CLSIG event on Time Management

I attended this (months ago) because I felt that although I had my work life fairly sorted, my home life could use a hand. This was particularly so at the time as I was in the midst of moving and had had two holidays.

I thought it was an interesting event particularly to get a different perspective on the whole thing from Susie Kay who was speaking. She was also looking at it from a risk management and reputation management perspective.

She outlined her system which, to be honest, seemed overly complicated given that I was happy with how my current work system went and it was far too much for a home.

She advocated mind mapping which is so far from being me that I just ignored that. Most of her advice was fairly obvious but good as a reminder (e.g. to open, deal with and file or bin emails and post). She mentioned how hard it can be if someone is off sick or absent and they didn’t organise themselves properly as it means it is harder for others to take on the work. This lead to her suggesting formally writing procedures etc. I’m sure this is a great idea but where does anyone find the time to write up everything that they do?
She also suggested planning half an hour of spare time every day for the inevitable stuff that comes up which is probably one that I will implement.

She ran us through the quadrant thing of important, urgent, not and not and got us to allocate our tasks to the various corners. She also showed us what her day book looks like which was interesting but a bit wasteful on paper as she uses in a day what I do in a week. She has the left page divided into nine squares in which she makes notes during phone calls and similar and the right looks more or less like this:

Name Priority Time Who can help Deadline


I stole the idea of using the left hand page – I used to just leave it blank and now I write meeting notes on it which is great.

I guess although I didn’t really apply much of what she spoke about, it did make me think:

1. You should have a tidy desk to give a good impression
2. You can’t ‘manage’ time as there are only twenty four hours in a day
3. It is all about priorities

Now at the time, I didn’t think much of this but as I mulled over it, I realised that what I was doing and my priorities weren’t exactly lined up and that I was clearly spending more time on work and professional development than I should. This is something I’ve been working on over the months since this event and I feel like I’m much more balanced but there is still more to be done:

- Desk could be tidier (especially drawers)
- Need to try to put a deadline onto all work (at the moment I list & sometimes add a date in a box but not consistently)
- Need to really think about my goals
- Need to continue to implement the systems I’ve read about since this event.