Organizing Your Work: New Techniques for Administrative Professionals

As an administrative professional, you’re trying to manage a workflow that’s getting bigger and more intense each day—frequently on demand and at the last minute. To handle all of this and continue to perform your job successfully, you need fresh ways of thinking about your workflow and new ways with which to conquer it. This seminar gives you the tools and techniques that can get all the work on your desk moving in the right direction. You’ll get hands-on practice applying them, as well as systems and templates you will customize during the seminar—so they’ll be ready to use your first day back at work.

• Replace outdated tools like “to do” lists with high productivity task systems and templates
• Learn to create a planning process that allows you to “think only once a week”
• Debunk the 5 biggest myths of time management
• Get the latest ideas on how to streamline voice mail and email
• Learn three magic questions that can cut workload at least 20% and streamline stress
• Customize systems and templates to use back on the job day one

• Defining what the terms productivity, being organized, efficiency and effectiveness mean in today’s world
• Debunking myths and getting rid of antiquated tools
• The power of systematizing your work: thinking it through once and “working the work”
• Destressing to eliminate productivity loss
• Problem solving with templates
• Making technology work for you and your boss

Defining Terms

• Clear Your Head Whenever You Need To
• Recognize the Difference Between Efficient, Effective, Productive, and Organized Work
• Identify the Two Factors That Will Destroy Your Ability to Be Organized

End-Game Thinking

• Define What Focus Is and Why You Need It
• Create a Quick, Big-Picture View of Your Work
• Identify “Broken” Work
• Help Others Finish Their Thinking About Work They Are Delegating to You
• Form Actionable Outcomes That Set You Up for Success, Even When Time Is Short

The Power of Systems

• Define the Experience of Flow and What It Means to You
• Identify Systems and Share in What Others Have Built
• Utilize Systems to Get and Maintain “Productivity + Flow”
• Build Any Kind of Template You Might Need
• Create a “Once-a-Week” Thinking Process for Yourself and Your Boss

Organizing Yourself—Inside Out

• Dispel Time Management Myths, and Replace Them with Current Thinking
• Use the ZAP Process to Create Flow
• Create a Working Command Central Focus Tool
• Organize Your Workspace to FIT
• Work from Zero Base
• De-stress with On-the-Spot Tools to Use Whenever You Need Them

Working with the Disorganized—Outside In

• Anticipate Others, and Decrease the “Emergency” Factor
• Harness the Power of Visuals for Yourself and Others
• Deal with Interruptions to Minimize Their Impact on You
• Problem-Solve Using Templates
• Make the Systems and the Sender Do the Work in Email
• Create Meetings That Work
• Persuade Others to Go with Your Flow

Action Planning

• Identify the First Tools to Put into Use When You Return to Work
• Build an Action Plan to Implement What You Have Learned