“We’d like to confirm your appointment.” When I first moved to the region, I found it quite odd how everyone called me to confirm our appointments. I quickly learnt that sticking to appointments was a given and just the other week, a reader asked me how to keep track of appointments. By now, I use the confirmation calls as pure reminders. But surely, there’s also a simpler way to keep track of your appointments?
Time will be tight this week. We’ve trained one of our clients over the last 2 days and are finally ready to kick of that project. My client is moving at the end of this week and there are many last minute things popping up. There are a number of networking events which I’ll attend. It’s all hustle and bustle this week!
How often do you plan your day or your week ahead? Are you pretty relaxed and decide as you go but then noticed you haven’t achieved as much as needed? Have your friends jokingly referred to as scattered brain and given you notepads and calendars to be on time?
We all have heard about the importance of planning. Abraham Lincoln once said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” The better prepared we are for our activities, the smoother the execution and the outcome. But why don’t we plan for the week ahead?
You’ve all heard it: “Less is more.” Especially with Ramadan being here, we will have less working hours in the day and if you’re fasting, your body will feel more exhausted quicker. Managing your resources will be vital during the Holy Month but it shouldn’t stop here.
Once the summer is over (or even before that), companies will be pushing full steam ahead and are expecting high productivity. Yet, you’re probably not getting additional team members to support your work project. How many activities will your kids enrol at school and how many will you need and/or want to attend? Your spouse may also want to spend some quality time with you alone? It sounds exhausting just writing about it.
So how do you manage your resource well and avoid being depleted by the end of the day?
Welcome back to the third and final part of the mini-series on running effective meetings. I’m sure by now, you’ve been in a number of meetings and I do hope you could apply some tricks from the first 2 posts. Today, let’s look into the follow up of a meeting.
First of all, please let me apologise for not publishing on Monday, and then again, yesterday. It was a tough and frustrating decision to not publish a blog post this week.
As my loved ones say, I have a tendency to overcommit and want to do a good (note, not perfect!) job. Last weekend, I had to complete a couple of projects and I also had some engagements this week. Knowing that my energies were running low, I chose to not publish this week.
It was part of saying my approach of “Say No to say Yes”.
Have you ever experienced this? Your life is fine, you have a beautiful home and yet, there’s a room or an area which is just full of clutter. You feel it’s just too much to tackle. It’s so much easier to close the door or put a blind eye to the mess. In short, you’re overwhelmed!
Last week, a client felt overwhelmed with the question: “Where do I start?” She had a number of areas in her bedroom which she wanted to organise: The closet, the dresser and the en-suite bathroom. Yet, she didn’t know how to get there and became overwhelmed working on these 3 projects simultaneously. Since we started working together, we broke down her projects, removing the feeling of being overwhelmed and replacing it with the joy of quick successes!
Time seems to fly in Dubai. How can it be that we’re almost in April while we just celebrated New Year’s Eve? They say time flies if you’re having fun. Generally, that seems to be true and like you, I don’t want to stop having a good time. And yet, I know that we can’t always have fun and live carelessly in the day. Often, the weekend is filled with errands, boring tasks which were ignored during the week and some fun activities. How can you make your time work for you and enjoy your weekends even more?
Last week, a member of the project team had a crisis. Everything was becoming too much for and she had to step out to regain her cool. It’s an all too common situation for a lot of teams and individuals these days. Deadlines are shorter, workloads are increasing and with smart phones, we’re constantly connected. Recharging our batteries becomes more challenging.
Here are 15 top tips to stay cool when you’re experiencing stress:
Isn’t it ironic to write about national procrastination week a week after it took place? It amuses me as, like most of us, I can also procrastinate certain tasks and am actually quite good at that at times. Even now, I’m procrastinating. Being home alone, I can watch “The Peanuts Movie”. Yes, I hear you. I should either watch the film or write the post. Focusing on one thing is quicker than working on 2 activities at the same time. Sometime, I too have to revert to doing two things at once. And so procrastination starts.
Why do we procrastinate?