Introduction to Time Management Skills
Gain control, achieve focus, and get more done
Topic: Career Development
As a new manager, you must learn the skills to help your team achieve your collective goals. However, your new—and potentially overwhelming—day-to-day responsibilities are one of the biggest hurdles to your success. Not only are there a huge number of actions and projects that have to get done, but now you have the added responsibility of managing a team, along with the constant interruptions from emails, phone calls, text messages, social media, and people walking into your office. You may start to wonder how you'll ever get anything done.
But there's hope. Join David McKeown for a deep dive into the fundamentals of time management. You'll familiarize yourself with the most effective productivity systems, explore strategies and best practices drawn from them, and learn how to use those elements in your day-to-day work in a low-maintenance fashion rather than adopting a single system. You'll then develop a personal, customized system designed to maximize your outputs, relieve stress, and allow you to focus on doing what is most important to you and your organization, freeing you to excel in both the workplace and the other areas of your life.
APAC time friendly.
What you'll learn-and how you can apply it
By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:
- The importance of developing time management skills as a manager
- Why you can’t trust your brain as a productivity system
- How to build a trusted system that ensures you get more done in a shorter period of time
- How your natural leadership style impacts your time management skills
- How to use technology to improve your time management
And you’ll be able to:
- Gain a full understanding of the key things that have your attention
- Classify your mind-sweep into next actions and projects
- Assign prioritization and contexts to next actions and projects
- Build a repeatable review process for completion of activities
- Ensure your time management system is easy to maintain and use
This training course is for you because...
- You're a newly promoted manager looking to master your time and productivity so you can focus on getting the best out of your team.
- You’ve been in management for some time and feel overwhelmed by your personal obligations, so you’re looking for a simple system to help you stay on top of the day-to-day.
- You feel there’s another gear you can kick into in managing your workload and know that building a dependable, repeatable process will get you there.
Prerequisites
Recommended preparation:
- “The Psychology of Time Management” (chapter 1 in Time Management (The Brian Tracy Success Library)
- “Internal: Mindset” (chapter 3 in The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by Implementing Projects That Matter)
- “Where to Start” (chapter 2 in The Secret to Peak Productivity)
- “Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (chapter 6 in The Little Book of Big Management Theories)
About your instructor
-
Dave McKeown is the CEO of Outfield Leadership, a leadership consultant, and the author of The Self-Evolved Leader: Elevate Your Focus and Develop Your People in a World That Refuses to Slow Down. He has a wealth of experience in connecting individual and team performance to improved business results, with a particular focus on fast-growing, complex organizations. Dave speaks, coaches, and trains on moving from execution to excellence. His goal is to help organizations build a culture of real, authentic, and ultimately results-driven leadership. He’s shared his leadership strategies at the Inc. 500 and GrowCo Conferences, for Bank of America, the British Government, Entrepreneur's Organization, and Bamboo HR, and with countless others. He’s the host of the podcast Lead Like You Give a Damn and writes a regular leadership column for Inc.com.
Schedule
The timeframes are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing
The Importance of time management for new managers (15 minutes)
- Lecture: The key shifts that first-time managers go through; the types of work you’re now responsible for; why management is an inflection point in your career for building a strong productivity system; what it means to find “flow” in the work that you do; time management scenarios
- Hands-on exercise: Assess your baseline time management competency
Building a trusted system (15 minutes)
- Lecture: The foundation of effective time management—having a trusted system; the allure and pitfalls of using your brain as a storage mechanism for your to-dos; the best way to begin to build your own system
- Hands-on exercise: Take the first steps toward building your trusted system by conducting a quick scan of those tasks that currently have your attention
The importance of the next action (20 minutes)
- Lecture: The difference between projects and next actions; Steven Covey’s Urgent/Important matrix, a tool you can use to help prioritize your projects and next actions accordingly
- Hands-on exercise: Review your initial list of items identified in the section above and break them down into projects and next actions; use the prioritization tool to identify those urgent and important actions
Break (10 minutes)
Working with contexts (15 minutes)
- Lecture: The power of contexts in managing your time
- Hands-on exercise: Add a context to each item on your list and begin to batch your items together
Conducting a regular review (15 minutes)
- Lecture: How to build an effective review process
- Hands-on exercise: Plan and schedule your reviews to ensure that you’re making progress on your actions and projects
Building easy input and maintenance (20 minutes)
- Lecture: How to ensure you have easy, ubiquitous capture and maintenance of your system; what to do if you "fall off the time management wagon"
- Hands-on exercise: Select the appropriate tools for implementing your time management system; commit to using it for the next 30 days
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)