Lean Time Management is a hands-on interactive virtual one-day course to explore and identify solutions to the root causes of why we are so busy. Participants leave with a plan to help them free up time in their schedule — targeting 10 – 12 hours per week.

Traditional time management workshops tend to deal only with symptoms, i.e. how can I get more done in a day?

A Lean/Systems Thinking approach addresses not just symptoms, but also root causes: “Am I doing work that is low-value?”, “Have I taken on too many priorities?”, “Do I say yes too easily?” and “How much of my work is rework, or failure demand?”  

This course addresses both causes and symptoms to allow participants to free up time in their calendar so they can focus on the work that matters most to achieving their objectives.

• The Lean Time Management course is targeted to:

• Leaders, team members, and groups who want to break the cycle of being too busy, needing to work evenings and weekends, and who wish to find the time to complete not just their “urgent” work, but also their important, strategic work.

• The learning objectives of this workshop include:

Combining theory with practical, proven approaches and tools, this course aims to enable participants to:

• create an individual plan to free-up a target of 10-12 hours of their own time per week
• address the root causes of overwhelm and deal with them, not just the symptoms
• create simple systems to sustain their new approach to time.

• Topics covered include:

• Realistic work planning so that we deliver on our plans by applying the principles of Lean strategic planning so that our plans more accurately reflect our available capacity.   What is a “Must-Do, Can’t Fail” versus a “Should Do” versus a “Could Do” versus a “Do Not Do” priority?
• Making work visible to manage it better.
• How to reduce switch-taking and interruptions to create more focused deep-thinking time to complete more work with less effort.
• How to directly improve flow and reduce waste, particularly failure demand that consumes more time than it should.
• How to make better requests, and make better commitments, to reduce back and forth. When to say “yes” to a request, and when and how to say “no”.
• How to get things done the first time through by identifying a task’s “jobs to be done”.
• How to identify opportunities to improve the value and efficiency of meetings, and reduce total time spent in meetings.
• How to optimize the use of highest-energy times of the day to get more deep-thinking work done.
• Create a tangible, specific, and practical plan to get started implementing Lean time management techniques directly.  A copy of the plan is emailed back to participant 30 days after the course.
• A two-hour group follow-up session 60-90 days later to provide coaching and peer-coaching to help participants execute their plan.