Help with cross cultural time management

[stellabeam]

I am training a group of people in documentary making skills. We are making a documentary as we go.

In their culture showing up at a time and place where you said you were going to be, is not really important. This applies to the people we are interviewing as well as the crew.

I need to hire expensive cameras and audio gear in advance, not knowing whether I will have a crew or anyone to interview.

The week before christmas we lost our editing suite because of a power surge when the computor had not been disconnected.

It has to be finished by 24th of January. We still have 2 days shooting to organise and do, plus all the editing.

It's stressfull. Any suggestions??

[fwade]

I think I may have come too late to this party! I moved back home to Jamaica after living in Florida, New Jersey and New York for a combination of 20 years, and ran into some of the same issues.

My response was to try to find a way to create my own time management system that was flexible enough to deal with all the uncertainty I found. I couldn't find any help in books and on the internet - the only message I heard wsa "this works for me, follow it."

I started to write about my experience, and after a couple of years, I have developed a way to help people develop their own time management systems from wherever their starting point might be.

The fun thing is that once they learn how, it's a little like learning how to fix a car -- you can keep at it even as it gets older, and needs to evolve to continue to work. In the same way, when promotions, babies, projects, marriages and retirement comes, we do need to retool our time management systems to adjust for the new life-changes.

We can all learn how to do that also...!