Switching tasks from ‘Neutral’ to ‘Automatic’

The new guide for effective time management according to the theories of Rory Vaden.

Let’s start with an authentic Israeli story. In the 1960s, as part of efforts to strengthen ties with Africa, an Israeli representative arrived in a remote village and watched the women watering their furrows of vegetables.

The river was distant and the women walked back and forth for hours with buckets balanced on their heads.

‘What tough and unnecessary work!’ thought the Israeli. He enthusiastically outlined a plan to lay irrigation pipes and was amazed when his fellow conversationalist, the village head, refused the offer. ‘”

Why?” the frustrated Israeli asked. “It’ll give them too much time to think,” came the response.

Automation is one of the dominant characteristics of modern culture. Most of us, though, feel as though we barely have time to breathe, what with our jobs, homes, and life in general.

The concept of “time management,” which appeared in the second half of the 20th century, focused on efficiency as a way of measuring successful management.

Later, prioritizing was added, but even taken together, the two systems don’t provide the average person a chance to maneuver smoothly between growing numbers of tasks.

Rory Vaden examined the conduct of multipliers, people with a natural talent for time management. His study led to the development of a new model comprised of four stages for handling tasks.

At each stage, the baseline question has to be: how does my action today affect my life tomorrow?

Stage 1 is elimination: it helps us decide which tasks can forego.

Stage 2, which we’ll explore further in this article, is automation.

The question we’ll look at here is: if I can’t cancel a certain task, can I make it automatic?

Here’s an example:

The paperwork’s piling up, whether by snail mail or email.

Who could be bothered with it all? Many of us just put things aside until a layer of dust accumulates and only handle them
when we’re left with no choice.

That’s how we forget to pay insurance on time, take the car in for its annual registration renewal, file away important guarantees on purchases, and even end up paying a fine on parking because we didn’t fix it right away.

The outcome: reminders, warnings, and bottom line, interest-bearing fines on missed deadlines.

Add to that the frustration of having to search through the papers for that lost item that you need urgently, and you remember “just putting it down near the computer a week ago… but someone must’ve moved it!”

What might happen if we put that boring filing job on automatic? If we decide to devote a monthly hour to it on a fixed basis, such as the last Wednesday of every month? Very quickly we discover that we’ve not only cleared our desk, but that hour also lets us look ahead into our financial space.

We can plan expenses in advance, decide on a worthwhile investment that money we see has freed up (how does a family vacation sound?), and so on.

That monthly hour has entered our automatic time management schedule and turned into an investment with a yield that can be measured in time and income.

Sounds simple? Sounds effective? Run with it.

Think about tasks in your lives that you cannot avoid, but can turn into automatic actions. We learned about automation from time multipliers, those people with an inherent sense of efficiency.

What can encourage you to emulate them? Perhaps the knowledge that the way the wealthy relate to money is exactly the way multipliers relate to time.