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The Future of Work and the Value of Time Management Skills Training
Time Management and Leadership: My Experiences
Look, I've been talking about this for the better part of two decades now and the majority of organisations I walk into still have their people running around like crazy people. Just last month, I'm sitting in this gleaming office tower in Brisbane's city centre watching a manager frantically switch between countless browser tabs while trying to explain why their quarterly targets are completely stuffed. Honestly.
The staff member has got several mobiles buzzing, chat alerts going crazy, and he's genuinely surprised when I suggest maybe just maybe this approach isn't working. This is 2025, not 1995, yet we're still treating time management like it's some mysterious dark art instead of basic workplace hygiene.
What really winds me up. Every second Business owner I meet reckons their people are "inherently chaotic" or "are missing the right attitude." Total rubbish. Your team isn't faulty your systems are. And in most cases, it's because you've never tried teaching them how to actually organise their time effectively.
What This Chaos Actually Costs You
Here's a story about Emma from this marketing agency in Brisbane. Brilliant woman, really gifted. Could sell ice to Eskimos and had more creative ideas than the rest of the team combined. But Christ almighty, seeing her work was like watching a car crash in real time.
Her morning began with her day going through emails for forty five minutes. Then she'd dive into this massive project proposal, get part way in, suddenly recall she needed to call a client, get distracted by someone dropping by, start working on a another project, realise she'd forgotten about a meeting, hurry to that, come back to her desk absolutely fried. This pattern for endlessly.
The real problem? This woman was doing sixty hour weeks and feeling like she was getting nowhere. Her stress levels were through the roof, her work quality was inconsistent, and she was planning to leaving the industry for something "simpler." Meanwhile, her teammate Mark was managing identical projects in standard hours and always seemed to have time for a proper coffee break.
What made Dave effective between Sarah and Dave? Dave understood something most people never work out time isn't something that controls your day, it's something you manage. Simple concept when you think about it, eh?
What Actually Works (And What's Complete Rubbish)
Now before you switch off and think I'm about to sell you another digital solution or some complex methodology, hang on. Real time management isn't about having the ideal software or colour coding your schedule like a rainbow went mental.
The secret lies in three fundamental things that most education completely miss:
Number one Attention isn't multiple. Yeah, I know that's grammatically dodgy, but hear me out. At any given moment, you've got one priority. Not five, not three, just one. The instant you start managing "priorities," you've already missed the point. Found this out the tough way running a firm back in Darwin during the mining boom. Assumed I was being clever managing multiple "urgent" projects simultaneously. Almost destroyed the Business entirely trying to be all things to all people.
Point two Interruptions aren't unavoidable, they're controllable. This is where most local companies get it absolutely wrong. We've built this environment where being "available" and "responsive" means reacting every time someone's phone dings. Mate, that's not efficiency, that's mindless reactions.
I worked with this law firm on the Sunshine Coast where the partners were bragging that they replied to emails within half an hour. Seriously proud! In the meantime, their productivity were dropping, legal tasks was taking much more time as it should, and their solicitors looked like the walking dead. Once we established sensible email rules shock horror both efficiency and service quality increased.
The final point Your vitality isn't constant, so don't assume it is. This is my personal obsession, probably because I spent most of my younger years trying to fight fatigue periods with more caffeine. Plot twist: made things worse.
Some work need you alert and attentive. Some things you can do when you're half asleep. Yet most people distribute work throughout their day like they're some sort of efficiency machine that operates at constant capacity. Complete madness.
What Works in the Real World
Here's where I'm going to annoy some people. Most time management education is total waste. There, I said it. It's either excessively complex all systems and charts that look fancy on PowerPoint but fail in the field or it's fixated on software and programs that become just another thing to deal with.
Effective approaches is education that acknowledges people are complex, businesses are constantly changing, and ideal solutions don't exist. The best program I've ever delivered was for a group of construction workers in Townsville. These guys didn't want to know about the Priority Grid or Getting Things Done methodology.
What they needed usable methods they could use on a job site where chaos happens every moment.
So we focused on three basic ideas: batch similar tasks together, guard your best thinking time for important work, and learn to decline requests confidently about it. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing fancy. Half a year down the track, their work delivery numbers were up thirty percent, additional labour expenses had fallen dramatically, and injury compensation cases had almost completely vanished.
Consider the difference from this premium consultancy business in Brisbane that spent massive amounts on comprehensive time management software and complex workflow processes. Eighteen months later, half the workforce still wasn't using the system properly, and the other half was spending more time managing their productivity tools than actually being productive.
Why Most Businesses Get This Wrong
The issue isn't that leaders don't see the need for better organisation. Most of them get it. Where things go wrong is they treat it as a universal fix. Use the same approach for everyone, provide identical resources to all staff, expect the same results.
Complete rubbish.
Let me tell you about this production facility in Newcastle that hired my services because their floor managers were always running late. The CEO was convinced it was an education problem get the department heads some organisational training and everything would sort itself out.
As it happened the real problem was that management kept shifting focus unexpectedly, the production planning system was about as helpful as an ashtray on a motorbike, and the floor managers lost significant time in discussions that should have been with a brief chat.
Even the best organisational courses wasn't going to address fundamental issues. We ended up rebuilding their workflow structure and implementing proper project management protocols before we even looked at individual efficiency development.
This is what drives me mental about so many Australian businesses. They want to address the outcomes without addressing the underlying disease. Your people can't organise their work properly if your Company doesn't value efficiency as a valuable resource.
The Brisbane Breakthrough
On the topic of business time awareness, let me tell you about this tech startup in Sydney that totally shifted my thinking on what's possible. Tight group of around twenty five, but they operated with a level of efficiency mindset that put major companies to shame.
All discussions included a defined purpose and a firm conclusion deadline. People actually came organised instead of treating discussions as thinking time. Communication wasn't managed like texting. And here's the kicker they had a Company wide agreement that unless it was truly critical, professional contact ceased at evening.
Revolutionary? Hardly. But the results were outstanding. Staff efficiency was superior to equivalent businesses I'd worked with. Staff turnover was virtually non existent. And client satisfaction scores were off the charts because the delivery standard was uniformly outstanding.
The founder's philosophy was simple: "We recruit talented professionals and expect them to organise their tasks. Our job is to create an environment where that's actually possible."
Contrast that with this mining services Company in Perth where managers wore their 80 hour weeks like badges of honour, discussions exceeded timeframes as a matter of course, and "urgent" was the default status for everything. Despite having substantially greater funding than the tech Company, their individual output rates was roughly half the level.
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