TIMEMAKER and TRIGGERS

Through experience I’ve learned that most people do not know the following:

FAILURE TO SETUP A TRIGGER FOR THE NEXT ACTION is the only reason one doesn’t complete a cycle he wanted to complete and can complete.

It is also one of the reasons for the creation of backlog and the state of overwhelm by willing personnel:

FAILURE TO SETUP A TRIGGER FOR THE NEXT ACTION.

Examining this maxim you will see that it applies to all of life’s and all activities at least in this universe.

It includes the process of making a cup of coffee as well as the execution of a ten billion dollar merger agreement between two high-tech conglomerates.

Let’s examine the process involved in making a cup of coffee:

1. One decides he wants a cup of coffee.
2. He usually asks his wife to prepare one… (just joking) He starts boiling the water.
3. He takes a cup and puts in it one tea-spoon of good Turkish coffee and two tea-spoons of sugar.
4. He now has a few minutes to wait until the water will boil and so he starts surfing the NET totally forgetting the coffee cycle since he didn’t setup a trigger to remind him of the coffee cycle.
5. An hour latter the fire alarm goes off… this is the FAILURE TO SETUP A TRIGGER FOR THE NEXT ACTION at work. He now may very quickly become overwhelmed by the need to handle new cycles that have nothing to do with the handling of the original cycle. He is now not only handling the coffee but the burned kettle, in the best case, and a burning kitchen or home, in the worst case, as well as the derivative cycles created by the resulting backlog.

The answer is relatively simple. Any cycle is in one of the following stages:

1. At work or,
2. Pending a trigger or,
3. Completed.

There are no other stages!

We will call the above three stages the Magic Three.

At work means you are actively dealing with the cycle and nothing else towards a known product. So, if you are handling a phone call while the cycle is supposedly at work, the cycle is not at work!

Pending a trigger means you’ve placed the cycle at a known place and the cycle requires no further attention from you until the moment the independent future action you have setup will inevitably happen and will cause you to pickup the cycle and move it to stage 1 or 3. Setup the trigger in such a way that the trigger will inevitably go off calling for your attention automatically, allowing you enough time to respond with the envisioned future action needed. TimeMaker is the only known comprehensive tool that enables an efficient implementation of this stage - USE IT if you love success.

Completed means the cycle is DONE and requires no further action. It also means the cycle history is recorded and that with a relatively small amount of effort, one can locate the cycle history.

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The above three stages are all the stages and there are no other stages. Making sure no invented stages (I’ve seen many invented stages) are introduced is the key to success.

There are no other stages and any attempt to operate outside of the Magic Three will result sooner or later in backlog and overwhelm.

Become an expert in the use of the TimeMaker - it’s so much easier.

Meir Ezra

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under Management, How to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.