In your quest to keep pace with the increasing speed of modern life without dashing about, you may be tempted to take certain short cuts with the advice contained in this book. If too recklessly undertaken, this could be dangerous and return you to headless chicken status overnight. There are, however, some sensible short cuts that you can take and still feel that you have given matters the care and attention they need and deserve. Let us look at each of the basic time creation techniques outlined in Part 1 in turn and see where and how this may be possible.

Feedback should be obtained fairly frequently at first, but once you have got the hang of a particular technique and simply want to keep an eye on things to make sure performance does not deteriorate through complacency, you can reduce the frequency. The important point is to keep a record of all the feedback you do obtain, because this is the only way you can look back and spot precisely where things started to go wrong, if indeed this is the case. It is far easier to deal with specific errors than to remedy a general feeling of unease.

When you are increasing flow rates, make sure that you do it gradually at first until your performance meets the level you require. You can then experiment with faster speeds, which are a kind of short cut to getting things done, secure in the knowledge that if you have to go back to the previous flow rate you are still acting faster than you were at the beginning of the process of acquiring these new skills.

Not everyone sticks to every deadline they have set themselves. They are mainly there to prompt you to take action. Try to beat a deadline if you can, as this can be a very useful short cut to the next activity. You may even find that, if you have identified minideadlines to work to, that you can skip quickly over some of them or even omit them altogether without loss. There is little point in sticking to a plan simply because it is there, if you can see a faster way to completion.

At first, mainly because they are new to many people, more time is spent on anticipatory scanning techniques than is necessary. The idea is to get a quick impression of the task ahead and not to go into detail about how to tackle it. A few seconds should be all that is required. If it takes longer than this, you may be trying to do things which are dealt with in the next three paragraphs below.

With selective perception of cues it is important to concentrate on what are truly the important features of a situation. You are looking to identify the highlights, the salient points, the things which you simply cannot afford to ignore. There is no point in including something simply because it might become important later on. Your flexible performance strategies (see below) should take care of that. The rest you can skip over with a reasonably easy conscience, knowing that anything missed by one technique will almost certainly be covered by another.

Adequate incubation periods can be shortened to save time, but be careful to ensure that you have correctly identified the ones that require an overnight pause. They cannot be reduced if they are to work properly. To curtail those would be to take a risk not worth taking. You also need to be careful about cutting down on incubation periods when you are learning something new and it is important for you to get it right.

It is difficult to take short cuts with intuitive and imaginative responses simply because by their very nature you have no way of knowing when they are likely to occur. Sometimes, however, when a brilliant idea about how to tackle a task springs to mind out of the blue, you do not need to act upon it there and then. Simply make a brief note of it, but in enough detail so that you will later recall exactly what it was you intended to do, and this will provide a useful and safe short cut.

A similar problem arises with critical incidents and learning periods. You can save some time by noting the insight for later action, but very often it will be best to exploit to the full the incident or period whenever it occurs.

Timing and synchronisation present perhaps the best opportunities for taking sensible short cuts. Very often when people speed up and then encounter a difficulty which forces them to slow down, they forget to speed up again once the problem is passed. You should be continuously on the lookout for opportunities to speed up so that you can operate, if you like, at the level of the highest common factor in a task rather than the lowest common denominator.

Slippage and downtime offer the chance to examine a task and ask whether it needs to be done at all. If you find you are continually being prevented from doing something by forces or events beyond your control, perhaps you should at least be looking for an alternative route to where you want to be. For instance, if you have difficulty in reaching people on the telephone, it might be more effective and quicker to email them.

Flexible performance strategies, as we said above, help to ensure that your short cuts do not lead to more problems than they solve. It is important to keep your strategies flexible. The last thing you want to do is to become set in your ways. Once you have successfully dealt with a situation in a certain way, there is a great temptation to tackle all subsequent similar problems in the same way. This can be a very quick road back to headless chickendom if you are not careful.

Critical analysis of performance, which you only engage in in any depth at the end of a cycle of activity, may not offer many short cuts itself, but it may lead to the identification of other shortcuts available in the use of other techniques. Always be on the lookout for anything that will give you a faster and better performance without endangering your status as a laidback bear.