A Valuable Workshop about Time Management

Great2bToastmasters have organized another ‘great’ event on 3rd November 2009 (Tuesday), at 7.30pm, which was the Time-Management Workshop conducted by the ever-prominent speaker, Christopher Choong. Christ is a rather experienced speaker who always sugarcoats his speech with convincing facts and matters as well as humorous elements that intrigue his audience.
He is such a responsible person whereby he daintily dressed and reached the venue much earlier to prepare and set up whatever gadgets needed during the presentation. Most importantly, he brought along cakes from E&O to ‘bribe’ us. In fact, there is no necessity for him to bribe us. We should be ‘bribing’ him to hold this workshop.
Christopher Choong, our main character of the show

Everyone paid their undivided attention to the speaker

At the outset of his sharing, Christ inspired us with a very precise fact. According to him, we do not manage time because time cannot be managed, but we manage ourselves to ensure we have sufficient time to get things done. Christ has made the workshop so vivacious by letting us to mentally ‘work’ throughout the session. He passed a questionnaire with 15 questions to us. We were asked to complete the questionnaire within 10 minutes. As usual, different questions will carry different scores that represent certain qualities in us. This practice seemed to be boring at first, but the interesting part took place later on. He imparted the idea on how these questions portray the different time-management abilities in us. For instance, those who scored high in question 6, 10, 14 & 15 are people who are more well-versed in goal setting (as shown)



At the end of the session, all of us got to realize our own abilities and weaknesses in different aspects of time-management, such as goal setting ability, capability of prioritizing works, skills of managing interruptions, level of procrastination as well as the ability of making schedules.
Of course, Christ didn’t only help us to decipher our weaknesses only, he did provide us with effective solutions to overcome those ‘flaws’. For example, I told him I am deficient in prioritizing works even though I did adopt a to-do-list in my own job management. After sharing with him my actual situation, he suggested me to use a more effective to-do-list. (as shown)
Here is the Priority Setting Tool that shows you how to create your own to-do-list more effectively without interrupting by the less important jobs.

From what we can observe from the chart, we are encouraged to pay more attention to zone A, as whatever very important and urgent tasks will be listed here. So we need to complete the tasks occupying zone A first. Then most of us were wondering whether we shall go for important or urgent tasks for the next step, B or D? According to Christ, we shall prioritize the more important tasks first, which is zone B. Nowadays, lots of people has abused the word ‘urgent’. A lot of people tend to use words like ‘super-urgent’, ‘extremely urgent’ to urge you to get things done earlier and faster for them. So the word ‘urgent’ basically has not much value in it. So it totally depends on you to recognize its urgency. I do agree with Christ in such situation. So he advised us to settle the tasks that we think are more important first because those tasks may cause some negative impacts to you if you do it late. After Zone B, then you may steer to Zone D for the urgent one, and lastly only go to Zone C to finish the less important and less urgent jobs when we are free. This chart was another beneficial message brought to us that night.
the IPP, Khai Yuen was asking for Christ's help to 'crack a tough nut' related to time-management during the Q&A session

Christ granted all the attendees another bonus too. He sent us the softcopy of his presentation materials and some research few days after the workshop. Guess what? What he gave us is a 52-page time-management e-book with the compilation and preparation of all time-management related information. We didn’t pay a single cent for the workshop, except for the guests who only paid RM5 for admission. But what we obtain from this workshop is much more than we can expect. Thanks, Christ!

We did have guests who promise to join our club after this workshop, because they have benefited a lot from this workshop and strongly believe they can gain more knowledge and communication skills by joining us too.
a passionate guest of the workshop, Fennie

We will have another big shot coming to our next meeting on 17th November 2009 (Tuesday), 8pm, at Northam Tower, Wing B, 22nd Flr, Suite 5, at Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah. This big shot is none other than our Distinguished Toastmaster, Charles Tan Chia Lih. He is going to conduct a session on "Handling Q&A Session ". I personally think it is the most challenging session of a presentation. If you would like to know how to confront the Q&A session more steadily and confidently, this is a session you can’t afford to miss.

Come and join us on 17th November! Admission is absolutely free!