Over the last few months, the b5media team has been growing. Fairly quickly. In fact, it’s been growing faster than we’d projected. Part of this is due to the cold hard reality that none of us has run a company this large before, so it was easy to forget about a position like an Office Manager/Bookkeeper (our newest hire). The other part is that our growth is above every projection we’ve set, so we have extra resources to bring in more team members.

As a team grows, it develops its own culture, its own strengths and its own weaknesses. One of the great things is that most of us at b5 struggle with some of the same issues, namely time management, information overload, email etiquette, etc. Seeing as how I’ve developed courses on these things, and nearly wrote a book with my good friend Marc Orchant (/me waves @ Marc!) I felt I could probably add something to the discussion.

Now, I’m very aware that I’m not the best at these things. This was only reinforced last night as I reviewed notes, courseware I’d previously developed, presentations I’d previously given, etc. It’s easy to fall into bad habits with anything, and time/life/information management is no exception.

So, no, I’m not perfect. But I’ve taught and learned enough that I thought it’d be great to write a series of posts on the subject. Originally I’d intended for this to be private. However I’ve decided to do this in public partially because then there’s no hiding something that’s valuable and partially because I’m sure I’ll muck stuff up, and I’d appreciate being corrected by folk who know more than I do! ;-)

What I’m Doing 

I’ve outlined 11 posts I need to write. Since this is basically my own little course, this here’s the outline:

post 1: what I’m doing and why (this post, fyi)
post 2: Time Management 101
post 3: Getting It Together – Collecting Your Sh*t
post 4: No More Piles! – Organizing Your Life
post 5: Combating Overload – Processing the Junk
post 6: Email Sucks – Processing as it Relates to Email
post 7: The Dirty Little Time Management Secret – Next Actions
post 8: Being A Hero – Review Your Successes & Failures
post 9: The Story of Joe
post 10: Critical Components for Success (big ass review)
post 11: Systems I’ve Used in the Past & How I Do It

In addition, if you’re at all curious about this stuff, a brief intro can be had here: my time management seminar. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start. It’s a few hours long, though, so feel free to just skim.

Want to Help?

If you’ve ever thought about this stuff, if you have your own little system, if you have experience with GTD and want to point out tips, drop me an email (jeremy@b5media.com). I’d love to have a guest “sidebar” for each post.

What to Expect

Obviously, you shouldn’t expect perfection out of this. This is basically me developing a course using the blogging spirit. Fairly quick, fairly off the cuff and hopefully fairly valuable. I won’t have spent 100 hours on this (like I have previous courses). And I’m so out of practice that some bits’ll probably be out of whack.

However, for those who want to have a swing at this, here’s what you should expect. First, there’ll be about 3 posts per week, which makes this a 3-4 week course. I might do one a day, but I figure if I target 3/week I wont’ disappoint anyone (least of all myself!) ;-)

Second, I’m looking to incorporate the following elements and structure into each post (so you can skip, come back later, use the posts as reference material, and so forth):

  • Goal for Today
  • Key Takeaways (or: if you only hear 3 things, hear these)
  • Actual Lesson
  • Guest “Sidebar” / Testimonial
  • Exercise to Reinforce Learning / Put it Into Practice (or: what’s the point of teaching spring cleaning if we don’t actually DO IT?!)
  • Review of Key Takeaways  / Lessons
  • Customizing for You (or: everyone’s different, so here are some things you might want to switch up to make this work for you)
  • Video / Audio / PowerPoint Component (not sure on exactly what I’ll do here, so this part might not happen, but I’d like to talk through perhaps just the key goals and takeaways, since audio/video can be a better reinforcer than just text)

Conclusion / Review

As I said at the start, this is primarily a tool for b5media, but one that I’m hoping will be useful to a few other folk who happen upon it. It won’t be perfect, but if it’s useful and not totally boring I’ll be happy :-)

Updates: Updated some broken links.