Hi there, and

welcome to Work Smarter, Not Harder. This is time management

training for
your personal and your professional productivity. I'm Margaret Meloni,
and it is really my
honor to lead you through this course. After you complete our time
together,
you are going to be able to describe the difference between
productive versus unproductive work. You will know three ways a plan
helps to make you more productive. You're going to learn how to break
your work into manageable chunks. You're going to be able to
determine your high priority tasks. You're going to learn the definition
of work/life balance, and you'll know how you actually really
truly do spend your time. And also you're gonna learn
how to estimate your work so you know how long it's going
to take you to do things. You're gonna identify your most and
least productive times of day. This is really about you and
you getting the most from your time. I hope that sounds good because
it's
time for us to get going, so let's go. I'm not gonna promise you that
after you finish this course you'll never work overtime again. But if you
do the work in this course,
you're gonna find approaches that can support your personal and
professional productivity. And when you do find yourself working
overtime, you're gonna be able to do so in a much more efficient manner.
Wouldn't that be nice? Have you ever had a day when
you're absolutely busy busy busy from the minute you woke up until the
minute you fell into bed and fell asleep? And at the end of this super
busy
day do you know what you did? Or was it one of those days where you
know
you worked, you know you worked hard all day, you know you're tired,
but you're
not exactly sure where your time went? Well if you worked and worked
all day
long, and you're not 100% certain at where your time went, you might
have
been engaged in unproductive work. Sorry to tell you. How can there
even be such
a thing as unproductive work? Isn't all work good? Another phrase or
term for
unproductive work could also be busy work. You were doing something.
You weren't lounging, but you weren't
completing the work that was really gonna further your goals right at
that time. You weren't completing
the work that really needed to be completed right at that time.
Sometimes this means you get distracted
by something that is work related but not related to the task at hand.
Maybe you start looking for some information that you
do not need until later. Let's take a look. Consider the following
scenario. It's noon on a Friday afternoon, and
Sam plans to leave the office at 5 P.M. Before Sam leaves he needs to
complete a report for his boss. The report's gonna take two hours. It's
due at 3 P.M.
He needs to write a status report. That's due at 5 P.M.
and will take 30 minutes. He also wants to go through some
emails he's been saving and make sure that he has
addressed them appropriately. He's not sure how long
that is going to take. So Sam goes to lunch and returns at 1 P.M.
He begins to go through his emails. And he reads an email from a
coworker
asking him to research some sales numbers. The email says, Sam, when
you have time,
would you look these numbers for me? They don't balance, and I need to
discuss them with our
vice president next Thursday. Sam begins to look at the sales numbers.
The numbers don't make sense, and he
doesn't know where the numbers came from. So he begins to look
through sales
reports from the past six months in hopes of deciphering how
these numbers were created, and he works very hard tracing
each month into the next, looking to see if he can find
any errors or miscalculations. The phone rings, and Sam picks it up. And
as he does,
he notices that it's 4 P.M., and his boss is calling him about
the report that was due at 3 P.M. Sam had become so
engrossed in researching the sales numbers that he had not even started
the report
yet nor had he started his status report. Oops. Sam had engaged in some
unproductive work. Sam didn't need to look
up the numbers yet. That is work that he could've
completed next week. Remember the email said next Thursday. He
became distracted, and he didn't
work on his two priorities for the day. Now Sam's probably staying late.
How would you have prioritized
Sam's Friday afternoon? Perhaps Sam could've arranged
his Friday afternoon like this. Okay, number one,
create the report for his boss. Number two,
create a status report for his boss. Number three, go through emails and
respond or
prioritize actions from those emails. Something that would've made
Sam's
life easier is if he had a plan. So if Sam had created a plan to
get through his Friday afternoon, and if he had stuck to his plan, he
probably wouldn't be working
overtime on a Friday evening. Let's think of some ways the plan
would have been helpful for Sam. Well, the plan would have shown
what
to do and in what order to do it. It would have shown
when something was due, and it would help him to assess
any new requests as they came in. And then this last thing I'm
gonna tell you sounds weird, but the plan would help Sam change his
plans. That sounds kind of crazy. How is it that a plan helps
you change your plans? Change is gonna come, and
when it does it's good to be able to look at your original plan and
see what was going to happen. And that way you can understand what
will happen to the rest of the work now that you've been
asked to make a change. Let's go back to Sam, and now take a look
at how this might work out for him. Sam's plan for Friday afternoon.
From 1:00 to 3:00,
he was gonna complete the report. 3:15 through 3:45,
finish the status report. From 4:00 to 4:45,
go through emails and respond or prioritize actions from those emails.
With this plan, Sam would have completed
his work in the right order and at the right time. He would have handed
things in on time,
and he would've been able to go home on
time which would be nice on a Friday. And when he encountered the
request from
his coworker about the sales reports, Sam would already have taken care
of his
most important work for the afternoon. At that point he could have
decided whether he wanted to get into that research of those sales
numbers or finish going through emails and carve out some time to go
through
the sales reports on Monday. Let's say that Sam's boss calls
him at 1:30 on Friday and says, Sam,
I need your status report early. I need to go give the status
to our vice president at 3:30. Now what should Sam do? Well Sam
knows, because he has a plan,
that it will take him an hour and a half to finish the report and
that it's due at 3:00. And if he does this he might complete
his status report exactly at 3:30, if he transitions right to the status
report without taking a break. So, what do you think he should do? One
approach would be for
Sam to put the report on hold and transition to his status. He could
complete the status
at approximately 2 P.M. Maybe he should say 2:15 just to be safe,
and then he could resume the report. And if he does this,
it would not be unreasonable for him to ask his manager if the 3 P.M.
report could be turned in at say 3:45 or 4:00, and then this way he's able
to make
these suggestions because he has a plan. Each day, each week, have a
plan. Know what you want to accomplish and
what you need to accomplish. We've been discussing work, but you
know
it never hurts to have some plans for your personal time. Now some
people don't like the idea
of planning their personal time. It's an individual call. It's your
preference. And I'm not saying plan
every minute of every day. I am suggesting that if you have something
specific you want to accomplish, a plan is what's gonna help get you
there. There are all kinds of time management
systems, and you can use them. I'm not standing here with
a preference for one or the other. And the purpose of this course is not
to sell you a time management system. Sometimes your employer will
provide a time management system or send you to time management
training,
and if they do, go and pay attention and
consider what is presented to you. It's possible that your employer has
this
preference for this specific system, and when this is true, it's really in
your best interest to
try to learn their system of choice. Otherwise, don't feel
compelled to use a system just because everyone says
it's the best system. The best system is the one that helps
you to be productive and effective. That's really the bottom line. What
really goes into your plan
that's part of this system? Well in many ways,
your plan is your task list. Rather than just write down things to do,
you want to organize them. You wanna organize them by priority, due
date, steps that need to be taken, start date, who is it for, how long is it
gonna
take, what information, what do you need? And that's what's gonna
help you stay on plan. In your sample work plan you might have
something like priority, the item, a description of what it is you're doing,
a due date, the name of who it's for,
the steps that have to be taken, an estimate of how long, and
when you're going to get it started. And that right there
could be your work plan. And you could create a table and
a quick template and use it. And test it! And see what works for you and
what doesn't work for you.