Personal Efficiency and Managing Meetings Training Course

Self-Awareness and Interpersonal Dynamics

• Recognising that requesting attendance at a meeting is effectively imposing your priorities on others
• Exploring the factors that drive our behaviour
• Assessing how our actions impact others: Are they responding as expected and as required? If not, what are the underlying reasons…?

Managing the Meeting Process

• Evaluating the necessity of a meeting: What are the alternatives, and is one of them preferable?
• Implementing a structured process for scheduling, conducting, and preparing for meetings:
  • Drafting a meaningful agenda that covers objectives, topics, and suggested timings
  • Inviting only the essential participants
  • Conducting the meeting: Ensuring contributions are relevant (distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant inputs), staying on agenda, and adhering to time limits
  • Generating clear outputs: Focusing on action points rather than necessarily detailed minutes
  • Scheduling necessary follow-up sessions

Strategic Meeting Attendance

• Questioning the need to attend every invited session
• Developing criteria for deciding whether or not to participate
• Identifying valid reasons for declining invitations
• Understanding permissible activities during meetings regarding attendees, topics, and timings

Advanced Personal Efficiency and Time Management

• Setting and maintaining personal and professional goals
• Work Prioritisation
  • Determining which tasks require immediate attention
  • Ranking activities by priority
• Managing time imposed by employees: Are staff and colleagues working for you, or are you working for them…?
• Identifying 'Time Bandits': Other factors that steal time and strategies to mitigate them
  • Emails
  • Telephone calls
  • Unplanned interruptions
  • Displacement activities: Procrastination…
  • Other distractions…
• Effective Delegation
• Assertiveness: Finding compromise and learning to say “no” effectively