Time Management Skills

Running a Time Management Skills workshop and it overruns slightly.  Worst work day ever?  Actually, no.  

It was an hour’s workshop in a 1hr 15 minute time slot, and the ideas that the group were coming out with were too good for me to cut it short. To me, this really well illustrated the importance of building flexibility into your schedule. The problem many people have with Time Management is that they forget the human element, so try to regiment their time and plan to the very last second. When something crops up, this then throws the whole schedule out and they become de-motivated and end up not bothering!  Time Management isn’t about crowbaring things in.  It’s about prioritising what is important.

Time Management Skills serve a greater purpose than just getting more work done and being more efficient.  They enable a reduction in stress and a better quality of life (or work life balance as we refer to it nowadays). I went through exercises with the group to show them how they can do to cut down on time wasted, but there is a certain amount of workload that cannot be changed. This them comes down to prioritisation, and not letting your thoughts about your workload become overwhelming.

Thoughts about Time

Workload is what it is.  It is a person’s thoughts about it that affect whether it is stressful or not. Holding on to thoughts of how much work there is, and fearing that you might not be capable of doing the work in the limited time available is going to crush productivity and make you feel stressed about it. It may sound like a simple comment to make, but the following example of the difference between a lucky person and an unlucky person illustrates this a little further…

An unlucky person falls down a flight of stairs and breaks their leg. They then think to themselves “Oh this is terrible, I’ve just fallen downstairs and broken my leg, this sort of thing always happens to me, I’m so unlucky”. A lucky person falls down a flight of stairs and breaks their leg. They then think to themselves “Blimey, I’ve just fallen down a flight of stairs and only broken my leg, I could have broken my neck! I’m so lucky!”  All other things are equal, apart from their thoughts…

Time Management Skills for Business & Work…

These can be taught very easily.  I have mutliple tactics and organisation strategies that I teach business owners and company employees to put to work during their day to day. My Time Management work always goes further, into an understanding of the mindset that goes with it.  When stressful thoughts about time can be seen through as only thoughts, then you will find your productivity is better.  You have better ideas and more energy.  I focus on grounding this understanding first, then guiding the way with tools and techniques.

If you are interested in how you could develop your time management skills and improve your thinking around time management, please get in touch!

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Want to know more about how I can help? Drop me a line or give me a call. A successful coaching relationship depends upon a great rapport, so it’s important to talk. I want to get to know you, see inside your world and we can assess how we’d go from there!