About Me:

What’s more important than time?  It’s the one resource you cannot recover once it’s been consumed.  What would you give to get more time?

Well, I can’t make the day longer - not that we want to work longer hours - a few extra hours of sleep would be nice.  I also lack access to any time turners, hot tubs, alpha mimics or groundhogs.  However, what if we could just be a little more efficient?  While there are many ways to solve this, I chose a very human approach.

Why I do what I do (and why I still love it!):

I’ve always enjoyed teaching - I suppose my first real experience was in college when I was asked to TA a course which I hadn’t actually taken - Computers and Sculpture.  Getting credits for a course without HW is kinda awesome, but I really enjoyed learning the materials and then helping explain it to other students. 

Once I joined the workforce, my role as a technical analyst constantly had me act as a conduit between the business and engineering team.  Looking back, you could say my first unofficial side hustle was facilitating an occasional Excel lecture - I felt that I had learned many tricks over the years that would benefit folks. At one job I was so fast at operating excel that one of the sales people just watched me going - we could just resell this - which actually they kinda did.

Finally, when I became Head of Corporate IT, I continued my management learning and found one that offered a simple strategy - use hotkeys.  Coming from a pc gaming background, this makes total sense.  I already used many hotkeys but started to really force myself to use more and more.  I also had to rethink how to use the applications - digging through strategies and trying them out until things just started to make sense and I had systems to operate all my tools.  I am blazing fast (if I do say so myself).  So are my trainees.

Why does the training work?

This is personal training for your tech.  Just like in the gym - you do exercises until it becomes second nature.  If you learned to touch type, it probably will feel very similar.  You start with a few letters and practice until you can utilize the full keyboard.

The other half is training you on “how” to think about the tech. These are the strategic lessons.  It will feel unintuitive until again it becomes second nature.  If repetition relates to Mr Miagi, then the strategy relates to Marie Kondo. 

Finally, we’ve intentionally evolved the course to be very lightweight because people are busy!  So the training is daily and short.with lectures on weekends.

One really interesting differentiator between this and other types of training is that the effect is more holistic.  Soon after I adopted these strategies at work, I found myself adopting them at home.  In fact, the program encourages folks to try at home as well.  I’ve heard from several trainees of the program that they’ve benefited from the lessons in their personal lives.

Curious to see how to create time without a sci-fi or magical movie prop?  Reach out – I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you figured out all the movie references above.