Organise Your Time — A 1-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

• Do you sometimes struggle to meet deadlines?
• Are you often fire fighting to the detriment of other, more important work?
• Do you find yourself running late, even though you have prepared?
• Do you often lose things or spend ages hunting for a file / email on your computer?
• Do you wind up working late / feeling stressed because there is not enough time in the day to do everything?

If the answer is "YES" - this is the course for you!

We will show you how to take control of your time, set realistic goals, understand the difference between important and urgent and manage the people and tools around you: to enable you to feel confident and relaxed about your work-life balance. Creating a focused approach to work, with key tools needed to manage time and organise resources. Fine tuning the way you do things to allow you to gain more time to spend on what is important: not just fire fighting.

Course Objectives

During this training course, delegates will:

• Assess their current time style
• Identify the 'Time Thieves' in your world
• Feel in control of their day rather than swept away by fire fighting or interruptions: this is a great feeling!
• A step-by-step method of turning goals into action, to spend time more effectively
• Understand the difference between urgent and important and recognise the price of constant fire fighting
• Practice 'chunking' to spend time more efficiently
• Learn how to say 'no' when the pressure is on
• Create a Daily Plan template that suits their working style and that is easy and desirable to look at
• Master the 'one book' concept to create organisation
• Understand how to organise filing / resources for minimum disruption to their time
• Create of a personal action plan to enable them to put what they have learned into action

In the Practical Workshops, students will:

• Analyse your use of time using the pre-course Time Record
• Understand how your energy cycle affects your efficiency
• Daily Planning tool to take back and use at work
• Practise saying 'no'
• Construct the bones of your filing system to implement on your return to work
• A Goal Workbook to track your goals and daily plans

Intended Audience

This course is intended for:

• Those feeling overloaded from work pressure
• Anyone who feels they lack time or organisation will benefit from this practical course.

Benefits for your Company

Staff who can manage their own time and resources are easier to manage as their requests are timely and allow managers time to respond. Those who are overloaded and not coping well will tend to react to events rather than proactively planning time and so will cause fire fighting for those around them. This spreads the time management issues further. Any company will gain time for its managers and increased productivity from its staff by having a team that understands their own time needs and respects those of others.

Benefits for You

You will learn how to identify the important goals in your life and arrange your time so that they take come first. You will learn how to minimise distractions and say 'no' to the Time Thieves. This will make you more relaxed at work and more productive in the areas you want to focus on.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Introduction & Welcome

You will meet like-minded people and share your reasons for wanting to be on the course. You will write down what is most important in your work.

An experienced, friendly trainer will help you visualise where you want this course to take you.

How Do You Use Your Time?

This session covers the self-assessment tool that you fill in before the course. It looks at whether your use of time was planned or unplanned, broken up or in consistent chunks and whether you accomplished things that are important to you (identified in the previous section). You will then explore urgent versus important (the Priority Matrix).

You use the self assessment to analyse how effectively you currently use your time and assess what proportion of your time you spend in each quadrant of the Priority Matrix.

Personal Styles

We will help you assess your time style and understand where your natural strengths and weaknesses lie and discover how to use this information to make you more effective. You will also understand energy cycles and which side of the brain you prefer to use.

You complete the time style self assessment and gain advice from each other about managing your style and dealing with those with different styles.

Create Goals & Plan Ahead

You will look at your objectives and create SMART goals that sum up what is important to complete in the short to medium term. You will then turn these into tasks and look at planning these into your diaries, with many useful tips for creating milestones and the performance boosting technique of visualisation.

You create a list of goals which are broken down for you to better manage and plan into your diary; helping you to learn how to visualise success.

Gain Time

Using both your self-study tool and past experience you will look at the biggest Time Thieves for you personally and discover how to stop them stealing your time. You will also look at concentration, delegation, the 80:20 rule and other ways of finding more time.

You decide what techniques you will save you time at work.

Organise Your Life!

This section introduces the power of chunking tasks, holding information in one place only (one notebook, one diary) and allows you to design the most effective and efficient filing systems for both documents and email. This section is full of practical best practice tips to allow you to use your time most effectively: from your desk and PC to travelling time.

You create a daily plan, filing guides for yourself and start using the one-book system.

Be Proactive

You will look at the mindset needed to take control of your time, from positivity to saying 'no' and managing those around you. We will also look at saving time spent in meetings.

You role play saying 'no' until you feel comfortable.

Action Plan

This combines all the outputs from the sections so far, as well as your top 3 tips from the course, into an action plan with dates for completion. You can then ask your manager or a colleague to help you stay on track.

You devise your action plan to take away with you.