Management and Leadership

Maximize Productivity: Manage Your Time, Maintain Focus, and Set Priorities

• Traditional Classroom: 1-day
• Virtual Instructor-led: Two 3-3.5 hour sessions; Three 2-hour sessions

Do you drive your day, or does it drive you? Are you continually fighting fires and responding to other people’s emergencies without having time to do what you value most? In today's world of continuous partial attention, owning your time and following through on your own priorities can seem impossible at times.

Interweaving research from neuroscience, psychology, and biology with hands-on practice, this course is highly interactive. You’ll get the opportunity to: analyze how you currently spend—and waste—time; define your governing values and set goals aligned with them; and prioritize your time and energy in order to maximize your productivity. Working individually and collaboratively, you’ll experiment with techniques ranging from tactical to strategic that will put you back in the driver’s seat of your workday… and your life.

Target Audience

This course is targeted toward anyone who has ever struggled with setting goals, managing time, or maintaining focus and productivity at work.

Learning Objectives

• Explain the psychological and physiological impacts of “switch tasking” and disruptions.
• Leverage a scientific model to determine your hours of peak productivity.
• Set priorities based on goals aligned with your governing values.
• Decompose goals/projects into smaller executable tasks.
• Practice task and goal prioritization using real-world examples.
• Utilize various tools and techniques for planning and managing time.
• Create a personal time management and organization plan.

Pre-Course Work

Assignment: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

• Watch this TED Talk by Tim Urban and be prepared to discuss it in class.

Course Outline

Opening Activities

• Course Goal and Objectives
• Activity: Time Management Spectrogram
• Participant Expectations

Module 1: Who Owns Your Time?

• Exploring Your Current Workload
• Personal SWOT Analysis on Time Management and Prioritization
• Unpacking the Myth of Multitasking
• Interruption Science and Productivity
  • The Costs of Disruption
    • Mental
    • Physiological
    • Tangible (Quality of Work Product and Performance)
• Determining Your Peak Productivity Time
• Sharpening Your Focus

Module 2: Defining Goals and Setting Priorities

• Identifying Your Governing Values
• Setting SMART Goals Aligned with Your Values
• Creating Priorities Based on Your Goals
  • Pair-Wise Comparison Technique
• Allocating Your Time to Reflect Your Priorities
• Reflection and Sharing in Pairs

Module 3: Time Management Tools and Techniques

• Video: Covey’s “Big Rocks” Principle
• Task “Chunking” (Decomposition) and List Making
• The Secondary Gains of Procrastination
• The Eisenhower Time Management Matrix
  • Identifying Your Time Wasters
  • Mapping the Quadrants
• Additional Time Management Techniques
  • The Pomodoro Technique
  • The S.T.I.N.G. Technique
  • Apps and Online Tools

Module 4: Taking Action!

• Activation Energy and Mel Robbins’ 5-Second Rule
  • Bias Toward Action
  • The Progress Principle
  • Internal Locus of Control
• Creating Your Personal Action Plan

Extend Your Learning

Continue the Learning Journey

• In class we will share a variety of learning assets to guide you in learning more, including suggested podcasts, videos, white papers, articles, and books.

MDP2028 Course Code