Beat Procrastination Today: Time Management Masterclass

Let’s say you wanted to go to the gym early tomorrow. You arranged to meet your friend there at 6am.

The alarm clock goes off, what’s your first thought?

You’re thinking that you don’t want to let your friend down right?

You’re not lying in bed thinking about all the benefits you get from going to gym early in the morning.

This would be the logical thought process. You get benefits from doing something, so you should do it? No – we are driven by emotions.

In this real life example of one of my students, you will see incredible examples of how Remonah burnt her boats with a community of students. She achieved her goal and shared her success with everyone else.

In this activity you will put the lessons into practice and try burning your boats using an important task. I explain everything that you need to do.

My story: At a company townhall one year I was up on stage with other managers and we were fielding questions from the audience of 100+ employees. Being the CIO at the time the IT related questions came my way and soon the topic turned to the workflow system that badly needed replacing. Someone from the back asked a very direct question about when this would be sorted out and when I answered I effectively burned my boats.

Sometimes an ambitious goal requires you to cut off your own escape routes.

During the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519, the naval commander had his men destroy their boats when they landed on the enemy beach. This war tactic has been used many times but it meant the soldiers had to conquer the land – there was literally no turning back. Often it’s our own plan B nature that is the greatest barrier to achieving ambitious goals, conquer this first and then you have no choice but to succeed

Kanban is all about visualizing your workflow. If you can see your work and your progress then you are more likely to get it done.

This is why we write lists and put notes on the fridge or have noticeboards in our homes and in the workplace.

But Kanban is a very powerful method of exactly how you should visualize your workflow and I’m going to give you a very brief version of it in this lesson.

In this real life example you will meet Remonah, one of my students who has learnt and applied the principles of kanban to achieve better focus and management of her tasks.

In this activity you will get a Kanban board going on a wall or a space close to where you are working. I explain everything in the activity so you know exactly what to do and how to be successful.

In this video I explain how your assignment will work so that you put everything into practice and achieve the transformation you need. I go through exactly what you need and what you will be doing in the coming days to consistently apply burn your boats and kanban so that you can beat procrastination.

In this demonstration lesson you will learn about cadence, limit work in progress and swimlanes. Cadence is the regular and consistent reviewing of your kanban board. Limit Work In Progress is the practice of focusing on a limited number of tasks that you want to get done in a certain time period. Swimlanes are horizontal rows that run across your Kanban board and can help you group or categorise tasks into projects or areas of work.

In this demonstration I show you practically how you would manage a MS Teams meeting when you have multiple team members working on different tasks that need to be managed through a workflow as part of a project. I also explain concepts such as Limit Work In Progress and link these to the example in the demonstration.

In this lesson I demonstrate the full set up of a Kanban board and the principles of moving tasks across the columns. These more advanced Kanban principles are often used by teams in working environments.

In this lesson we talk about burning your boats principle that how public commitment and listing goals helps you to achieve your goals easily and faster.

Making a public commitment holds yourself accountable for your actions and then you  do your work because you commit it in front of someone.

To deal with serious time management issues, you should set your achievable goals in defined time.Dont set your goals too high that you cannot achieve just achieve right goals that you can think you can achieve in defined time.

Using Kanban board principle you can set your goals and achieve them in your defined time.

Repetition of your commitments publicly helps you to achieve your goals faster.

Making of a timetable is great but if you want to follow  this timetable then you have to do one more task which is "commit your work to someone else"

So Kanban board is a principle which says that first to identify all your " to-dos" work and then move ones you want to achieve in "in progress" bar and then when its done move them to "done" column.

To follow 10 hour  a day work timetable you have to break your 10 hour a day work into 1 hour achievable work. Breaking of goal actually helps you to achieve it faster.

Plan your work whether on weekends ,on days ,on months and when you plan it dont change it and try to stick to it.

Two key principles of Kanban Board is:

Cadence

Limit your work in progress

What change in your weekly routine is your ups and downs not your routine. So be consistent with your routine and get your work done timely.

Limit your work in "in progress" work,only add work in " in progress" that you can achieve in your defined time.