Well considering how busy we all are, many of us managed to find the time to take part in this webinar to explore ideas on how to gain more control over our time.
Presenter Catherine Nicholson of The Virtual Training Team acknowledged that we often get to the end of the day feeling frustrated about what we didn’t do, rather than satisfied about what we did achieve.
Considering the average person spends a full 11 years physically at work (and probably more than that for most ALTO members!), every minute should count. Even just saving 10 minutes a day adds up to a whole working week of 40 extra hours at the end of a year.
In the webinar, we looked at small things we could do to make a real difference to how we felt about our working days. We explored three areas:
- Managing our Mindset
- Managing our Focus
- Managing our Workflow
Read on for Catherine’s tips, and if you’re a member, you can also view the webinar recording and slides.
Managing our Mindset
With our mindset, we discussed how our good intentions can actually create time challenges for us. Many of us can relate to these situations:
- Feeling the need to say ‘yes’ too much;
- Having super-high standards;
- Feeling that we have to do too much ourselves and can’t delegate.
Catherine shared some tips to keep these mindsets in line, which you can view in the sample slide below.
Managing our Focus
Next we looked at ideas to improve our focus, so we can focus on the right things at the right time.
We discovered that we often tell ourselves that we are prioritising, when really we are procrastinating. Quite a few people on the webinar took a tip away to make the first task of the day be the one they resist the most.
We also discussed how our circadian rhythms change through the day, influencing our energy and ability to focus. This is even more prevalent for many of us as we are travelling often. By paying attention to this, we can plan our day accordingly – matching high focus tasks to times when we know we will be highly focused.
Managing our Workflow
Finally, we talked about managing our workflow so that we don’t get overwhelmed as much. The reality is, we are not very good at estimating how much we can actually achieve in the day.
Catherine shared the “7Ds” of deciding what we do with everything that comes into our workflow, as outlined in the slide below.
We finished the session with each of us making some personal commitments to change, such as:
- “Start the day with the one task that I am resisting most.”
- “I’ll be more realistic about my to-do lists for the day.”
- “I will try to delegate a bit more.”
- “I am planning on sorting my big To do list in order to set realistic goals for each day.”
- “Make a to-do list for ONE day.”
- “Prioritise.”
- “Eat the green veggies while fresh!” [you’ll need to watch the recording to understand this one!]
- “Be more realistic about tasks that I can achieve.”
- “I will try to manage interruptions more.”
Further comments, apart from thanking Catherine for the fantastic webinar, included:
- “I love the poster idea with the Post-Its showing ‘with’ and ‘without’ deadlines.”
- “I love the idea of following your circadian rhythm because I always end up doing the most important huge tasks close to midnight!”
- “I always find it helpful to do a list for the following week on Friday afternoon – just to finish off the week and get an idea of the following week.”
ALTO members, please login to view the Members Resources to download the presentation slides and watch the webinar recording at your convenience.
Join us next time!
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