FREE Time Management Exercise

Always feel like there are never enough hours in the day? Constantly missing deadlines? Buried under an ever-growing mountain of work? You don’t need to increase your hours; you need to increase your productivity! Let executive coach Magdalena Bak-Maier teach you how to make your time count.

Get Productive will help you to: Identify key time drains Develop a focused mind Apply 13 proven productivity strategies Become creative, flexible & resilient Improve your communication and encourage

productivity in others

Make time count

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‘Packed full of practical, insightful exercises, supercharging your energy to power through any productivity roadblocks’

Guy browning, The Guardian

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Extracted from Get Productive published in 2012 by Capstone Publishing Ltd (a Wiley Company), The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ. UK. Phone +44(0)1243 779777

Copyright © 2012 Magdalena Bak-Maier

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright

Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, England, or emailed to permreq@wiley.co.uk.

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FREE Time Management Exercise

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

one of the key bits of awareness required to create amazing results is an explicit understanding of your regular patterns of activities. Knowing how you spend your

time in practice is invaluable in being able to make conscious decisions about your future and often about what you choose to do in the present. When you look at how you spend time now in comparison to how you would like your day to look ideally, you can begin to make specific changes that will create the results you desire. In fact, often the mind is doing that automatically, except that when the process is taking place in our subconscious state, the result takes longer and it can be difficult to believe thatchange is possible. Time Travel is a useful exercise to help generate this information in a clear way, as it highlights what you are moving towards unconsciously or whether you are stuck. When you see what is happening, your brain can begin to make decisions about what to do. The exercise is based on the belief that you are always aiming to create a state which meets your needs, values and goals and which makes you happy. Any patterns, positive or negative, that are revealed in this exercise are worth exploring. Patterns or trends provide rich information for making positive adjustments sooner.

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOUtime travel exercise

Consider what your day looks like over a 24-hour period using the circles over page. Sketch your typical work and leisure day. Half of the circle is twelve hours, a quarter is six hours, and so on.

To generate a picture of where time goes at the moment, begin by filling in/shading the typical values of time you devote to the following activities:

If there are other things you do, please account for them in your circles. Once you have a wheel showing where your time goes, you will be able to see how much free time is left (if any).

sleep work personal hygiene meals

travel/commute shopping chores/tasks

wellbeing activities such as sports, hobbies learning time with others.

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

Work day Leisure day

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

How satisfied are you with your circles in terms of how you spend your time, from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied)? Note down any small changes you may wish to make.

Notes:

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU You are now ready for time travel as you look back and forward at the same picture.

looking back What did each day look like two, three, five years ago? Pick a time that makes most

sense for you. You may pick more than one and repeat the exercise for both time periods from the past.

What has changed and what remains the same in the way you spend your work and leisure time between the past and now? What does this reveal for you in terms of your habits, needs or patterns, good and bad?

Work day Leisure day

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

looking forward How will the picture look a year, two, three, five years from now in your opinion?

Again, pick a time frame that fits your circumstances.

Work day Leisure day

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

Go back through each pair of circles and see how closely they correspond to your ideal way of spending your work and leisure time. If you had to go around your circles and assign smiley faces to these activities and their time allocation, would you find any frowns and why? What do you want to do to change this?

Notes:

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOUrefleCtive Questions

What is similar and different between work and leisure days? Are you getting enough rest?

Is there anything that tends to fragment or otherwise negatively impact on your work or leisure days? If so, what do you want to do about it?

What actions can you take to improve how you spend time now in order to achieve what you want in your future?

Have you got something that either adds joy and happiness to your life or helps you sustain your energy in your work and leisure day? If not, what could that be?

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15 WORK OUT WHERE YOURACTIONS ARE TAKING YOU

tAkeAWAy lessons

Being able to see clearly what is happening to you over time by becoming a conscious observer provides a powerful new window of awareness. Hopefully the Time Travel exercise has helped you identify specific preferences for activities and time allocations (desirable and less desirable), patterns of behaviour you adopt over time and in some cases the optimal lifestyle that you are trying to create. The information you have gained will provide you with a good picture of the life you are creating. Is it the life you want? If not, change it! Hopefully your trajectory and trend is a positive one, i.e. your work and leisure times are staying constantly good or are improving. Many people find that they are always moving towards what they truly want. The speed and the boldness of the moves, however, can often be severely hampered by unhelpful beliefs, deep fears, lack of safety and past failures. Life is designed to be actually pretty amazing. It takes courage and conscious decisions to make it so. Do you like how you spend your time? If not, change it! If yes, well done you!

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Dr. Magdalena Bak-Maier is a highly sought after Organisational and Individual Development Specialist, Neuroscientist, Learning Expert, Executive Coach, Trainer and Speaker, with over 10 years experience in the field of consulting, training and developing people with top-tier organisations and highly intelligent and creative professionals including renown scientists, artists and global social entrepreneurs.

Magdalena’s productivity training has been used at the London School of Economics, on the Imperial business School MBA Programme, at the Royal College Of Music and at KLM/AirFrance. She has personally trained over 5000 people in professional effectiveness, communication and authentic leadership. She runs her own training and coaching practice including regular workshops and development programmes as well as a bespoke consultancy service.

Magdalena has a BSc from NYU and a PhD in Neuroscience from Caltech. She is a professionally qualified coach and full member of the Association for Coaching (MAC) as well as an accredited NLP practitioner. She is currently working on a series of articles for The Times Higher Education.

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