Advanced Time Management

“Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant PERSISTENCE.”

Napoleon Hill

Do you suffer from having to deal with too many e-mails? Do you follow a task management system, but still get overwhelmed by all the tasks that need doing? Do you suffer from information overload? Do you constantly feel like you want to check your social media site right in the middle of work? Do you attend too many time-wasting meetings and wish you could somehow avoid them?

The secret to keeping an effective time management system is to constantly review it and make sure you don’t gradually fall back to bad habits. This course provides a series of advanced guidelines for those who want to push the boundaries and stay on top of their workloads. It follows from Intermediate Time Management assuming that delegates already have a system of time management in place and are familiar with fundamental productivity techniques. Usually, anyone who is in need of an advanced course on productivity is likely to be a knowledge worker. The course specifically caters for their needs providing numerous examples, case studies and ways to take advantage of what technology can offer.

"Where was it, I can't find it. I just put it here 5 minutes ago..."

This course is designed to encourage discussions among delegates so not only they can benefit from the guidelines provided but also from each other. Many people develop tricks or come across useful time saving tips. The course is carefully designed to maximise this interaction so delegates can constantly learn new materials during the course.

The course focuses on two aspects of productivity; attitude adjustment and environmental engineering. Correct attitude helps an individual filter through tasks and focus on what matters the most. Environmental engineering helps individuals free their mind from tracking mundane tasks and instead focus on critical activities. This allows users to constantly focus on goals and push forward through the clutter encountered in day-to-day life.

It is assumed that delegates are familiar with GTD (A popular system of time management known as Getting Things Done from David Allen). Here, this topic is expanded and various advanced guidelines are provided.

How to Get Rid of Bad Habits?

In this highly practical course participants will learn:

Define Goals

• How to have goal-oriented thinking
• How to formulate your goals
• What is important to focus on and what should be left out?
• What does it mean to place yourself first?

Eliminate Unnecessary Stuff

• What is the grand rule of productivity?
• What are two fundamental laws of productivity that can significantly help you get more done?
• What is the secret to success and how knowing this can make you more productive?
• How many different ways can you delegate a task
• How to increase the efficiency of your phone conversations
• Is there a way other than multi-tasking to save time?

Handling Meetings

• What strategies can you use to increase productivity while attending meetings?
• How can you avoid face-to-face meetings to increase productivity?
• When and how to use alternative methods of communication?

Managing Your Habits

• Why people develop a bad habit?
• What does it mean to be disciplined?
• How can you be disciplined?
• How to use a 6-Steps technique to eliminate a bad habit
• How to beat the urge of falling back to bad habits

Automate Everything

• What can be automated and why this matters?
• How to implement a universal task management system
• What are the critical points to consider when considering such a system?
• How to take advantage of automatic reminders to program yourself
• How to log your life and why is this significant
• Digital or paper; what are the advantages and disadvantages of each type to manage tasks or log your life?
• How to control and engineer your internet browsing habits

Advanced GTD

• How to make sure tasks don’t get stuck in your “Next Actions” list
• How to stop procrastinating and get things done
• How to formulate actions
• When and how to review your GTD time management system

Managing E-mails

• When is the ideal time to respond to e-mails?
• How to prioritise and filter emails to reduce time spent handling unnecessary e-mails
• How to process e-mails? What are your options after reading an e-mail
• What are the fundamental productivity principles of e-mail management?
• What is an ideal folder structure and e-mail workflow?
• How to minimise slow moving e-mail conversations
• How to manage e-mail when you are on the move

Audience: Anyone. Familiarity with GTD is required for certain parts of the course. A trainer can cover this quickly for those who are not familiar with this subject.

Prerequisites: Time Management (This covers introduction to GTD)

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Advanced

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Re-evaluate and simplify your goals to increase your productivity
• Focus on what is most important and use techniques to simplify everything to boost your productivity
• Use a series of techniques to save lost time in meetings and use alternative means of communication according to your needs
• Use a step-by-step technique to replace your bad habits with good habits and increase your productivity
• Automate your notes and tasks, program yourself for good habits, engineer your environment and monitor yourself to increase efficiency
• Improve your current time management system using advanced GTD techniques on action formulation, periodic review and prioritization
• Process e-mails systematically using advanced e-mail management techniques such as automation, task management, filtering and frequency control

People who want to become successful need to know how to manage their time well. They will always have some kind of a system to deal with day-to-day tasks. The purpose of this course is to help participants review their current systems and fine tune it using various productivity techniques. It is designed to get the delegates discuss their techniques with each other centred on certain critical topics as presented in the course.

Your role as a trainer in this course is to facilitate these discussions and guide delegates as necessary. We can always become better and faster at what we do. What stops us is sometimes knowledge of shortcuts that can be used to reprogram our behaviour. These shortcuts, though small, can come to make a huge difference in both productivity and satisfaction. This course is full of such tips and techniques which through the power of association will help delegates think of more techniques and shortcuts and share these with each other. This is why it is critical for you, as a trainer, to facilitate these discussions in a somewhat free flow manner so delegates can get the most from them.

I am fed up with reading so many e-mails!

Since this is an advanced course, several exercises are provided to help delegates apply the guidelines in the course to their current systems such as task management or e-mail management. For these parts you need to ask them to bring their system (such as a laptop with Microsoft Outlook) so they can go through the exercises provided in the course. Trainer guidelines are included so you know what to ask them and how to pace the course. Alternatively, you can provide a common setup for delegates, such as PCs with Outlook, so they can implement the guidelines in these test environments and learn how to apply them to their own systems later on after the course.