by Andrew Langford

There are two core and connected routes for improving our capacity to Manage Time and Manage Promises.

One is the cognitive route that has to do with learning new tools and new attitudes.

The other is an affective route (affects = feelings) that involves unlearning or releasing any dysfunctional patterns that rob us of our ability to think well and flexibly.

We sometimes summarize these two overlapping routes or conditions as Competence and Attention.

  • Competence is to do with the ability to acquire and use knowledge and skills
  • Attention is to do with having the emotional calm to be able to put your mind to the task on hand (to be in the present).

Both are required in order to be effective.

In this book we present a range of tools and attitudes you can work on acquiring for the purposes of effective management of time and promises AND we note that it is critical to deal with the emotional ‘noise’ that the idea of being efficient, balanced, strategic, committed and in your integrity as regards time and promises seems to generate for many of us.

Otherwise this emotional noise can easily drown out our intelligent minds and render us incapable of organizing much at all. Using the language of Re-evaluation Counseling we’d say that the topic (Managing Time, Managing Promises) can re-stimulate (trigger) hidden (and usually old) patterns that then play very loudly and take over our capacity to think well.

Please be alert to possible re-stimulation around this topic. It turns up as resistance, rejection, an unwillingness to experiment, feelings of exhaustion, boredom, despair, self-loathing and other ways of feeling bad about ourselves, compulsive distraction and a hundred other ways of filling our minds with anything but what we need to think about.

A primer on how to deal with restimulation is in the last book in this element.

To look at the following collection of key attitudes and tools in the next chapters you can register for the full element – beginning November 17th – HERE.