This exercise helps delegates to become more aware of what they have and therefor appreciate where they are and how they are living. In our quest to become better and grow, we sometimes forget what we have or what we have achieved that we didn’t have before. Thinking of them periodically helps us to monitor our progress, become more confidence, happy and energetic. This is not a group exercise. Delegates can do this on their own.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of several key principles, such as “Parkinson’s Law” as well as managing their performance in the face of change or increasingly challenging environments. It is also useful for teamwork, decision making, leadership and creativity. You can use this exercise to teach “Parkinson’s Law” in a time management course.

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.

In this exercise, delegates explore the implications of stress and how it affects their workflow. In 1936, Hans Selye carried out extensive research on stress. He found that the body goes through 3 stages during distress:

• The body is alarmed
• The body’s resistance is increased
• The duration of the distress causes exhaustion.

These three stages are present in any stressful activity. If we want to get over our stress and reduce its impact, it is ideal to know which one of these is causing most of the problem so we can take steps to improve it.

This exercise uses a simple example to demonstrate the three phases.

This uplifting exercise can be used as part of a stress management course or any other training session where delegates are more likely to be stressed or under pressure. The activity encourages a proactive approach to problem solving and therefore can effectively reduce stress levels.

This is a fun activity which can be used as an energiser or icebreaker within any group of people. The physical movement associated with this exercise makes it ideal for long training sessions where participants have to sit down for a long time.

Deadlines are a fact of modern life and professionals in just about any role need to be able to efficiently deal with them. However, people deal with deadlines in different ways based on their personality. Deadlines can be stressful and the way people deal with this stress usually comes to define their success and subsequently the success of the team, especially when things go wrong. This article shows why everyone, team members or managers, must be aware of these differences and make decisions based on this knowledge.

The purpose of this team building exercise is to recognise similar values within the team and understand the importance of matching values in reducing stress at work place.

This activity is suitable for delegates from the same organization who work together at least some of the time.