Essential Time Management

Day 1

The ‘inner game’ of Time Management

Considering the fundamental principles or core beliefs that are important in managing time and giving participants the opportunity to review their own beliefs.

• Role perception assessment
• Beliefs elicitation
• Affirmation technique

Exercise: applying the ‘affirmation’ technique.

Whole life planning

The starting point for any attempt at improving personal effectiveness is to set goals based on the most important aspects of your work and social life.

• Understanding core values
• The Wheel of Life technique
• The stretch goals concept
• Visualising long term stretch goals
• Setting short term SMART goals

Exercise: the wheel of life exercise and visualising stretch goals

Setting work priorities

Effective Time Managers make conscious choices about how they use their time. Part of doing this well is to make a distinction between high value, high impact tasks and the more trivial ones.

• ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ class items
• The Pareto rule
• ‘A’ items and the energy management concept
• Understanding ‘Quality Recovery Time’ (QRT)

Exercise: identifying ‘A’ class items

‘To do’ lists

‘To do lists’ or ‘action lists’ highlight the tasks that need to be done in order to start to achieve the priorities.

• The rationale for ‘to do’ lists
• Types of to do list
• The 4D’s concept
• Understanding the difference between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ items
• The importance of a ‘system’ in avoiding being overwhelmed

Exercise: writing to do lists

The batching concept and diary management

The essential premise behind the batching concept is that if you group similar items together and work on them in a single time slot or batch you can achieve much more than if you hop or jump from task to task. All the research shows that tremendous reduction can be made in the time taken to complete jobs by avoiding fragmenting them, thus making it unnecessary to return to them.

• Protected ‘A’ time
• The fixed schedule concept (routines & rituals in time management)
• Handling the telephone
• Dealing with post
• Email strategies

Exercise: planning for fixed routines

Transition steps

A common time management problem is the inability to ‘switch off’ from work when at home. Thus many people find that when they should be paying attention to their partner or children or enjoying a good meal or sleeping soundly they are in fact still thinking about work. Here we discuss how to resolve this issue.

• The state management concept
• Resource anchoring
• Thought stopping technique

Exercise: applying resource anchoring method

Participating in meetings

A great deal of time, effort and energy can be wasted in meetings but there are a number of key behaviours that can be used when participating in meetings that can make them more efficient and effective for everyone concerned. There are two key areas that we need to consider and these are (i) control techniques for helping to keep things on track and (ii) our personal contribution to the meeting based on the style of our intervention.

• The Disney strategy (realist, dreamer, critic roles)
• Stating outcomes
• Relevancy challenge
• Time challenge

Exercise: applying the tools to planning and running a meeting

Negotiating Priorities

Many people don’t fully appreciate that saying, “yes” to one thing effectively means saying “no” to something else. That ‘something else’ may well be a priority work task for us or may eat away at time we want to dedicate to our home or personal lives. So if we are too accommodating, then it may well be that the things we are saying ‘no’ to by default are the very things that we need to do to take better care of ourselves and/or hit our personal work targets. This is why finding out exactly why people are asking for things and then negotiating a way forward that makes sense to you and to them is so important.

• Assertive listening
• Assertive inquiry
• Workable compromise
• Three step assertive technique
• The assertive broken record technique
• The assertive fogging technique
• Keeping in touch with ‘flash reports’

Exercise: agreeing to prioritise workload

 

Contact

Further information on this course is available by contacting
Boulden Management Consultants:
via our Contact form
Tel: 0844 394 8877