Manage Time Better

Everyone could benefit from a boost in creativity. Whether you're in marketing and advertising, management, or software development, all professionals need to be able to come up with original ideas and think outside the box every now and then. But sometimes the pressure to think creatively is the very thing that blocks the flow of fresh ideas and results in the type of procrastination that is an obstacle to efficient time management. This course focuses on the relationship between procrastinating and creativity. You'll learn about how the optimal amount of procrastination actually boosts creativity and efficiency. You'll also learn how to use creativity boosters to help you past those times when you procrastinate a little too much.

This course focuses on ways to prioritize your workload. It discusses how to prepare a useful to-do list and prioritize the items on it. The course also outlines how to sequence and queue tasks to help improve your time management. Finally, it describes how to estimate time frames so you can schedule your tasks effectively and meet your deadlines. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.

If you want to manage your schedule and make your time count, you have to be organized. But to stay organized, you need to check your progress. This mean developing schedule management skills. The stress and potential for mistakes grows when you don't spend time organizing your time. In this course, you'll discover how schedule management can help you regain control of your time. You’ll learn how to leverage your personality to boost your productivity and explore techniques for dealing with time stealers. And you'll learn how to create practical to-do lists and keep them relevant and realistic.

Too much to do and too little time? Everything is urgent? Modern technology means our employers can reach us 24/7, so schedule management and goal setting are more important than ever. When you're under pressure to deliver, you need to know your priorities. Meeting targets and achieving goals consistently regardless of the business situation isn't easy. And this means managing your time effectively. In this course, you'll learn about aligning each goal with your employer's expectations, clarifying your goals, and prioritizing your most important work. You'll also learn how to ask questions to clarify goals, and how to establish and schedule priorities based on these goals.

If you don't feel that you are the organized type, or if making lists or drawing up detailed plans doesn't come naturally, don't worry. There isn't just one way in which time can be managed effectively. This course will introduce you to several different techniques for improving your time-management skills--experiment with them, and then choose and apply the tools which best suit your own situation. In order to achieve anything it is important to establish goals. You need to know what you want to do, before you can decide how and when you are going to do it. You then need to establish deadlines. If these deadlines are unrealistically tight, your interest and commitment in the task may be undermined, or you may experience stress which can have a negative effect on your performance. Deadlines are important, but they have to be realistic. Making "To-do" lists is a useful technique, but you can end up feeling overwhelmed by the amount that has to be achieved in a day, a week or a month. It is vital to prioritize the tasks, and the Priority Matrix is a quick and effective way of sorting the urgent, from the less important. It is relatively easy to make changes to the way in which you work while you are concentrating on making improvements, but it can be much more difficult to sustain these improvements. Once you have taken better control of the way in which you manage time, you need to find ways of maintaining this control. The final lesson in this course will provide some suggestions as to how this can be done effectively.

Even if you know what's important to do, losing focus can stop your progress. No matter who you are or what job you do, focusing at work can be hard. Even with great schedule management and organizing skills, it's easy to get off track if you're not careful. In this course, you'll learn how to stay focused and stay on top of your schedule. You'll learn strategies for dealing with focus challenges and distractions at work. You’ll also find out how to beat fatigue, manage your time, and decline work-related requests. And you’ll explore how to adjust your focus to deal with change, and how to regain focus when you've lost it.

This Assessment Only course is a component of the SkillSoft Professional Advantage track Time Management and was designed for use specifically within that track.

In addition to personal skills such as problem-solving ability and communication skills, a business analyst must also possess a core set of professional competencies in order to do their job effectively. In this course, you'll learn about some of the professional competencies that are fundamental to business analysis, and which are featured in the business analysis body of knowledge (BABOK). You’ll explore the behavioral characteristics and business knowledge needed when analyzing the business challenges your organization must overcome. You’ll also learn about the analytics tools and technology knowledge necessary to carry out a detailed and useful business analysis.

Procrastinating can be a big obstacle to efficient time management. The good news is that there are ways to overcome a tendency to procrastinate. The trick is to figure out what your own personal reason is for putting off what you know you need to do. In this course, you'll discover what may be behind your tendency to procrastinate by learning the indicators. Then you'll explore many helpful techniques and strategies for dealing with procrastination and improving efficiency. There are four key areas covered in this course: improving focus, increasing self-motivation, taking action, and improving your ability to organize.

In this course, you'll consider how you're spending your time now and what techniques you can use to spend it more wisely and productively. You'll learn to block the time stealers that interfere with your productivity, use to-do lists and schedules to organize your time and tasks, and develop a regular habit of checking in with your plans to make sure you're getting them done.

Do you sometimes feel you have too much to do and not enough time to do it in? You aren't alone. It can be frustrating when you're expending a lot of energy but not sure you're doing it in the right places for the right reasons. Having goals is a good start. But do your goals align with your organization's goals for you? When goals shift and change and you don't know which are most important and to what degree you're supposed to be attending to them, it can get confusing. You have to be clear on where you're headed and why, otherwise your work getting there will be scattered and you won't make the best use of your time. In this course, you'll learn how to get clarity around what's most important – your goals – by ensuring they're aligned with those of your organization, so you can prioritize your work based on those goals.

Do you have too much time on your hands? With all of the pressures of modern life, so few people today do. In order to preserve your time, you have to know how to manage it. And the first step in learning how to manage time well is to understand how you make use of it now. This will help you determine where can you be more efficient. This course focuses on ways to analyze your current use of time. It covers how to use a time log to document and then assess your time use. It also describes how your energy levels and personality affect how you manage time, and outlines ways to better manage time in accordance with your personality type and energy cycle. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.

When goals and targets seem to shift daily and there’s never enough time to get everything done, it’s hard to achieve goals consistently. Good time management will help you work smarter – not harder – so that you get more of the important things done in less time. The first step in working smarter is making sure you’re going in the right direction. In this course, you'll learn how to accomplish more through effective time management. You’ll learn why it's important to align your goals with your company's goals, and how to do it. You'll also learn how to differentiate between urgent and important tasks, how to pivot between conflicting priorities, and how taking the time to make improvements can save you time in the long run.

In this course, you'll learn strategies to manage challenges to your personal focus, techniques to help you shut out distractions and manage time conflicts, and ways to regain focus and develop mental resilience when faced with change.

As much as we wish we could, no one can really make time on the clock. You can't add a 25th hour to the day to get more stuff done – but you can make better use of the 24 hours that you do have. Everyone is capable of becoming a more effective time manager, of organizing their efforts to get more done. All it takes is deciding to seize control of your own time, and then taking small steps in the right direction. In this course, you'll consider how you're spending your time now and what you can do to spend it more wisely and productively. You'll also learn to block the time stealers that interfere with your productivity, use to-do lists and schedules to organize your time and tasks, and develop a regular habit of checking in with your plans to make sure you're getting them done.

You may have a strong sense of your priorities, an organized desktop, and a well-planned routine, but none of that will get the job done. Now it's up to you to focus – and do it. Many challenges will arise that threaten your focus: distractions, messages, drop-in visitors, competing tasks; not to mention internal saboteurs like temptation, multi-tasking, and procrastination. Any of these can derail your attention and deplete your time, leaving you feeling ineffective and overwhelmed. How do you focus? In this course, you'll learn how to use both personal and interpersonal skills in very specific ways to keep yourself on track for accomplishing your goals. You'll find out how to manage your internal focus deficiencies, make your environment work for you, gracefully decline requests when you need to, and refocus when circumstances change. Get ready to get things done.

Each customer wants her problem to be the most important problem to the Customer Service Representative (CSR). For the CSR, adapting to each customer's communication style, understanding each customer's emotional response, and solving each customer's problem can be an enormously stressful and time-consuming process. This course is intended to show the proper methods needed to resolve conflicts, manage time, and manage stress. It also highlights the importance of a positive approach and attitude in bringing customer interactions to a satisfactory conclusion. This course helps to prepare learners to work in a customer support center or help desk environment.