|
A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of Collin College. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: June 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Dana Schmitz, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Heather Darrow, contributor; Nick Young, photographer and layout.
|  |
|
|
Time management: are you an expert or flunkey?
By Heather Darrow
Special Contributor
Why is it that some people have time to accomplish their work with only occasional moments of stress and other people feel perpetually behind?
Is there hope for those who find their work hours swept away like grains of sand in a wind storm?
After taking Karen Hettish’s time and priority management class, Collin College employees Dr. Leda Cott, Anita Wormald and John Wilkins say there is hope and the best part is that many of the tricks of managing time and workload are simple to employ.
What idle time?!
Today, while Dr. Cott, Collin College professor of child development and education, is waiting on the phone, she pulls items out of her idle time folder, including articles to read or items to plan. She continually finds time that she never knew she had. Since the class, Dr. Cott has also changed her e-mail writing style.
She no longer writes long, detailed paragraphs. Instead, she uses lots of white space and bullets and numbers her requests.
“I learned that five minutes a day equals 21 hours a year, and if you take advantage of this idle time you get three extra days of work a year. Karen also impressed me when she said 15 minutes of preparation can save 45 minutes a day. In a year, that is one extra month to meet your goals. Now, I know my e-mails are being read. Before, people would e-mail me back with answers to the first question but not answers to the second or the third question,” Dr. Cott said.
Dr. Cott said Hettish had the class practice skills during the workshop. She was so energized by the seminar that she immediately purchased a file bin to hold items for future filing, another task that can be accomplished during idle time. During the class, Hettish reviewed the college’s strategic goals so that participants could see if their department and personal goals were on track with the broader college community goals.
“I refocused on the scholarly community and how that applies to my daily classes. I am reevaluating teaching plans, aligning class assessments with learning outcomes and matching activities, portfolios and tests to make sure they match learning outcomes. Now, I feel more capable of prioritizing because I think of things using the Stephen Covey quadrant system. What I realized was that if I don’t put things in quadrants, some of the things won’t get done at all,” Dr. Cott said.
The jewels of time management
Wormald, Collin College director of the Business Solutions Group and director of workforce development, is enthusiastically using what she calls the jewels of the professional development class. She now writes a to-do list at the end of each day, and she has charted her peak productive hours and guards that time, keeping interruptions to a minimum.
Wormald has also set specific monthly times to review individual’s goals within her department.
“It is a reminder to me and to my team to make sure we are on target for divisional goals which will be on target for the strategic goals. Karen also suggested we tie our goals from our performance appraisals to the number on the strategic plan it related to. She hit it dead on; we have got to be accountable and working toward the same goals,” Wormald said.
By the end of the training, Wormald had written five action items. She has created a spreadsheet with dates and activities to manage projects and can make a quick daily check to make sure she is using time wisely. She bases her daily to-do list on the tasks within the spreadsheet.
“Now that I have taken this class, I have a better handle on prioritizing my work,” Wormald said.
Knowing when to switch gears
John Wilkins, professor of business information and engineering technologies, is developing new techniques to teach classes in the online and weekend college formats. While his school office was always in order, his home office was not set up to handle the paperwork that the new class formats produced.
“I am glad that Dean Bill Blitt inspired me to take the class. One thing stood out for me; I have to stop when things are good enough because it takes away from spending time on something else. My overall goals are in line with the school and department goals; I am delivering our product― education to the community. However, the issue is how to do it more efficiently. How do I get more things done in the day and deliver the same quality? That takes continual learning, and to do that I have to get more time. Simple things, like reorganizing the work place to find things more quickly, help. This class has given me a lot more time to be creative and productive, and that is what I was looking for,” Wilkins said.
To view the college’s strategic goals, visit www.ccccd.edu/au/aboutus.html.
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
|
|
|
