Time Management

In: Career, Time Management

With everyone working remotely, the demands on the day seemed to increase exponentially. Many people feel like they have lost control of their schedules with video calls back to back from dawn til dusk. Author Cal Newport proposes to time blocks in his book The Time-Block Planner: A Daily Method for Deep Work in a Distracted World. Schedule Breaks It is easy for the day to eat into lunch and coffee breaks when you don’t have to leave the house. Newport suggests that you make sure to schedule time in your calendar for lunch and breaks. Intentionally Allocate Your Time and Attention Set a regular time to plan your week, consider the best way to spend your working hours and map it into your calendar. Schedule blocks of focus time. When you are following the schedule “You know what you’re supposed to be doing, and you don’t want to fallContinue Reading

In: Career, Time Management

One of the first lessons taught to MBA students is ‘The Time Value of Money’ but the question is more personal when you consider the impact of money on your life. How much money is enough? How much time do I need to work? It is a divisive question that comes down to how you value two valuable resources – time and money. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy beer and that is a close second.. Unknown The flippant quote that money can’t buy happiness but can buy beer (or insert any other consumable here) is actually making the point quite aptly. It implies that chasing the money for its own sake can lead you to prioritising and losing sight of the importance of your own time even when you have the means to buy something you will enjoy. Back to the Time Value of Money its beenContinue Reading

In: Career, Effective Communication, Resilience, Time Management

There are lots of reasons where a meeting or group session that once might have been important and highly relevant stops being your top priority. When that happens you have to choose to be fully engaged or to break up with your commitments! It could be a regular social engagement, or a working group where you were included for ‘your perspective’, or maybe it is a voluntary activity that is no longer top of your list of priorities. We all have them, those meetings or events in our diaries that we are not really engaged in anymore, maybe you show up, but don’t really engage, other times we ghost the meeting by not showing up but not dropping off the invite list or admitting we were no longer attending. In this article Saunders explains why you should make a formal break and provides you with four steps to go aboutContinue Reading

In: Culture, Human Capital, Time Management

Synopsis of an Article from HBR by Maura Thomas, Published 14th May 2020 Maura Thomas is an award-winning international speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity, attention management and work-life balance. Synopsis: Remote work in the current world (affected by the COVID-19 pandemic) naturally leads to flexi time. Different employees will get work done at different hours, some will need to work around having children at home others will work longer hours. The downside of the ‘always-on’ environment is that it drives burn out and once this way of working is established in company culture its very difficult to change and reset later on. This article goes on to explain that you should ‘address the problem head-on’ make it clear on the workday expectations of employees and what is definitely not expected. Further provide clear guidelines about which communication channels to be used for which situations. Email should neverContinue Reading