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By Katie Duckworth, October 19, 2012

The pressure is on me at the moment. And it’s all of my own making!

At a recent training day, I challenged participants from the charity I was working with to choose a task they’d been procrastinating on and make a pledge to the group about when they would get it done. I found myself promising to update my website by the time we met for the follow-up workshop. Needless to say, it’s quite a job, and I’ve been meaning to do it for quite a while.

So how am I going to make sure I put my money where my mouth is and get it done? Here’s three things I will be doing:

1. Making it up – when you step into the positive results of your action, as if you are have already done it, you get massively more motivated. So, I’ll be creating a powerful image in my head of how an enhanced website is going to benefit me and my clients, what I’ll be feeling (thrilled!), what people will be saying to me once the job is done, (“great website, Katie” etc, etc) – and keeping focused on that lovely vision.

2. Turning the pain into pleasure – I’ll  be considering how I can I turn the pain of doing it (it takes a long time, I’m not really a techie, there are things I’d rather do, I’ve tried before and made a mess of it etc, etc) into pleasure. The group have promised ‘admiration and cake’ which is a great reward but I shall also be focusing on how fantastic it will feel when I’ve achieved something so challenging to me. If I keep focusing on the pain, I can guarantee it won’t get it done.

3. Thinking thoughts which serve me – our thoughts have a huge impact on the results we go on to get. If I think to myself that “I am learning to handle WordPress easily and effortlessly” I will get better results than if I think “I am no good at anything to do with technology.” Read more about the power of thoughts here, ( in this instance at the top of a cliff-face).

These are just three of the steps which I’ll be taking from the many effective strategies I encourage my clients to adopt to be super-effective in their work.

I offer one-to-one coaching with individuals as well as training to improve the effectiveness of third sector organisations. If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you, contact me here or call 020 8772 7808 for a no-obligation phone chat.

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By Katie Duckworth, July 24, 2011

My third sector clients often seek help with restoring their ‘work-life balance’. They’re mostly very committed. They have heavy work loads, put in long hours and take work home – often. But what are they really asking for? What do they mean by a better work-life balance?

Most people would say that a good work-life balance is a balance between the hours spent on your work and your personal life. When the former tips overly into the latter, we don’t have a good work-life balance.

But in my experience of coaching third sector clients I’d say there’s much more to it. It’s not just a question of hours. If you work ten minutes a day but those ten minutes take up so much of your energy that you need to spend the rest of the time recovering that’s not too balanced, is it?

I’d say there are four parts to having a good work-life balance:

1. A satisfactory balance between the hours spent on your work and on your personal life.

2. A satisfactory balance between the amount of physical and emotional energy needed for your work and your personal life.

3. A satisfactory balance between the various aspects of life which are important to you – eg career/ambition, family, fun and interests, spirituality, exercise etc, so that no one aspect dominates.

4. Having a sense of purpose and fulfilment in your life.

I work with my clients on all these four aspects. We learn practical time management and prioritising techniques to tackle the first. We do deeper ‘know yourself’ work to discover how they can find the latter.

If you are concerned about the effect a poor work-life balance is having on you or your staff contact me here or call 0208 772 7807 for a chat about how I can help.

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By Katie Duckworth, June 14, 2011

Wow! What a week. That was some marathon!

My Learning at Work week was absolutely buzzing as I coached dozens of committed and hard-working third sector staff in my marathon ‘speed coaching’ sessions.  It’s amazing what you can achieve in 25 – 40 minutes if both coach and client are focused – which I can tell you, we were.

Here’s some of the feedback I got from staff at The Back Up Trust and One World Action, just two of the organisations which took part.

“The session provided me with simple ideas and steps to having more confidence and self-belief.”

“It helped me be aware of the big picture of the current state of my life, to organise priorities and to focus in on actions and deadlines – thank you very much.”

“I brought a big issue that I wanted to change. I found it very useful to have it nailed down.”

And because all the best learning is two-way, I also learned a lot about the very smartest way to produce results in a short space of time.

I was very struck also by the similar issues which people needed help with. These are the top three issues affecting the people I coached:

1. How to be super confident in meetings and presentations

2. How to make get your career moving

3. Work/life balance & time management

From my on-going work with clients I know these are big issues for the sector – the clients I’m working with are already making breakthroughs in these areas. I’m available for one-to-one coaching for third sector staff and managers, and my newsletter, Stay sane in the charity sector will be covering these topics regularly.

I’ll definitely be doing a coaching marathon again, so sign up to my newsletter by using the form on the right, for news of future events and those tips on handling life in the third sector.

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By Katie Duckworth, November 10, 2010

“Just do it!” One of the greatest ad campaigns ever, and brilliant advice on how to stop putting things off. Or is it?

I don’t know many people who find this approach to getting things done particularly helpful, certainly not the hard-pressed third sector clients I coach. If they could “just do it”, they would.

Instead of drawing on massive amounts of willpower, I teach my clients how to stop procrastinating with three steps which are virtually foolproof.

These are the steps:

1. Make a decision about whether you’re going to do something or not
2. Book the action into your diary
3. Associate the action with pleasure.

Here are the reasons why each step is important, and how to do it.

1. Make a decision

When you don’t make a decision about whether you’re going to do something, the task weighs on your mind making you feel stressed even if you don’t realise it. You feel guilty for not doing it even though you haven’t decided whether you want to or not. What a waste of emotional energy!

So, make a decision. Ask yourself, “am I or am I not going to do this job?” If it’s no, forget about it. Tell whoever you have to tell. Delegate it. Do whatever you have to do to get it out of your mind and off your to-do list.

If it’s yes…

2. Book the action into your diary

When you schedule an action into your diary you are making a commitment to yourself to do it. You can begin to imagine yourself doing it. You’re not putting it off any longer, it’s in the diary.

So, decide when you’re going to do a task, and write it into your diary or Blackberry or whatever you use to schedule your week. Work out roughly how long it’s going to take – and then forget about it.

3. Associate the action with pleasure

The reason you’re putting the action off in the first place is because you’re associating it with some kind of pain. To stop procrastinating you have to control the feeling or emotion around the task. Associate the task with pleasure or something that you value and focus on that instead. So, for instance, you could associate getting your filing done with the pleasure of having a great space in which to be creative or the reward you plan to give yourself afterwards.

Then you can “just do it”!

So, these are three steps to follow if you want to stop procrastinating. Try it and let me know if it works for you.

If you work in the third sector and want help with making better use of your time contact me here.

Follow me on twitter @katieduckworth for more time management tips.