Two Southern Illinois University Edwardsville alumni returned to their alma mater last week to discuss successful time management techniques.
A group of students, staff and faculty members, alumni and members of the outside community attended the event. Brian Henry, a 1995 mass communications graduate and senior director of public affairs for Express Scripts in St. Louis, and Zach Schaefer, assistant professor of speech communication at SIUE led the event, which was sponsored by the SIUE Alumni Association and SIUE Educational Outreach.
The group collectively listed prioritization, managing emails, dealing with other people’s emergencies, shifting focus and helping others get focused as the top time management challenges they face. Another topic was intent – what individuals say they want, versus behavior – what they actually want.
Henry and Schaefer presented a PowerPoint presentation that referenced a 2008 article from the Boston Globe stating that when identifying what people value most between the following categories: wealth, marriage, career and free time—the majority of respondents, 68 percent, chose free time.
“All of us are wired for inattention and inertia,” Henry said. “It’s important to consider time management isn’t just about your time. It’s about that shared time—time with family, friends and colleagues.
“The focus of this program today is to help you reframe the way you think about time; discuss useful strategies, identify your top time management obstacles and develop an action plan.”
Schaefer added, “When you stay focused it requires you to make conscious decisions, which means you manage yourself and your time much more effectively.”
Some means of incorporating time management tactics included:
- Adopting time management applications on wireless phones and computers to identify how time currently is being used
- Breaking larger projects into manageable pieces and tackling them one task at a time
- Picking up the telephone and calling people if more than two emails are exchanged
- Identifying times of greatest productivity in order to determine when is the best time to take on projects that require the most focus and attention.
The event was free for SIUE students and $10 for other attendees. The Alumni Association and Educational Outreach host monthly Speaker Series events on myriad topics aimed at engaging students, alumni, and the campus and outside communities.
For more information, contact the Alumni Association, (618) 650-2760, or siuealumni@siue.edu, or visit siue.edu/alumni.