Time Management - Marc Mancini
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The Art of Anticipating 103<br />
The need for backup applies not only to hardware but to<br />
software, too. Spell-check systems, for example, promise errorfree<br />
prose. People then fail two proof reed watt they right—and<br />
produce perfectly spelled, perfectly wrong sentences like the<br />
one you just read.<br />
Create a “foresight action plan” for yourself, listing important<br />
items—from both work and home—for which you have no<br />
real backup. Identify the appropriate forms of protection in the<br />
event of failure and promise yourself to take action to implement<br />
these backup systems within the next month.<br />
Remember, too, that the Wallenda Effect describes less tangible<br />
systems—and the people who run them. Are those you<br />
work with cross-trained? If someone is out sick, is there someone<br />
else who can handle what that person does? If you are out,<br />
does someone else have access to your calendar, phone numbers,<br />
and work in progress? Nothing sabotages a system more<br />
surely than knowledge isolation.<br />
Bell’s Blessing (or Curse)<br />
Do you think Alexander Graham Bell could have possibly foreseen<br />
the implications of his grand invention, the telephone?<br />
Freed from its cord in the last decade, the phone permits us to<br />
communicate from anywhere: yards, cars, and in any city we<br />
find ourselves—from the same phone number. Bell would have<br />
been astonished. People even a generation ago would have<br />
been amazed. Remember the “communicators” on the original<br />
Star Trek series? Well, we now have them (and they look a lot<br />
less clunky, too).<br />
The telephone may be the single most powerful and versatile<br />
time management tool. It saves time, travel, distance, and<br />
energy. It’s an instant form of communication. It also permits<br />
technological cousins, like the fax machine and the modem, to<br />
ply their electronic paths. In a slightly different form, it allows<br />
interaction with all manner of computer knowledge and can<br />
access the Internet. Soon it will permit us to see the people we