Good thoughts.

Retrospection is an important tool.

Now twist this taxonomy a bit and look forward—both immediate (what do I do now / next) and longer term (planning.)

David,

What about the rest of the time? For example, what about time spent reviewing a junior colleague’s work? It’s not a challenging growth experience. It’s not something I can delegate, but it’s important. Did Deborah comment on that kind of time?

What you both comment on, Carl and Mike, is that there ARE other categories of time we could all invent.

What I liked about the principle of what Ms. Szekely had to say is not that you must review everything, but that you should invent a simple scheme that (a) helps you check that you are taking care of the key issues, and (b) forces you to examine what CAN be modified or changed.

As I argued on a post on Dennid Howlett’s blog (http://www.accmanpro.com/?p=726), the best any measurement (or judgment) mechanism can hope to do is to give us ‘signals for further investigation’.

From that point of view, a simple review scheme will never cover everything, but it will help us ensure that, if things are seriously unbalanced, we need to dig deeper.

That’s better than an unwieldy system that forces us to review everything (and hence will be less likely to be slotted into our already busy lives.)

This is a remarkable idea. If everyone applied this practice to their lives the world would be a much better place!

David, Here you draw attention to something broader, and generally underestimated: people are so busy with coping with things that come their way (to react, to read, to reply etc.), that they do not take the time to reflect: is this what I want?, is this worthwhile? For me, the turning point came when reading Stephen Coveys famous book and learning to draw my own agenda. This tool seems a useful one and I will try and figure out how it can work for me!
Don’t forget the opening scene of Winnie the Poo: Poo bear assumes that there must be an other way of coming down the stairs than bouncing his head, if only he had the time to think about one.
Judgement, and gut feeling is what it is all about, like you mention at several other places as well.