Coaching: Time Management and Organisational Skills
What did the Client want to have happen?
My Client is dyslexic and wanted to improve her ability to manage time and prioritiseher workload. Her role involved collating documents and preparing evidence for courts,and so it was important to be neat and accurate, creating and maintaining cataloguingand payment systems.
What did we do?
I worked with her using Clean Language to elicit metaphors for how she currently managed her workload and organised her paperwork.Tasks that had to be done would suddenly “pop” up in her mind and then she knew they needed doing. However, she would then find that they had disappeared by the time she sat down or went to the file. She wasn’t able to “pin them down”, and would often think of other things that needed doing that were connected so that she ended up panicking about how much needed doing.It felt like bubbles rising up inside her so fast that she had to let them off. As her colleagues asked her where certain pieces of work were, or when she would have something finished, the bubbles would rise faster and faster and she would “pop”. This often resulted in conflict and her colleagues perceived her as aggressive and snappy.
What happened next?
To enable her to keep ‘an eye on’ her workload and to remember things that ‘popped up’, we organised a magnetic board next to her desk that she could pop post its onto,whenever things occurred to her. She was also able to view her entire workload at once.She literally began to ‘pin things down’. Sometimes the metaphor provides the simplest of solutions!
Since dyslexics often create unusual order, or connections between things, problems have occurred in the past when my Client had been midway through a sequence of tasks in a different order to what was expected of her. Because she wasn’t doing it in the same order as the others, they assumed that she had missed things out and would berate her for it. Often their assumptions were false and she would have completed all aspects of the process. However, because of her dyslexic difficulty things popping in other mind and disappearing, she had been unable to explain herself eloquently.
The white board had a secondary benefit, in that her manager could also notice which things were in her awareness and which weren’t so that she could remind if necessary and relax when she saw things were going to be done.
We also ran a half day training with the team on diverse thinking styles, allowing them to consider all of their working patterns in terms of costs and benefits.
If you would like more information about this process or how we could work with your teams please contact Caitlin Walker.
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