Productivity
Training Exercises and Resources

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.

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.

By looking closer at their main tasks and goals as a team, this exercise enables delegates to examine and prioritise their team’s efficiency and direction towards its objectives. This activity is most suitable for smaller groups of people who usually work as part of a team.

This is a fun activity which encourages delegates to be more optimistic and find positive points about some situations often perceived negatively. This exercise works best as an energiser and generates some laughs.

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.

Procrastination is what we do when avoiding doing important things. We defer our decision or action to a different time. Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with anxiety associated with starting or completing an action. Procrastination also means that we overestimate difficulties associated with doing something or making a decision. As a result, we postpone our tasks hoping that at some point in the future we will find a better environment to deal with those difficulties. This error of judgement often proves costly as procrastination becomes a habit and this causes regret for the decision maker. Fear of failure, perfectionism, weak prioritisation, inability to make important decisions or emotional mood swings are other factors preventing individuals from doing what they should be doing at a suitable time.

Time management in effect refers to management of what we do about what is important to us. It is about achieving our goals in less time and with less effort. Time management skills are essential for increased productivity and success in both personal and professional life.

This articles explores a number of techniques you can use to quickly imporve your productivity, almost immidiately after you have finished reading the article!