Earlier this year, we caught up for a social with the charming Andy Ellwood, Director of Business Development for Gowalla, a location-based social media group. For more info about Andy, click here. In these two clips, Andy pinpoints Time Management as the root habit of successful people, and discusses how we go about teaching these skills to the next generation. Counter-intuitive it may seem, but in terms of self-motivation it is very difficult to achieve great things without a concrete deadline. As Andy says, “A goal without a deadline is just a dream”. Setting up a deadline applies pressure upon yourself to achieve and put in the hard yards, instead of doing things when you get around to it. When we attend school, we have deadlines provided for us by our teachers. They hand you an assignment, a due date, and a set of consequences should you not achieve your goal. However, as we shockingly find out once we graduate, this is not the way the real world works. It is perfectly possible to cruise along doing the bare minimum, and not achieve anything. It is those students who learn in school how to set their own goals, and to manage their time appropriately, who become successful in the real world. The freedom to do what we want, when we want, is a wonderful thing, but it can also be debilitating. Andy suggests that his particular method of education, being home schooled by his parents, is responsible for teaching him the necessary time management skills. Being given deadlines, but left to figure out how to reach them, was something of a bridging step between school and the real world. Once grown, all Andy had to learn was to make his own goals, and the rest came naturally. Setting goals, of course, is another kettle of fish altogether. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TD2Ls4ECtM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY5Cx-4qJnw
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