CRCE Tech Tips

Most everyone these days admits they could use better “time management.” But the reason it has not really been addressed to any universal satisfaction is because time management isn’t about managing time. If it was, just buying and using a calendar (and a good watch) would handle it. The savvy among you will usually acknowledge that it’s really self management—what we do with ourselves during the time we have.

Many people these days talk about “information management,” because there’s so much of it, and many consider themselves roadkill along the information superhighway. Too much information is not the problem though—if it were, we would walk into a library or do a web search and die. So, what is time management, really? It’s dealing effectively with the things we have and want to do. It’s the latest industry publications sitting in a stack on our desk, about which we told ourselves we could/should/ought to do something. And the hundreds of hours of undone “stuff” sitting in most people’s brains (in psychic RAM) and on their desk and on the floor of the back seat of their car. That’s why my flagship seminar is called Managing Workflow, Projects & Priorities—because that’s what time management really is. It’s about capturing things we collect and create, deciding what (if anything) we want to do about them, organizing the results of that knowledge work into a trusted system we can review appropriately, and making intuitive strategic and tactical choices about what to do at any point in time from our options.

It’s hard to manage your workflow, projects, and priorities though, when you don’t really know what they all are, or if they are still unclear. “Projects” are results that require more than one action step to get done, and they need to be defined and reviewed as stakes in the ground to keep us moving toward their goal line. And the “moving” needs to be defined (“What’s the next action?”), so we can execute elegantly and intuitively when the ball is snapped, instead of continually thinking that we should be thinking about what to do.

Getting Good Ideas Off the Drawing Board

How many times have you thought of a really fantastic idea? Maybe it was something that would revolutionize the way your office operates. Or perhaps it was a great product that would appeal to millions of people worldwide.

Most of us have been in this situation at least once, and we'll probably have to admit that this great idea never became a reality. Sure, it was creative – and it could be done. But we never acted on it.

Why? Why do we think of ideas that we know are good, only to let them sit in the back of our minds – without doing anything about them?

One reason is that putting an idea into practice can seem like a huge amount of work. Even if it's a small idea, most of us see nothing but potential obstacles when we imagine taking action. We assume we've lost the election before we've even started the campaign!

Watch this demo to learn when to shift from Excel to Project 2010. Discover how you can manage simple task lists or tackle complex projects by using the right tool for the job. With significant updates and visual enhancements, Project 2010 helps you save time and effort by simplifying project management.

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Did You Know...

... that in Project 2010 you can copy and paste a bulleted list into the ‘Task Name’ column of Project 2010? When you paste the bulleted list into the ‘Task Name’ column Project will use the information to layout out the schedule. This is a quick way to get started – now all you have to do is edit the ‘Task Mode’ (Manual or Automatic), ‘Duration’, Start and Finish and link any tasks. You may also use the Task ID number in the 'Predecessors' column to link tasks; where one item has to be completed before the other.

To assign ‘Resources’ go to the ‘Resource’ Tab in the menu. From the Resource Ribbon select ‘Assign Resources’ a Assign Resources window will open. If you use the ‘Add Resources’ button Project will use the Outlook Exchange Server’s Global Address List to locate the resource. The resource name will appear in the resource list. To assign a cost to the ‘Resource’ double click on the resources’ name and select the ‘Cost’ tab then in the ‘Standard Rate’ click the $0.00 (there is a space above the column headers where you edit the $0.00) do this for the Overtime Rate and the Pre Unit Cost and click OK.

Once you have entered all your resources you can now assign resources in the ‘Resource Name’ column using the drop down combo list (click in the cell in the ‘Resource Name’ column to see the down arrow)

There is still so much to cover – more to come stay tuned to a browser near you for more Project 2010 tutorials.

Working in teams can be fantastic – if team members work well together. However, if people are pulling in different directions, the experience can be awful. What's worse is that without sufficient direction, teams can focus on the wrong objectives, can fail to use important resources, can be torn apart with avoidable infighting, and can fail, with sometimes dire consequences for the organization.

Listen to this PodCast of Getting Things Done ® by David Allen. GTD® is the shorthand brand for "Getting Things Done® ", the groundbreaking work-life management system by David Allen that provides concrete solutions for transforming overwhelm and uncertainty into an integrated system of stress free productivity.

GTD is a powerful method to manage commitments, information, and communication. It is the result of thirty years of consulting services, private coaching, training, and organizational programs with millions of people internationally. It has earned a reputation as the gold standard in personal and organizational productivity.

GTD enables greater performance, capacity and innovation. It alleviates the feeling of overwhelm, instilling focus, clarity and confidence.

Step by step you will learn how to:

• Capture anything and everything that has your attention and concern

• Define actionable things into concrete next steps and successful outcomes

• Organize information in the most streamlined way, in appropriate categories, based on how and when you need to access them

•Keep current and “ahead of the game” with appropriately frequent reviews

•How to keep track of the bigger picture while managing the small details

Decades of in the field research and practice of GTD led to the publishing of the international bestseller “Getting Things Done”. Published in over 28 languages, TIME magazine heralded it as the defining self-help business book of its time.

If you work eight hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks a year, then you have 2,000 hours a year to allocate to accomplishing various jobs. Think of this in the same way as if you had $2,000 for office supplies in your budget, or 2,000 gallons of gasoline that you could us in a year. To make this even more difficult, if you found you haven't used your time wisely, there's no begging for more resources from the boss, or buying more - when it's used, it's used, regardless how well you allocated it.

When you recognize the reality that time is a valuable and finite resource, the idea of not squandering it becomes that much more attractive! With this attitude, you can approach decisions about time allocation more efficiently. You'll be less likely to waste time and be more reluctant to do things that don't contribute to your important goals.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Avoid these mistakes if you want to be highly-productive.

How well do you manage your time? If you're like many people, your answer may not be completely positive!

Perhaps you feel overloaded, and you often have to work late to hit your deadlines. Or maybe your days seem to go from one crisis to another, and this is stressful and demoralizing.

Many of us know that we could be managing our time more effectively; but it can be difficult to identify the mistakes that we're making, and to know how we could improve.

When we do manage our time well, however, we're exceptionally productive at work, and our stress levels drop. We can devote time to the interesting, high-reward projects that can make a real difference to a career. In short, we're happier!

In this article, we're looking at ten of the most common time management mistakes, as well as identifying strategies and tips that you can use to overcome them. These ten mistakes are:

Learning to control aggression

Anger can be normal and healthy emotion that helps us instinctively detect and respond to a threatening situation. More than this, when it is properly channeled, it can be a powerful motivating force – we all know how hard we can work to remedy an obvious injustice.

However it can also be an emotion that gets out of control, leading to stress, distress, unhealthiness and unhappiness. Uncontrolled anger can seriously harm your personal and professional life, because it can become incredibly destructive – to yourself and the people around you.

And in a modern workplace that often demands trust and collaboration, it can cause great damage to working relationships.

This article teaches an effective 12-step approach that helps you direct your anger constructively rather than destructively. The 12-step approach is based on the ideas of Duke University's Redford Williams, MD, who with his wife, authored the best-selling book Anger Kills. (In this book, Williams discusses 17 steps for controlling anger – these are often abridged to the 12 steps described here.)

The tips in this article can help you master file management by supplying some tips to help you better manage and organize computer files. After you’ve decided on a strategy for organizing and managing files and folders, we bet you’ll see improved time management skills and increased productivity.

An unorganized computer makes it more difficult to find information, and a computer that is cluttered with unnecessary files and email messages can be sluggish. So if you haven’t organized your computer recently and it’s running slower than you’d like (or you’re having trouble finding things), the tips in this article can help you delete or move old files and email and can even help you do a thorough cleanup.

Making it easy to capture, organize, and finding information has always been at the heart of what OneNote does. OneNote 2010 offers several enhancements in this core feature area.