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As we are gearing up for back-to-school, sports, and activities, do you find that your child is having trouble getting all their interests, and homework, fit into the day?  Is it becoming a source of stress rather than a source of joy, relaxation, or accomplishment?

What can you do about it as a concerned parent?

We’ve heard this comment, time after time - some variation of “Little Johnny/Susie really enjoys his/her soccer/violin/dance lessons; but the days (s)he has practice, it’s just a madhouse! We are eating dinner on the go (or through the drive-thru), and (s)he’s up until all hours of the night getting homework completed…”

The good news is, with a little help, you can get your child’s calendar, and the resulting stress, under control. There are several solutions:

1) Limit your child’s involvement in after-school activities. I’ve heard many parents say that they limit their child to 1 sport and 1 other activity, such as scouts; or they are limited to 1 activity if that requires significant lessons/practice. The child is allowed to pick what the activity is; but they know that they are allowed to pick only one during the school year.

If this is your choice, consider enrolling the child in something different over the summer months, so they can experience something that they may be interested in, to find out if there is a passion there…

2) Identify projects, assignments, etc. that can be worked on ahead of time - and then help your child to block out time to work on the project in advance. I’ve found this to be particularly helpful for my procrastinating child… (s)he tends to wait until the night before for most assignments. To combat this (and the inevitable 3 am bedtime unless (s)he wants to get a failing grade), I’ve asked their teachers to let me know which websites, papers, or assignments I should be aware of. Then, if I know that the teacher hands out long-term assignments on Mondays, I can proactively query what that week’s assignment is, and have a relaxed discussion about what we can do each day to chip away at that assignment. Our weekly schedule may look like this:

- Monday - think about what we want to research and write down some ideas

- Tuesday - research our idea and start to capture sources. Cut/paste info into a document.

- Wednesday - do an outline of how the info should be organized, start writing a first draft.

- Thursday - write final draft including all spelling, punctuation, and source citing.

- Friday - hand in completed assignment

You can lay it out on the family calendar, a whiteboard, etc. - wherever it makes sense for your family. The important thing is to help them do what they want to do, without stress, or missing deadlines.

Technorati Tags: Family, managing your time, preparation

Last time I shared an article about being efficient versus being effective by Robert Rolih. Now here are the rules on goal setting from http://www.time-management-toolbox.com/articles.html:

1st rule: Your goals should be specific. The clearer the goal, the clearer the outcome. So, always set specific goals that can be measured. Let me give you an example. If I say, “Next year we will increase our market share,” is this specific? Well, not really! But if I add “by four percentage points,” it makes this goal specific and measurable. There’s an old saying that goes, What gets measured, gets done, so always be specific when you set your goals.

2nd rule: Every goal must have a deadline. Human beings operate best when they have clear deadlines. Deadlines get us moving. So every goal you set should have a deadline – the date by which you will accomplish it.

3rd rule: Your goals should be challenging. Aim high: Set goals that will provide you with a challenge; but be careful – they must be realistic! You must believe you can achieve them.

4th rule: Write your goals down. Gene Donohue once said, The difference between a goal and a dream is the written word. So, write your goals down. This will make them concrete.

Ok, those were the four goal-setting rules.

But what if your goals depend on a boss, and you don’t know what they are? Then go to your boss and ask him! Always be clear what your boss expects from you. Otherwise, you will be doing the wrong things most of the time. So, the real secret of effective time management is choosing the right things to do. That means choosing the things that help you achieve your goals. And those things that help achieve your goals are the tasks that will bring you to your goals faster.

Best-selling author Timothy Ferriss once said: Doing the right things is infinitely more important than doing things right. Efficiency is still very important, but only when you do the right things – the things that will bring you closer to your goals.

Technorati Tags: effective, efficient, goal setting, goals, Time Management

What exactly is the difference between being efficient and effective? We hear those words all the time, but do we really know how to be efficient versus being effective, or vice versa? Take a look at one man’s perspective on the two and share your own thoughts on efficiency and effectiveness! Here is the article from http://www.time-management-toolbox.com/articles.html:

Key to good time management.

By Robert Rolih

Imagine the following situation: You want to buy a new, big screen, high definition TV. You want a really good one and are prepared to pay a high price for it. You also have a very good friend who is a tech geek – he knows all about new technologies and owns three big screen TV sets himself.

What would you do?

Would you go on the Net, spend five hours comparing different TVs, read a ton of information about each one of them, and then go through a thousand customer reviews?

Or would you simply call your friend, ask him what he recommends, and only after that go on the Net and check his choices?

Well, with the first option you could be very efficient if you are good at searching the Net. As a matter of fact, you could be extremely efficient for the whole five or six hours you are doing the research.

You could select great search terms, read the content really fast, and so on. But it’s still the totally wrong thing to do if you have a friend who can help you achieve your goal in a few minutes.

So, calling your friend is effective. It’s the right thing to do because it will bring you closer to your goal fast.

Doing research on your own is not effective; it’s not the right thing to do in this situation, but it can be efficient and you can be very good at it. So, let me recap: effectiveness is doing things that bring you closer to your goals.

Efficiency is performing a task in the most economical manner possible. Now think about your work. Ask yourself, “Am I being productive or just active? Am I making up activities just to fill my time? Or am I doing things that will bring me closer to reaching my goals? And then ask a crucial question: “What are my most important goals right now?”

I see a lot of very busy people in companies all the time. They are constantly under pressure, they work all the time, and they are stressed. But when you take a closer look at what they are doing you will often find they are doing just a lot of stuff that has little value.

They shuffle papers, get interrupted all the time, surf the Net searching for god knows what, check every e-mail when it arrives, and so on. They spend the whole day doing activities that don’t help them achieve their goals. They are just doing stuff. The first thing you have to be clear about if you want to be good at time management is your goals.

What do you want to accomplish? Are you clear about that? If you own a business or manage a department, you probably have very clear financial and development goals. Like “open three new locations by the end of the year,” “launch a new product by the end of May,” or “increase our sales by 30% in the next year.”

Clear goals are crucial for success. If you don’t have them, set them now! When you set your goals, it is critical that you follow some rules about goal setting.

Check back soon for the rules on goal setting!

Technorati Tags: effective, effectiveness, efficiency, efficient, goals, Time Management

Earlier this month we talked about “dividing and conquering” your to-do list. The very next week I received my Mind Tools newsletter, titled “Delegate and Thrive”. The newsletter article goes into detail on the what, why, how, and when to delegate. There’s also a free downloadable Delegation Worksheet and a quick “How Well do you Delegate” quiz.

I scored a 36, which indicates I’m making progress on my delegation skills. How about you? What challenges do you face with delegation?

Technorati Tags: communication, delegation, leadership, newsletters, problem solving, Streamlining, teamwork, working smarter

When you find an error in your process or system, you should do an analysis of the reason you made that error.  Many times, you may find out that the reason that an error was made is that you don’t have a process - or that the process wasn’t followed (but that’ll be another post…)

So, if you don’t have a process - design one!

HOW do you design a process?  Easy peasy - map the process out.  How do you map a process?  Write down the steps that need to be done in order, try following those steps, then refine it until you’ve got it where  you want it.

Here’s an example:  we rent our Texas beach house out on VRBO and HomeAway. During this time of year, we get a LOT of requests for summer rentals.  The big risk is to rent the place twice for the same night(s) - double booking, so we want to make sure that we have a process in place.  Sure enough, we didn’t have our process in place, and ended up with a double booking this year; luckily, we caught it within an hour of accepting the second booking, so only had to apologize profusely and refund the deposit.  [It would've been MUCH worse if both families had shown up at the beach place expecting to stay for a week!]

So the problem remained - we had double booked.  How to revise our current process?

1. we stopped letting all folks take and make reservations - I am now the linchpin for the reservation process, and although others can check the account and answer queries, I’m the only one who accepts a deposit.
2. We track every reservation and deposit on a spreadsheet - and the process has to be followed in order.  So, a reservation has to be logged in and the calendar dates have to be blocked out before we deposit the money, as an example - to ensure that money isn’t accepted prior to verifying that the calendar is available.  The spreadsheet is sorted by date, so this should ensure that we don’t double-book.
3. Our double check for this is to make a copy of the check or credit card deposit, and to file those by dates  in a paper backup file.  [That's how we found out that we had double booked - the calendar hadn't been updated, but we had a deposit for that week already.]
4. Then, and only then, do we let our guests know that they have secured the reservation and continue the process.

We are hopeful that these tweaks will work for us, but are vigilant to identify possible ‘loopholes’ in the process, and plug them up. This is the essence of effective corrective action - monitoring to ensure that the process design is robust enough to prevent recurrence of the problem.

Have you had a problem, or made an error, and put a process in place to ‘fix’ it?  Post it here or contact me at marymcd@mcdcg.com - I’d love to hear about it!

Technorati Tags: beach home, process design, process improvement, process map