Activities

Here are several activities for your attendees to do, which are related to this chapter. The activities begin at a more elementary level, with the second activity more intermediary, and the third for someone who has more advanced time management skills. But you can also have everyone do all three activities if you like. The benefit of having all the attendees do all three levels of activities is that they are getting two or three times the reinforcement of the ideas that they learned in this module. The negative aspect of having attendees do all three exercises is that it will take two or three times as long to complete the activities.

Activity 1

Make a list of time management challenges that you are currently facing. Next to that list, note whether you think that particular challenge is unique to your IT position, or if anyone and everyone deals with it.

Look over your answers and see whether you can group your IT-specific challenges apart from those that you would be facing, whatever field you were working in.

Activity 2

Think about the last time you felt that you were in total control of how you were spending your work and your personal time. When was that? What were you doing differently from what you are doing now? Was the office environment different? Were you performing a dissimilar job?

How can you recreate the conditions that aided your productivity?

Activity 3

Take out your smartphone and program your phone to go off in five minutes. If you do not have a timer on your phone, tell the group that you are going to stop them after five minutes. Ask them to sit and do nothing but think for the five minutes.

At the end of the five minutes, ask the group to share their answers to the following questions:

• How did you feel taking five minutes to "just think"? Was it comfortable? Uncomfortable? Stressful? Relaxing?

• When was the last time you had five minutes of uninterrupted thinking time?

• What did you think about?

• Would there be a benefit to building into your work day at least five minutes of uninterrupted thinking time?

• When and how will you implement that five minutes of thinking time if you agree this would be beneficial to your goal of improved time management?