Welcome to the start of the build-up to the Task Management and Time Blocking Summit 2021. Perhaps the best place to begin is with a recap of all that happened in the March 2020 Time Blocking Summit and what has taken place since then.
Act 1 – The Virus
Back in January 2020, one of our summit’s speakers apologized for not being able to commit to attend a live Q&A at the March event. She was stuck in Wuhan Province in China, she explained.
There was a virus spreading that had halted all travel, preventing her from leaving. Consequently, she had no idea when she would be leaving to return to the United States.
By then, the world had received early warning that something unique was happening, and that many Chinese citizens were being affected. It’s safe to say that few ordinary citizens outside the Far East thought much of the issue.
However, within days of the summit ending on March 7th, entire countries (including Jamaica) shut their borders. Most around the world saw this as a temporary inconvenience, to be dispatched with by the summer, or at the latest, by September.
Well, here we are in November 2020 and there is no definitive end in sight. A vaccine is promised for March 2021 availability, but that would only be the first step in a long process to innocculate the world from COVID-19.
Once the lockdown announcements were made, I paused…or truth be told, I stopped in my tracks. While I had extensive plans to continue promoting and engaging with the audience from the Time Blocking Summit, many internet marketers and summit hosts agreed that this was no time to promote or sell anything unrelated to saving lives.
By the time a new “normal” set in a few months later, it was time for me to pivot to another virtual conference I was hosting in a completely unrelated industry in September. With the lessons learned from the Time Blocking Summit 2020, that event was a big success.
Act II – The Malware
However, it was not without major hiccups. Several months earlier, the virtual conference website was attacked by malware and was rendered inaccessible. I was forced to recreate it on a new server as I manually, painstakingly moved it to safer ground.
But that wasn’t the only site affected. This one (timeblockingsummit.info) was attacked as well, along with ScheduleU.org. In fact, a few of my sites have still not been recovered.
Perhaps you may agree with the popular sentiment that this year – 2020 – has been the most difficult one in your experience. It certainly has been a crazy year for us here at Framework Consulting, the company behind ScheduleU and this site’s productivity summit.
But, with respect to the Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2021 – we are back. To support it’s activities, we are relaunching the Mighty-Taskers community. Fortunately, it was untouched by the malware due to its location on another platform.
And, fortunately, preparations for the Task Management and Time Blocking Summit 2021 are now ahead of last year’s schedule. And as you can see, the scope of the event has been expanded. We aren’t just focusing on time blocking.
Act III – The Pivot
But that’s not just a name change. The fact is, more people are time blocking than ever before. This has become a critical skill in Working from Home, given the number of distractions which regularly interrupt work. However, my research shows that most of the articles being published on the subject area are geared towards people who are relatively new to this particular game: beginners.
There remains little help for the Mega-Tasker – someone who must effectively manage tends and hundreds of tasks at a given time. In other words, there’s a unique role for the summit to play in the honing, enhancing and growing a skill that every adult must use. Some are using time blocking, but most Mega-Taskers haven’t gotten there yet. They arrived at the summit this year with rudimentary skills and a basic understanding. Some were still using lots of memory, stretching it to manage lots of tasks and being stressed as a result.
As such, this year’s summit is still not for the Average Josephine. Instead, it’s intended to help Mega-Taskers do a better job of employing sophisticated habits, routines apps, devices, paper tools, calendars, administrative assistants and auto-schedulers.
Once again, the summit provides a space for all of us who are Mega-Taskers to learn from each other, and grow exponentially as a result. There’s simply nowhere else in the world where this happens at scale. The 600+ people who registered for the 2020 summit discovered this for themselves as you may see from the testimonials on the home page.
So on behalf of the team behind the scenes, I welcome you to the 2021 Virtual Summit. We hope that you register and begin to find value right away, perhaps from joining the Mighty-Taskers Community.
Francis
Summit 2021 Host