Sticky Learning Lunches #42: Think You Don't Need to Attend This Webinar?

This 7-part model will help you to find out what is wrong with your time management.

You will learn:

- Each of the 7 parts of the time management system.

- How each part is essential to creating an effective time management system.

- The holes that are exposed in your time management system by not having any one of the 7 pieces.

- Practical tips to incorporate any one of the 7 parts of the time management system.

- The strengths and weaknesses of your time management system.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Oh God, there we are. Congratulations we made it. Welcome to Monday. Excited to be here. Excited to be sharing. Excited to see so many wonderful, beautiful people already. We're just as always gonna wait for the last few people just to arrive in the room, get themselves ready. Abby, thank you for being here. Colin, as always appreciated. Fabian, wonderful to see you again. Tim, Victoria, thank you so very much. I'm just looking down at the list of people coming into the room.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's Monday, it's beautiful weather outside. I hope you have sunshine where you are, so you give it 30 seconds. Good afternoon, Darren. On a scale of one to 10, for all your wonderful people that are here, how are we feeling about this week? One terrible, 10, fully, you know, primed. Ready to go? How are we feeling about this week? Got some tens. Got some eight. Strong nine. Nice, strong nine. What, what's stopping it from being a 10? Victoria? If it's a strong nine, what would make it a 10?

Improve your time management skills

 

Darren Smith:

Good.

Nathan Simmonds:

To see you, Rihanna. Thank you for joining. I hope I pronounced that right, not having so many back to backs. Agreed. We've talked a little bit about that inside the time management side of things. Let's just make, you know, one thing we can be making sure is know, giving ourselves a little bit of breather to decompress from one meeting and declutter. And then get those things off, you know, captured on the right lists, uh, and and stored in the right way. And then give us those a few minutes to get to the next session. So actually we've got a clear mind.

Nathan Simmonds:

Next week is better. Nice. Good. Let's dive in. Gotta make sure I've got all the right pens in the right places. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning and the provider of leadership development and soft skills to the grocery and manufacturing industry. Idea of these lunches is to give you 20 to 30 minutes of micro learning is gonna help you be the best version of you in the work that you do from wherever you are right now, whether that's at home or whether that is that you've returned to the office or that you are, you know, in the middle of those two spaces.

Nathan Simmonds:

Just some core content that's is gonna help you raise your awareness, raise your thinking, and raise your impact. So first things first, let's get you set up for success. As always, mobile phones, let's make sure they are on flight mode. Little airplane is lit. Zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention. Also, as always, fresh page, fresh thinking. Let's make sure you've got a nice clean sheet there so that you can document your thinking. Top of that page, you're gonna write keepers and these are the things that you wanna remember, that you want to be reminded of so you can reignite that new thinking when you go back and reread it.

Nathan Simmonds:

Drinks, I've got my herbal tea here. Make sure you're hydrated and you're keeping the brain lubricated. Before we even dive into this, I'm gonna make sure that I do this now with you right now. If you have not signed up for tomorrow's session, the link for tomorrow's sticky learning lunch is gonna be in the chat box. Now, if you haven't registered, now is the time to go and make sure you are registered for tomorrow to make sure you are in the room live for hurdle number seven, as we bring time management to a close tomorrow.

Nathan Simmonds:

So that link's gonna be available in the box for you. I just wanna make sure you've got that link. You're primed ready for tomorrow, so you're gonna be receiving that information. Where are we going? I think that's everything. I think that's everything. I think we're prepped for today's session.

Nathan Simmonds:

What are we covering today? This is hurdle number six of the time management training session, which is all about scheduling and it's all about making sure that you are getting the right things in the right places so that you can take the action at the right time. Or we'd be reminded to take the action at the right time. Quick flow through what we've already covered. I'm gonna do this quite small because I've got quite a bit to cover up here. We've got capturing, these are the points where the information comes in, whether that's our email or text message, whatever that's coming in.

Nathan Simmonds:

The next thing here he says is emptying. Making sure we're clearing our capture points. We have deleting is making sure that we're stopping things from coming into that flow if we don't need it, 'cause it's wasting our time or making sure we're removing things that don't need to be there. Emptying then comes down to listing, making sure that we're taking things off of here and putting them into the relevant lists so we know where they are to take the action in here. We then have storing and then we also have over here. What we're gonna be covering today is our scheduling,

Nathan Simmonds:

And then we also have our action. So as the saying goes, all, all roads lead to Rome, but when it comes to time management, all roads lead to action. Okay, so these are the flow of the, of the seven hurdles we often experience and where they come in. And we've already covered a lot of of these and we're now getting into the scheduling side of things. The key part, and this is a lesson, a vital lesson that I've learned, uh, repeatedly in previous jobs and previous experience, is the first thing that we need to be looking at is making sure that we've got a centralized point.

Nathan Simmonds:

How many people here are managing more than one diary? Yes or no? If you're managing more than one diary, yes. Home and work good. Yes, yes. Good. Lots of yeses. Who here is manage them? Managing them on separate systems? So both of those diaries, those calendars are completely separate of each other, yes or no? Yes. Yes. Who here then has experienced a challenge in those where you've forgotten to put one thing on the other and you've caused yourself a double booking? Yes or no? Yes. Yes. .

Nathan Simmonds:

And it is frustrating. Um, a because you know, it's your own actions that of caused this to happen. It was an oversight, um, caused by yourself in this. There is no one else to blame there, you know, it is because you then feel you maybe let the other person down because of that, that, that lack of foresight or you know, the ability to, to sync those two elements, who hears experience, these emotions come that are coming up when they've been in this experience. Yes or no, it's painful and it's a painful lesson to keep learning.

Nathan Simmonds:

So what we talk about is, or the ideal is that we have our capture points, we empty them, and when we want to get 'em into a schedule that we have a centralized point where we can see everything that's going on. We want to give ourselves as much support as possible in making sure that we can take the, all the actions we need to get done. The moment that we start to separate things and we start to pull them apart, it becomes just that little bit more difficult because we're having to constantly look at two things and try and calibrate what's going on to make sure we take the right action.

Nathan Simmonds:

This make sense so far? And I'm just gonna just check on my slides in a minute because I'm gonna share my screen in a second. I'll give you a prime example. Previous job that I was working in, um, and I've been working in, in multiple, um, there's multiple elements of the work that I do. I was working full-time, pretty much over here. Um, I'm also working as a trainer. This was some time ago. Um, with MBM, I'm also running my own business over here, but I'm trying to manage two different diaries because I've got the work diary over here for the day job.

Nathan Simmonds:

And then I've also got my extra, um, responsibilities over here as I've started to transition. And I'm trying to keep certain things separate because this is my diary, this is my work, this is what, you know, and this is the, this is the day job. And then what would happen is I would have something coming over here, but because it wasn't in front of me on my, um, where I was on my nine to five, reminded me at lunchtime that I would be doing this.

Nathan Simmonds:

I would then fall down over here and a prospective client. I be then late for that conversation or the conversation wouldn't happen. And then I'd be frustrated at myself because I actually haven't, you know, delivered on the promise that I said to them, you know, I haven't set an expectation clearly with them or I've got something over here, you know, in my personal diary that's outside of, you know, the nine to five. It might be a webinar or some training that I'm doing within that clashes with something that's going on over here on the home diary.

Nathan Simmonds:

We know with what's going on with my daughter. So maybe I was meant to be taking my daughter to dance class, but actually there's a live training that I need to be in. Okay, there's a problem here. So we start to see by having these three structures in place, or these three points that I had,