Weekly Training Booster #2: Improve Your Time Management Skills

Join Andy Palmer and Darren A. Smith in the second episode of the Weekly Training Booster. This episode was about how to improve your time management skills with frogs, badgers, and woolly mammoths. Plus, the 7 hurdles of time management.

You Can Read the How to Improve Your Time Management Skills Episode Transcript Below:

Andy:

Good stuff. Okay. Welcome to this week's MBM weekly training booster. Good afternoon, or good morning, depending on when you're watching this video. I'm Andy from MBM here with my colleague Darren. Today, we're talking about how to improve your time management skills. So for me, this is certainly the skill that unlocks all others. If we get this stuff right with a solid foundation to our core time management principles, everything else just magically falls into place. So let me throw that out there. Darren, how would you more better define time management?

Darren A. Smith:

Time management for me is the king of skills. It's the key that unlocks the door. If you can get this one wrong, you can be a great influencer, a great negotiator, all those things, but if you haven't got any time managed, then A, you don't really know what you're here trying to achieve ultimately, and B, you probably can't do it because you're all over the place. And you don't look like a credible confident leader. You're not really prepared for your negotiations. Your [inaudible 00:01:05] is done, but it's natural, it's not prepared, it's not improved. So for me, it's the key that unlocks all the doors. And it's the one that a lot of people chase and never get right.

Andy:

Okay, cool. And if I was to throw it out there, just because I find it a little bit contentious. You can't manage time, but you can manage the things that you do within that time. What's your view on that kind of thinking?

Episode 2 discusses how to improve time management skills

 

Darren A. Smith:

Well, I love the phrase that goes time flies, but the good news is you're pilot. Which is quite nice and that suits my right brain thinking. If I had my way I'd call it stuff management, not time management. Because you cannot manage time, you can only manage all the stuff. And when I say all the stuff, in our head, we don't have work and home, we have things. So you have to manage both the home and the work stuff together. So when you've got a to-do list, it has a home and work on it. It's not like, I'm at work, I'm at home. And particularly now that we're all mostly working from home, although we might go back, it's stuff, you've got to manage all the stuff.

Andy:

I think it makes good sense. I kind of liked the term stuff because actually it doesn't matter if it's big or it's small, where that that can then take us then is how we then prioritize that stuff. And one of the best things I learned over the years was then how to prioritize the important stuff first, because I think we've seen it so often, people just tend to get the quick fun and easy done first. If we were to look about how you can improve your time management skills, not you personally, but how people can improve their time management skills, what for you would be that single simple, but yet powerful suggestion?

Darren A. Smith:

What I see, and particularly we're pretty good on Google, is I see a lot of people searching for time management tips. They're looking for the really small, easy win that makes the bigger difference. And here's the bit that they're going to hate me for, it doesn't exist. Now for someone who used to be rubbish at time management that had to learn it over 15 years, I know it doesn't exist because I've tried them all. So unfortunately this stuff is about mindset. And the one I'd like to share with people is eat that frog. So it came from a phrase of, if you do the biggest horriblest thing first, the frog, then the rest of the day is going to be easy. And as someone who does it,