FC

FRANKLIN COVEY!! About a week ago my work sent me to a one day Focus: achieving your highest priorities conference, loved it. Call me nerdy, but I loved the whole day. It makes me think very highly of my work to send me :). All I knew about the training before attending was that it was meant to help professionals organize and become more effective at their jobs. Knowing that alone was pretty exciting! But there is more...

The conference was holistic. You start by identifying your values, setting goals based on those values, then planing your week and day to meet those goals. That way your daily activities are lined up with your core values. Also, it categorized activities into 4 quadrants -ones that are important and urgent (crises, deadlines), important and not urgent (preparation, planning, prevention), not important and urgent (unimportant meetings, emails), and not important and not urgent (busywork, excessive TV, internet). The goal is to minimize the last two quadrants and maximize the second quadrant. And it's really true if you stop and think about it.... that way you are balanced and productive... not wasting time or just reacting to crises. The part that was most helpful to me though was prioritizing daily tasks.. I tend to do the easy ones first so that I feel productive, but then I end up not finishing the tasks which are most important. So in the handy-dandy planners they gave us, there are a lot of spots to write out tasks each day and prioritize them. There are also areas to write notes each day -to do away with my random sticky-notes posted everywhere, and tabs for other information. Anyhow, so far I like it.. practical.. I sit down for 5 minutes each morning before I begin my work day.. I make a list of the realistic things to be done, prioritize them, and then not let myself do them out of order. That way, when new tasks come up and people ask me to do things, I write it down and plan when to do it instead of do it at that moment... which wastes time doing things that aren't necessarily most important at that time. SO- even though it's huge and I've already accidently left it at a school I work at for a long weekend... I like it. The truth will be unveiled though on March 30th because that is 21 days from the conference and that is the number of days it takes to form a habit. Go Covey!