Sylvia Thompson attended a two-hour seminar on how to tackle that mounting backlog of work that haunts you
Are you often overwhelmed by the number of emails you receive? Do you find it difficult to juggle several work projects at once? Do you go home stressed at the end of your working day, unable to clear your mind when leaving the office?
If you answer yes to the above questions, then you need to learn some time management skills. And a new international programme, enticingly called Work Smarter, Not Harder, promises to help you do so. Run in Ireland by Dermot Rice and William Bruen, the programme is a day-long seminar, followed by a personal coaching session at your desk (for about 1½ hours) and ending with a half-day workshop.
Aimed at the "information worker", which Bruen claims the majority of workers now are, the seminar focuses on prioritising and delegating tasks, always with the aim of "touching each piece of information once".
A typical seminar begins with a look at what are called productivity pirates. These include emails, interruptions by colleagues or phone calls, technological breakdowns and unplanned or badly run meetings. Interruptions, emails and searching for information are the top three productivity pirates, according to Bruen who formerly worked in the computer hardware industry.
Being constantly driven by what is most urgent may sound like good time management but the Work Smarter, Work Harder programme encourages participants to leave time to plan and organise their schedules to allow them to see what can realistically fit into a working day. And, as a guide to deciding what is urgent and what is important, the experts suggest considering what the impact would be if it did not get done. Giving an example of poor time management, Bruen quoted a manager who had 11,500 emails in his inbox and spent 74 minutes each day looking through this filing system for information he needed. "We showed him how to architect a good filing structure in four hours which up to then, he said he did not have the time to do," says Bruen.
Full of buzz words such as firefighting (those who do so constantly are not in control of their work) and technologically up to date (suggesting workers use the computer package Outlook to manage their schedules), the Work Smarter, Not Harder programme is a paean to good time management. Although its slogan is "slow down, step back and establish just how smart you actually work" it does, in fact, feed right into the current work culture of always trying to get more out of your working day.
Another point that the programme perhaps ignores at its peril is the reality that communication difficulties and personality conflicts are often at the heart of low morale and inefficient work practices. And, learning how to clear your inbox efficiently may not help you sort out these more subtle, niggling time- wasting issues.
However, Rice and Bruen have plenty of satisfied customers.
For instance, senior managers at an electronics firm found their prioritisation and time management improved by almost 30 per cent after completing the programme. Their information management improved by almost 40 per cent and their delegation skills by more than 20 per cent.
Overall, they gained 58 extra minutes in their working days.
"It's vital that workers should be in control of their workload in order to be motivated, make good decisions, make realistic commitments and achieve more within a given time," says Rice who worked for American multinationals for 18 years before setting up the Irish franchise for Priority Management. The company also runs programmes on project management and selling techniques.
But, in all of this lies the aim to get a good work/life balance.
"The real goal is to help busy people work more effectively and go home on time," says Rice, whose own work/life balance has improved since setting up the company just over a year ago.
See also www.prioritymanagement.com/ireland