Is your New Year’s Resolution to increase your personal productivity? Practical advice to turn an average workday into an incredibly productive day. . .

1. Let everyone know

Interruptions destroy focus and kill productivity. So are the guilt trips your family “sometimes unintentionally” lay on you. Let colleagues and family know you’re planning a “project day.” Tell key customers too. Announce you will be tied up on, say, Tuesday, and that you will respond to calls and emails on Thursday. Let people know who to contact in an emergency. Some will get with you before Tuesday, and the rest will make a mental note you’re not available. In either case, you’re covered.

Plus you get the “peer pressure” benefit: When you tell people you plan to finish a project you will be more likely to see the job through. Peer pressure can be positive motivation harness it.

2. Set a target

Don’t plan your project day based on fuzzy parameters like, “I will stay at it as long as possible,” or, “I won’t leave until I no longer feel productive.” Those approaches give you an easy out. Commit to working for as long as you estimate it will take. Pick a number.

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Just returned from you holiday? – How to beat your post-holiday blues. . .

With the summer period now firmly behind us and with autumn encroaching much sooner than we had expected, how do you get back into your routine pre-holiday?

Here are ten tips to help dispel those post-holiday blues. . .

1.  Accept that the holiday is over
2.  Jump back into your routine
3.  Say hello to the boss
4.  Work through your post-holiday blues
5.  Write a to-do list
6.  Take some exercise
7.  Catch up with your team
8.  Think big thoughts …
9.  … and try to make some of them happen
10.  Book another holiday

Helen
Management Today (Sept 2011)

Goal Setting in Coaching – getting people excited about what they can achieve

Setting goals in coaching conversations is vitally important. If done well it can release energy and motivate the coachee to generate new ideas and solutions to solve current problems.

Coaching managers can support individuals in generating goals that excite and motivate them. By creating positive emotions around these goals, individuals are more likely to evoke new ideas and novel solutions. Such positive emotions can expand the individual’s thought-action repertoire. When engaging in coaching conversations as managers, it is therefore important to consider how we go about getting people really excited about their goals.

Read the full ‘Goal Setting’ article by clicking here

Siobhan

Developing objectives participants care about

Props/materials:

You need a collection of cards, of lots of different kinds of visuals.

Method:

1. Outline the workshop objectives and the content you’ll cover to achieve them
2. Ask your participants to think about their own personal objectives for the workshop
3. Then ask them to select a card which, for them, links to their objective
4. Get them in two lines, opposite each other, in ‘speed-dating’ format
5. Ask them to describe their objective to the person opposite, and to say how their card visual links to that objective
6. The other person is only allowed to say “and is there anything else?” about the objective, 2-3 times
7. Then move them on, until each person has spoken to 3 or 4 others

Result:

What you’ll get from this are much more developed objectives that participants will be emotionally invested in, not just the usual cerebral stuff.

Good luck!

Jennifer

What to delegate and when to get involved

If you’re not certain about what work or decisions to delegate, or when you should be involved, use the ‘Decision Tree’ developed by Susan Scott in her book, Fierce Conversations. This helps you maximise what you can delegate, while minimising the risk.

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Delegation

These days many managers and leaders are doing far too much. As a result, they don’t have the time to do what only they can do: look well ahead and do the strategic thinking that is so essential in difficult, changing times. To make the time, they need to delegate more, but many people are nervous about how to delegate without risking disaster.

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