean? Had the accessories been fitted? All these things were on the job-sheet that went with every new car. As the salesperson, I knew what needed checking. All I had was a to-do in my diary that said: “check Mr/s Brown’s car is ready for delivery”. It was just something that needed to be prepared and I knew what needed to be done to deliver the car to the customer on the given day because there was a job-sheet for each car - a kind of checklist. I did not treat each new delivery as a project. My diary showed me a week view (I was using an A4 week to view desk diary at that time) and at a glance, I could see my appointments and so could very easily see what needed to be prepared so new cars were ready for delivery, and at the bottom of each day there was a space to write my to-dos. In my diary I already had my appointments scheduled for the day, these were returning prospects coming to place their order and new cars I was delivering. Then, throughout the day I called those potential customers in between talking with new prospects that walked into the showroom or called by phone. Every morning, when I arrived at work I looked at my prospects list, selected ten potential customers to follow up and wrote their names and numbers onto my note pad. We organised our time by what needed to be done that day and organising by time got a lot of work done because we were not trying to figure out where to ’store’ a task. We just needed to know when something was due and how much time was needed to complete it by that due date. But at an individual level, we were not so arrogant to believe we needed specialist project management systems, usually reserved for the construction industry, to organise our lives. There were - and still are - a lot of different parts done by multiple different people that need to be brought together. Of course, complex building and product development projects were organised by projects, but these were organised at an organisational level. That would have been considered ridiculous because you cannot “do” a project you can only do tasks that took you towards completion of the desired outcome. That was a very special day.īut of all the memories I have, I cannot remember any time management or productivity method advocating organising to-dos by project. This was in the days before Franklin Quest was bought by Stephen Covey’s organisation.
I also remember the day I bought my Franklin Planner. I carefully filled out the addresses in the back, I wrote down my income and expenditure and I carefully curated my calendar every day. I remember getting a gorgeous A5 leather bound Filofax for my 18th birthday.
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In the end, we often figured out how to do something ourselves because that was the fastest way of doing it.įor the more time management obsessed of us, we marvelled over leather-bound A4 or A5 desk diaries much like we marvel over the latest, shiniest productivity apps today.
We could not fire off an instant message to a colleague to ask them a question, we either had to get up and walk down the hall and ask them directly or call them and hope they were near a phone. We did not have persistent pinging from mobile phones as most people did not have mobile phones, we did not have computers and laptops on our desks (unless you were a very important employee) and everyone carried around a simple diary and a pen.īut at the same time, because computers were not as pervasive as they are today, that meant a lot of the work done today by computers in seconds had to be done manually and took a lot longer.
Now it’s very easy to say things were easier back then, and in some respects that is true. The most powerful question we asked was ”when does this need doing by?” When I became obsessed with time management and productivity in the early 1990s nobody organised their to-dos by project or context.
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