The purpose of this exercise is to help delegates practice memorising and paying attention to detail. Repeated exercise can increase focus and help people to become more aware of their surroundings. It also highlights the importance of using all senses, such as touch to increase memory retention and recall. The exercise is also useful for teamwork and leadership skills.

These days we read a lot. As the content consumption has gone up, our attention span seems to be going down. We might pay less attention to what we read, get less of it in and forget it quickly. In other words, in comes from one side, out goes the other side.

Naturally, this is a waste of our valuable time. If you are reading something, you might as well absorb everything it has. Perhaps you want to explain it to others later, so it pays to know the details but also be able to deliver it quickly depending on how much you have. This exercise helps delegates to increase their concentration while reading articles, reports or any written content.

The digital age has made it possible to multi-task. Multi-tasking increases productivity because you can do more in a given time. But can you? With certain activities, such as driving while listening to an audio book, this is highly productive. With some activities, you may easily end up producing sub-standard quality or finish none at all.

Like everything, if used excessively, it can actually reduce productivity. People who multi-task too much may start to suffer from lack of concentration. For example, you may sit behind a computer and decide to write a report. However, lots of unrelated ideas about you latest emails, browsing, conversations or daily activities can pop up in your mind that constantly slow you down.

It pays to practice concentration, so that when necessary you can focus as if nothing else matters and give a task your 100% effort.

It is famously known that if you want to increase your productivity and quality of your life to 100%, give 100% to every little thing you do. In other words, when you write a report, only think about writing it and when you are on holiday, only think of things you can do to have fun and not about work you left behind, or work that you will have to do when you get back.

This activity contains a series of exercises on increasing concentration. Depending on your course and delegates, you can initiate them during the course or provide them as ideas for post course exercises.

This activity encourages delegates to pay more attention to little details provided by their team mates. The idea is that knowing these facts about your colleagues can help you to understand them better and have a better relationship with them. This exercise works best with a group of people who work together on a regular basis.

This is a fun and noisy exercise that is ideal for a recap situation. You have thought a subject to your delegates and now want to test their knowledge or encourage them to review it. This exercise helps you to achieve this using a light hearted competition.

This is an interactive exercise which is ideal for groups of delegates who don’t know each other and have never met before. It demonstrates our attention to details or lack of it and shows how much information can be gathered about another person in a short space of time.

In this exercises delegates learn to use analogies to find novel solutions to problems. Specific analogies are examined and mapped to a problem domain for inspiration of similar unique solutions.

When engaged in a brainstorming session on productivity, you want to maximise your search efficiency in order to systematically explore all areas and get the best from the time spend on the problem. A great way to do this is to expand and shrink the problem so you can come up with new ideas, get rid of the bad ideas and move forward.

Effectively, you can use the following 5 techniques:

• Expand. Expand the problem by thinking of new associations on all directions.
• Reduce. Reduce the scope.
• Reverse. Come up with something opposite to explore new avenues.
• Eliminate. Remove those ideas that don’t make any sense to reduce your search space and increase the efficiency of your brainstorming. After all, you can’t spend forever on this topic so you need to setup boundaries.

The following exercise helps the delegates to use this method.

This activity encourages solution generation by looking at the problem from a different prospective. By changing the way we describe a problem we can come up with ideas to fix it. This exercise works best with a group of delegates who normally work together or belong to the same organisation.

This is a fun activity which encourages delegates to become creative with their ideas and share them with others. They will learn the value of quick thinking and quick judgement since sometimes you may need to rely on gut instincts to cut your search space and save time looking for solutions. If the delegates know each other or are from the same organisation, a common problem can be chosen as the main topic which helps them to use this exercise to brainstorming the problem.

This fun and creative exercise allows participants to work within a team and brainstorm different ideas to come up with the right answer.

This simple yet engaging energiser is suitable for all age groups but is ideal for 8 to 15 years old. This creative game can serve as a good energiser or even an icebreaker.

Psychologists have suggested a direct link between the way you recall an event and the way you are questioned about it. The structure of the questions and the wordings are critical. Numerous studies on eyewitness recalls show that witnesses remember differently depending on how they are asked. In this exercise, delegates will get a hands-on experience of differences created as a result of asking different questions. This will encourage them to pay more attention to the way they ask questions and thereby improve their communication skills.

It is 2075. You are on Mars. A strong solar radiation took out your communication and computer electronics and disconnected you from the rest of the world. You have no idea what happened to others on Earth and must simply carry on surviving since you might be the only humans alive.

You are now faced with many tasks, one of which is preservation of human knowledge, culture and know how. You are in the team that works on dictionary restoration. With great difficulty, you have been able to salvage some data from the toasted hard-drives. Unfortunately, the index table that connects the words with their definitions is lost.

You have a series of words and definitions and your job is to find out which word correlates with which definition.

Sometimes you need to give your delegates a creative exercise as an icebreaker which is also entertaining. The following gets people to laugh a lot but it also teaches them about the power of positive and negative narrative. The exercise encourages the delegates to speak in imaginative ways and promotes their creativity.