Encouraging Responsible Conversations
Collaborating with You to Achieve.
Improving any busy person's effectiveness
 Feeling stretched?You deserve attention too. When do you allocate time for your own goals and desires? |
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 Is time disappearing?Perhaps it is time to be tracking where it is disappearing to. How do you know it is being used to drive the results you want? |
 Reflect on what you are doing...To be a manager or leader, soft skills are really important and being a reflective practitioner is a key skill to learn. How well are you practising it yourself? Having a coach, or acting as a coach automatically allocates time for this. |
 Reflect on what you are doing.To be a manager or leader, soft skills are really important, and being a reflective practitioner is a key skill to learn. How well are you practising it yourself? Having a coach automatically builds time for this. |
 Others stretching you too much?Time to assert your needs perhaps? Or to assert others' responsibilities? |
 Too many deadlines?The clock is chasing all of us but who sets the deadlines? |
 Reflect, Understand and TransformOur brains are central to all decision-making. In addition, what we feel through the heart, gut and other parts of the body, may also have some bearing. |
Busy people tend to like to do things themselves and can 'spin many plates'. It doesn't always mean they are as effective as they could be, but they perceive it is the best way to get things done. They may have a good reputation for getting stuff done. It is their expertise.
For example, others may advise
- 'Ditch' some stuff - but they may not put the same value on some particular work or how it gets done. OR
- Delegate to others - but that requires a long term investment of training others to standards and may not feel realistic.
With 1:1 coaching, the aim is primarily to listen to you and tailor a personal system to manage what you do with your time. For example, if you're in a busy hamster wheel you've
- lost sight of your own needs
- are too much 'in your stuff' rather than 'objectifying your stuff'
Let's review the purpose of all effort, too. This is essential in the current complex workplace where we are being increasingly asked to do more with less, and perhaps even to take a more experimental approach. What does success (i.e. an effective personal management system) really mean to you?
Getting you started ....
Sometimes I run a workshop. Its outline is
1. Let's see where all your time goes? Try this questionnaire
2. Build some structure into your week
3. Explore tools to to record all your actual time - let's see what you currently use.
Possibly Timesum could help - if you need to experiment with the types of work that need to be tracked. You can easily change the task types you're recording time for: a few experiments will help you see whether high level or detail or something in between makes most sense.
Warning: this is a rough and ready tool for rough and ready experimenting!