Time Management, Personal Productivity &

Assertiveness
Time Management

Time management principles and tips to improve productivity

Knowing your work cycles and power hours
Reducing excessive interruptions
Why productivity and time management work hand in hand

The importance of effective and efficient pro-activeness

Frustrations experienced through time restraints
Coping with performance standards
Crisis management

Why be Assertive?

Understanding assertive behaviour

Negative and positive aspects of assertiveness
When to be assertive and with whom?
Difference between various character profiles

Non-assertive job personalities

Knowing your rights and responsibilities
Coping with performance standards
Dealing with criticism

Benefits of Attending:

This workshop was designed to prepare participants on how to maximise personal productivity
within the organization with a strong focus on time management for improved efficiency and
whilst being more assertive to reduce stress.

Assertiveness Helps with Time Management Skills

Are you setting productive boundaries?

An assertive person will have an easier time implementing and maintaining good time
management routines.

Definition of Assertive: characterized by boldness or confidence in declaring one's own rights,

claims or opinions

Let's explore what might happen during a work day at different levels of assertiveness, ranging
from low self-esteem to aggression.
Low Assertiveness

Equating with low self-esteem, low assertiveness is demonstrated in the following situations:

People intrude on your time throughout the day to chat or vent.

You never close your door because you want to appear friendly.
Work stacks up while you continue to accept more projects.
You volunteer for extra committees or assignments when no one else does.
Often you berate yourself for being incapable when work does not get done.

In all of these situations, you want to please everyone and find it difficult to say, "No." Your own needs
are ignored and you may feel victimized and powerless, yet guilty for being inadequate.

Assertiveness

In comparison, assertive individuals set boundaries. They do not allow someone to pressure them
into taking on an extra assisnment or serving on another committee if there is no way they can do
justice to the job because of time constraints. They are approachable and friendly, yet are able to
say "No" when the situation calls for it.

Are you assertive enough to maintain control over your day?

You shut the door when it is necessary to concentrate.

You set boundaries for how much you can do each day.
You work with the team and hold up your end on projects.
You block off time for yourself.

Additional positive traits of assertive people include:

Requesting clarafication rather than going away feeling confused

Disagreeing mildly rather than pretending to agree for the sake of peace
Asking why, when something does not seem reasonable
Speaking up for yourself and saying "No" without feeling guilty
Sharing successes when you do something worthwhile or interesting
Being persistent when you have a legitimate complaint

Aggression

Too much assertiveness, on the other hand, is called agression. You recognize aggressive
behavior when someone is:

Rude or bossy
Does not listen to others' opinions
Not a team player
Makes colleagues uncomfortable or fearful
How would you rate yourself according to these categories? If you are struggling with
maintaining good time management skills, examine your personal characteristics. Could
improving on the traits demonstrated by an assertive person increase your ability to perform and
add to your productivity?

It might not seem relevant, but being assertive is a key ingredient to you managing your time
effectively. Being passive can equate to inactivity, non-engagement or procrastination. Yet, if
you lack skill in the fine art of assertiveness, you can be seen as aggressive, too direct or
sarcastic. Being assertive enables you to empower yourself to improve your time management.

Take Action

With refined assertiveness skills, you will find it easier to make decisions, take action and deal
with the outcomes; both positive and negative. Feeling comfortable that your assertiveness is
effective and appropriate, you will develop a great confidence. Should a problem arise, you
know that youll be able to deal with it and therefore able to make decisions to act.

Leadership Qualities

By being assertive, you become the person that people trust and admire. As a person that can
act, that can make decisions, you are a reliable resource. People will seek you out for advice or
entrust you with responsibility. You dont need to hide behind the passive-aggressive behaviour
of sarcasm, insincerity, deceitfulness or slyness.

Practicing your ability to communicate your needs effectively can extend outside of the work
environment. You need to be able to effectively communicate your needs to your family, your
community and peers without causing offense or disruption. By speaking up for yourself, it
allows you to have a voice of your own rather than others speaking on your behalf.

By being assertive YOU take control of your environment.

By clearly expressing your needs and interests without being aggressive, you not only take
control of your environment, you reduce stress and anxiety. Being out of control, not being able
to anticipate things will undoubtedly increase your stress and affect your health.

Increased Productivity

With effective decision making, stronger communication and decisive action, you reduce time
wasting activity such as:

Inability to learn from mistakes

Ineffective communication
Inability to communicate needs or wants for projects
Working capacity affected by stress & anxiety
Time management; are your people assertive
enough?
Most time management programmes miss a critical element. The element is our own degree of
assertiveness.

Time management programmes usually encompass the following elements:

Goal setting
To do list
Prioritisation of the activities on the to do list

Many people use time management programmes to great effect. Many people successfully self
teach managing their time using the same tools and principles taught in time management
programmes.

A good, if not the best, example of a time management programme is Stephen Coveys
programme described in his very successful book, First Things First.

Covey describes four generations of time management:

1. First generation: Reminders and to-do lists. We regularly create lists to remind us of
what is in front of us. We regularly fail to complete the list, generating a new one. We
may fall into the trap of getting more joy out of creating the list than completing the tasks
on the list.
2. Second generation: Scheduling future events. We identify deadlines to get things done;
scheduling our time to complete the tasks we have on our to-do list. We fall into the trap
of overestimating our productivity and allow external forces to interrupt our schedule.
3. Third generation: Setting long term, medium term and short term objectives to reach an
ultimate goal. We manage our time to deliver the objectives we have set to reach our
ultimate goal. We can set aside tasks which do not contribute to the objectives we have
set.
4. Fourth generation: Committing to the important. We set objectives to reach our goal
and divide the tasks we have in front of us into a matrix of urgency and importance. We
evaluate our tasks against our goal and objectives using the matrix, with the obvious
conclusion that the non-urgent and unimportant are not done at all.

It is a great tool that has helped a large number of people manage their time better. And yet,
many people, possibly the majority of people, fail to get full benefit from tools like it.

My observation is that people who fail to manage their time given appropriate tools lack an
appropriate level of assertiveness.
If a low level of assertiveness is combined with low emotional energy and low levels of detail,
then they are bound to have difficulty managing time in any work environment.

They find it too difficult to pay attention to the details required to evaluate their tasks and
prioritise them. They find the requirement to proactively prioritise tasks and assertively stick to a
resultant schedule emotionally draining, giving in to others requests, when they know it will
disrupt their schedule.

If the low level of assertiveness is combined with a high level of tolerance and a high level of
consideration of others, their ability to manage their time will almost certainly be impacted upon
by the actions of their subordinates, peers, customers, suppliers and bosses with higher degrees
of assertiveness.

They will be unable to effectively say no to requests. They will be unable, when confronted with
requests to use techniques such as:

Time shifting I cant help you right now, but I would be happy to at 4:00 pm
tomorrow. Does that suit you?
Responsibility allocating I can help you with thinking through the problem, but
completing the research, analysing the options and making the decision is your
responsibility. Or I will not do what you have asked, it is your responsibility.
Goal clarification What you have requested is a good idea in itself, but I cannot see
how it fits with the organisations goal or my goal. Im happy to be convinced, but at the
moment I do not see the connection.
Lack of planning on your part does not create an emergency on my part I would love
to help and I will, but only after I have completed the requests made by people who were
on time. I will not penalise them for your being late.

Most time management techniques add less to their productivity than can be possible If people
are not assertive.

However, people can be taught to be assertive.

Making people aware of their level of assertiveness though an evaluation tool such as an EQ
profile is a first step. Getting people to seek feedback on their assertiveness and its impact on
their relationships and productivity provides further insight.

Self awareness is a powerful tool on its own.

Teaching people how to catch themselves in the act of being non-assertive is another great self
awareness tool. Being aware whilst in the act allows one to draw breath and change before the
interaction is completed.

A little self evaluation of times when they are not assertive reveals words, emotions or physical
attributes which are common across many different interactions. Training people to recognise the
triggers and training them to stop when they recognise the triggers is not difficult.
Role plays can be easily built to practice some techniques.

For example, training people to recognise a trigger and then stopping, by saying something like,
Would you mind if we had a time-out? I just need to think for a moment, will be seen by most
as not difficult to do.

Resuming the conversation, being calm and assertive about what they can and cannot do is also
easy to add into some realistic scenarios in a role play.

Teaching people to emphasise what they can rather than they will not do and being clear about
both is also relatively easy. It only takes a couple of weeks of using an approach such as this to
develop new assertive habits.

Using role plays in a face-to-face training programme backed up by working through them with
a mentor on a weekly basis builds confidence.

Providing additional reading such as Adele Lynns book, The EQ Difference will help expand
peoples skill sets as they become comfortable with the ones they have practised in the role
plays.

There are many tools available to help people manage time. However, without assertiveness,
most people will fail to use the tools appropriately. So when you are next thinking of running a
time management course, do not forget assertiveness training.