"Time Management: Strategies and Solutions" was the topic at the Marin Professionals General Meeting on February 10, 1999. Our guest speaker, Sue Coleman, is a Certified Personal and Professional Coach (CPPC) sand has a graduate degree in education. One of the most challenging problems for people in career transition is management of their time and emotional resources, so Sue's talk was most welcome. Here are some of her tactics and strategies.

Clarify Your Vision and Goals

In developing priorities, focus on your vision and goals. "Vision" is your long-term objective. "Goals" are things that are do-able within a foreseeable time span.

First, clarify your vision. Realize what is really important to you.

• Look at when life was really good
• Look at when you were really angry or frustrated (your values were being suppressed or violated)

Use visualization to see what you want to by doing in the future. Get in touch kinesthetically.

Set Your Priorities

Next, get your priorities straight. Train yourself to recognize the difference between "Important" and "Urgent". Urgent things have a deadline. Important things are those which will have a negative repercussion if not taken care of. She gave us a handout which showed a four-square grid on which you can list issues according to the following types:

• Important and Urgent
• Important and Not Urgent
• Not Important and Urgent
• Not Important and Not Urgent

Set Your Goals and Get Organized!

With goals, the more specific they are, the more attaainable they're apt to be. Break them down into steps, and set dates to provide a structure.

Keep your schedule in only one place - be it a wall calendar, datebook, or computerized agenda. Otherwise information is going to get fragmented and things are bound to get overlooked

Develop Constructive Daily Habits. Set for yourself one business habit a day (e.g. get your workspace uncluttered) and one personal habit (e.g. do your daily exercise).

Conquer Procrastination

Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which ends in paralysis. Learn to say "it's good enough."

Develop systems for breaking tasks into component parts. Try setting a start and stop time for each project., record it and be realistic.

Do You Have Paper Overload?

Judith Lubeck of Coaching Strategies presented the O.H.I.O. system (Only Handle It Once) of paper handling:

• Put marks on every paper each time you handle it. After three marks, do something with that piece of paper.
• Always take your mail to open at the same spot. This helps create a good consistency habit and encourages tossing unnecessary mail.
• Set up an action-oriented filing system for your papers, such as:
           To Write
           To Call
           To File
           To Hold for an Answer

With good time management, you can remove many artificial barriers to a more effective job search!

Sue Coleman can be reached at LIFEWORKS! (415) 383-7660. Judith Lubeck can be reached at Coaching Strategies Unlimited, (415) 479-7604.