In het kort
On Tuesdays 4th and 18th of July the course Time Management & Personal Organization was given to ENTER employees.
For this course, the main audience was people who wanted to gain insights on methods and tools to be able to plan tasks and stick to it.
We ended up with a nice diverse group of colleagues working with various clients. This spread of experience and backgrounds always leads to interesting discussions because the entire group gets a broader perspective on various working environments. To be honest, it was quite a talkative group. Especially during the second/last session, Suzan (the consultant providing the course) had to skip at least one exercise to be able to finish on time (reduce scope to meet deadlines -> also big part of time management).
The course was divided in two sessions. The first one started with a introduction and explanation of the two evenings (including a “Get to know Bingo”. A Candan board was used by Suzan to provide a “ToDo, Doing and Done” overview during the course.
A number of slides and some theory later, the first exercise started. For this, we used Lego blocks to grade one’s activities on an average day on importance.
This was a nice introduction to a main message of the course; Time management is very closely related to one’s values. In almost all professions, priorities need to be selected. One’s values have a huge impact on that priority setting, which overall drives one’s planning.
After some more exercises and theory about values, we arrived at the subject “Planning” and categorizing tasks. An exercise followed about planning and the priority matrix.
The second evening for the Time management course was in general more focused on tools and evaluation of one’s own behavior. One exercise that was really interesting and fun was one where you would need to choose which character profile suited the most (e.g. procrastinator, grasshopper, perfectionist, doubter etc. etc.). This followed by a list of questions about that profile that were discussed with the entire group. This led to a lot of fun in the group due to excessive stereotyping based on the chosen profiles.
Next up we discussed how to use the available energy most efficiently and how to deal with procrastination. Some interesting discussion arose about the use of energy, which made it more clear that there is no “one size fits all” solution to time management. It is very much related to one’s character, values and preferences.
“Closure”: Doing : Done
