One of the most universals tools in your NNI toolkit

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The Round Robin is a fairly general approach that creates peace, satisfaction, and results, resulting in both Now and Next being happy and maintaining Now-Next Integrity. It is a reliable approach to resolve a Now-Next conflict that otherwise might remain unresolved: Now wins and Next is unhappy or vice versa.

 

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How it works

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The 15-15 refers to 15 minutes-15 minutes. It’s an agreement between my-next and my-now that they alternate with each other “taking over the driving,” using 15-minute intervals (each taking their turn). Let’s say that my-next is in charge first (my-next is the one in the driver’s seat). He or she gets to do what they want to do for 15-minutes (for example, getting some accounting work done). During this interval, my-now can still be accepting and okay because my-now knows that he or she gets to do what they want to do at the end of my-next’s turn. 

 

Now it’s my-now’s turn. My-now is in the driver’s seat (maybe my-now has chosen to watch a movie or read a novel; it’s totally up to him or her). My-next can be accepting (and not blame my-now) because my-next knows that my-next gets to do (again) what he or she wants to do at the end of my-now’s turn.

 

The interval of 15 minutes is just one option. It could be 10-10 or 20-20 or 30-30. It could even be 30-15 (with 30 minutes for my-next and 15 minutes for my-now) or 15-30 (the reverse). You may need to experiment to get the best interval agreement for a given circumstance. The important point is to REALLY listen to BOTH my-next and my-now to make sure that they EACH think they can be happy with the proposed interval agreement.

 

My personal/business assistant and good friend Heidi Yang (for over eight years now, as of 2018) has made good use of the 15-15 way. Heidi-now has been very happy with her guilt-free play time on the Internet. Heidi-next has been gratified with all the things she’s been getting accomplished (like steady progress in her Korean language class).