Custom Search
Custom Search

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Uncover Your Time Wasters

(Refer for the most authentic articles on Building Leadership and Management: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia
Management Universe at:
http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)

Uncover Your Time Wasters

As trainers or seminar/workshop leaders, you can use this individual as well as participative exercise for your sessions/modules or programs on “time management”, “value adding management”, “effectiveness and efficiency improvement” etc. Rather than giving your participants a ready list of commonly known time wasters in one’s work place, allow the participants to introspect to uncover or discover their own time wasters. After they identify their time wasters you can ask them to work out their plan of action to minimize their time wasters.

To begin with, give your participants an explanation of what you mean by time wasters. Cite couple of examples of time wasters like:
  • Unnecessary meetings
  • Unclear instructions from the bosses
  • Overload of useless emails
etc.

Tell them that the examples you gave were just to illustrate the point. Now taking a clue from this, they should work out their own time wasters which they experience in their own work places. Each person should write down all the time wasters that he came across during past six months to an year that affected their work effectiveness and efficiency.

You may allow around twenty minutes to each participant to jot down his time wasters. Some participants may find themselves at a loss to identify their own time wasters or they may stop after writing only few reasons of wasting the time. Thus their lists may remain incomplete.

To facilitate them in completing their lists of time wasters in a more comprehensive manner, put them into groups. Randomly pick up 6 to 7 participants to form each group.

Now, in each group the group members should compare among themselves the lists prepared by them. This will prompt each member of the group to check out the items in the others’ lists which he did not include but those time wasters are applicable to him as well. By this process every member of each group will be able to extend his list of time wasters to make it more comprehensive.

Now each participant will shortlist two or three top most critical time wasters out of his entire list of time wasters. Ask the participants to make their own plan of action to minimize these two or three time wasters.

You will ask each participant to share his top two or three time wasters with the rest of the group by writing them on the white board/flip chart and presenting his plan action, At the end of all the presentations, the participants would have displayed on the white board/flip chart the most critical time wasters faced by them all. Group the common time wasters together.

As a faculty if you have more suggestions on how they can tackle their time wasters, share them with the participants.

Thank the participants and wind up your session on time wasters.

Get Hold of the Related Books
You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:
  1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
  2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
  3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
  4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
Related Reading: (Repository of a large number of articles in management and leadership): http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com and http://management-universe.blogspot.com

No comments:

Post a Comment