life@work

Time Keeps on Slippin'

When everything appears to be spilling and leaking all over in my life, I notice how attracted I am to finding the perfect time management system.

Ideally I'll find one that also cleans my house.

Sue Shellenbarger wrote recently about her experiment with three different systems:

• Getting Things Done
• The Pomodoro Technique (requires buying a tomato shaped timer - fun!)
• FranklinCovey's Focus

There are pros and cons to each, and she has decided to use the elements from each that work for her.

I'm a huge fan of Leo Babauta's Zen To Done system as described in his E-Book. It's a simpler (and more Zen-like) approach to productivity than Getting Things Done, but with GTD influences.

For something a bit more radical, try changing your perception of time from a Newtonian approach (time is scarce) to an Einsteinian one (you are where time comes from).

Gay Hendricks outlines this concept and describes how adopting it can make you more productive in his new book, "The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level".

Another paradigm-shifting concept of your relationship with time is explained in Darlene Cohen's "The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way". Mindfulness plays a huge starring role in this approach.

I'm still experimenting with ways of relating to and managing my time that work best for me. 

I'm thinking about getting that tomato timer, in the meantime.

And I'm still waiting for my house to get clean.

I'd love to hear: What time management system works best for you? How long did it take for using it to become a habit?

photo by Robbert van der Steeg

The Six Easy Steps to Making Great Decisions

We make hundreds of decisions every day, most of them mundane.

• Which shirt should I wear?
• What about breakfast?
• Will I return that call first or send that email?

Most of us make it through these kinds of decision points with minimal angst.

But the really meaty, complex decisions - the ones that strongly impact our lives and affect people we care about - can stop us dead in our tracks, unsure and overwhelmed.

You know the ones I'm talking about:

• Should I quit this job and try to find something better?
• Do I want to change careers altogether, even though I've put 15 years into this one?
• Where do I start with a job search?

Procrastination

Many of my career coaching clients have put off making these decisions for months or even years because they can't figure out how to make them, and because they're scared of making a wrong decision which will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Of course intellectually they know that it's unlikely that any one decision will haunt them for the rest of their lives, but emotionally it often feels as though a lot is at stake.

The Guide

To help my clients get moving and make great decisions, I walk them through a six-step process that I created.

Now I've put those steps into a coaching guide: "The Six Easy Steps to Making Great Decisions", and you can download it for free when you visit my website.

To create this particular process, I synthesized techniques and approaches I've been using with clients for the last six years with evidence from psychologists and other scientists who study effective decision making.

This coaching guide offers you concrete steps you can begin to use immediately, along with real-world examples of how three of my clients used the six-step process to make their own great decisions.

The guide is a great tool you can use when you're ready to make a key decision but are feeling pretty clueless about where to start. Consider this your free starting point.

Consider it also as a invitation for you to make the very first decision - the decision to make a decision.

I would love your feedback on the coaching guide. Try it out on a key decision that has you feeling stuck, and let me know what happens!

heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Unemployed? Use Your Time to Learn Essential Skills

  If you're looking for work, you've probably been told to turn job seeking into a full-time job itself.

This message has its heart in the right place (i.e., get off the couch and turn off the TV), but in reality, I know few job seekers who literally spend 40+ hours per week in their job search efforts.

Unless you've got small children at home, chances are you've got a bit of extra time that you could spend in any number of ways - surfing the Net, buying groceries, planting bulbs, going to the gym.

But this time is your opportunity to learn essential skills that regularly you don't have time for that you've "always been meaning to get around to".

Online Degree Programs recently posted "100 Skills You Should Learn (for Free), While You're Unemployed" and I must say, there are some really good ones on this list.

A few of my personal faves:

• Expand your network
• Understand your emotional intelligence
• Cook
• Meditate
• Beat procrastination
• Overcome fear of failure
• Use Facebook productively
• Hack Google
• Prioritize
• Write better emails
• Handle rejection
• Use Twitter effectively
• Consider things from different points of view
• Negotiate

Admittedly, some of these skills take a lifetime of practice, and what better time to start on those than now?

I'd love to hear: What essential skills are you working on developing right now?

Photo by HTB, Creative Commons license