THE PROACTIME METHOD 10

10. Develop your skills and your resources

In the production phase we may have all tasks well prepared, have all needed resources available and yet be unable to tackle them and to respect our planning...if we lack motivation and do not master the appropriate skills.

Motivation and skills set the limits of our action field. Our money, our social relations, our knowledge and diploma are of no use if we do not master the skills to exploit them. The ability to motivate oneself is also a skill.

Skills are our most valuable resource. We have to practice and to optimize them like a pianist. Skill training involves performing a skill over and over until the subconscious takes over more and more of the workload, allowing us to perform the skill with less and less conscious attention. Skills become a habit.

But in an ever changing world they may grow obsolete very quickly. We have to acquire new skills according to our projects and in view of external changes we shall be confronted with.

These rapid changes have an impact on brainworkers above all. Of course manual workers also have to get familiar with new techniques, new materials and new tools. But the evolution is slower. For brainworkers everything moves at an accelerated pace. Valid information the day before might be invalid the next day. Their knowledge has to be renewed. Brainworkers cannot simply be historians. Continuously they have to update and to expand their knowledge base.

Albert Einstein stated: « We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. » If we rely only on knowledge as a solid ground to think, we may have serious difficulties in remaining stable in such a moving world. Even our frame of references, our beliefs and values have to be modified when dealing with new situations. We have to learn to cope with the instability of the modern world and to accept that nothing is won forever.

However, we all need some stability to feel well. Where can we find it when we are not walking on the solid ground of knowledge anymore? We have to learn to acquire new intellectual skills. As Albert Einstein put it: « Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. » Thus we have to be on the move continuously. But we also must decide in what direction.

Surfers trust their skills to keep in balance on the unstable surface of water. We can improve our mental skills of logical and lateral thinking, of problem solving, decision making and management of emotions. We can acquire specific skills but they alone do not lead to stability. They do not guarantee our employability. Programming languages, for example, evolve. In the area of data processing acquiring new skills is permanent.

So how can we maintain stability if even specific skills are not enough? We have to reach the level of metaskills that endure. Metaskills are abstract skills which have to do with other skills. For example, an autodidact is a person who has the metaskill of being able to self-teach him or herself new skills without an outside teacher. In other words, metaskills are generic skills which can be applied to a variety of subject domains. We acquire metaskills through learning specific skills. Programming in any language, for example, develops our ability to abstract which is a metaskill. Logical thinking, invented by the ancient Greeks, is a metaskill. Problem solving, decision making are metaskills. If it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish, then it is even better to teach him the metaskill of how to develop new methods of procuring food. That metaskill will involve specific skills like fishing and hunting but also skills about creativity and about exploring new areas.

Metaskills improve our behavioral flexibility and lead to context independence. Confronted with a problem we have a lot of options for the actions we can take and are able to switch tactics easily and smoothly. If something does not work, we simply try something else.

PROACTIME offers several tools for coping with the instability of the modern world. Automatic planning is such a feature which allows you to renew the planning of your tasks as often as needed. PROACTIME also encourages you to set a daily primary goal to keep moving in the right direction, the direction defined by your life goals. Daily tasks can be integrated in life projects. According to your projects you design and enrich your personal knowledge base. Knowledge trees structure your base and offer direct access to the resources needed to accomplish your tasks successfully.

Above all, PROACTIME is a tool for autodidacts, people who want to improve their work methods continuously. It encourages you to analyze the underlying processes of your tasks and to optimize them. These processes can be viewed on the Dashboard when accomplishing the related tasks. This way, PROACTIME helps you to identify and to develop metaskills which will enable you to achieve your life projects on the long run. You can create an inventory of checklists, skills and metaskills, called processes. Autodidacts will discover many such processes on the net.

In conclusion, continuous process optimization is the means to increase our productivity and to avoid negative stress due to the lack of appropriate skills. It will be much easier for us to cope with the instability of our modern world and to maintain stability and employability.