Train-the-Trainer: Activities for Time Management and Goal Setting

Asked: Kindly suggest some games and activities for Time Management and Goal Setting Training.

Answered: Clearly, there are so many ways to approach these topics with hundreds of ideas for each. Before answering, I thought it would be best to step back and ask, “To what level do you want the learners to be able to work with these topics?” This question is the key to settling on activities that will help you achieve your objectives.

When I say “to what level,” I am referring to the ACFM model that we use at The Bob Pike Group for determining knowledge level.

A – Awareness - learners have heard about it and are aware that it exists. This is a knowledge level where they can recognize it and comes in about 30 minutes.

F – Familiarity - learners know something about the topic and can share the information with others. This level provides learners with the ability to talk about it in greater detail and comes with about 2-3 days.

C – Competence - learners can perform the new skill, not just talk about it. In this instance, learners can apply new knowledge to new situations. This is achieved once behavior changes.

M – Mastery – learners know it so well that they can teach the content and skills to others. John Medina says that this comes with about 10,000 hours of practice and use.

If we take this model and apply it to your question, we can see that different activities will help us achieve different objectives.

• Awareness – We could structure group discussions around time management and have people share how they manage their time. This would help get at this basic level so that learners are aware of the topic. We might also do a lecturette to help explain concepts of time management.
• Familiarity – Since we want our learners to be able to talk about it in greater detail, we could use the same exercise as shown above but build on it with some discussion. We might start asking people to list off their “big rocks” and also make a list of their “little rocks,” too. They can then start applying these principles and see how they are spending their days. We might also ask them to list behaviors in small groups that support effective time management and those that derail it.
• Competence – This does not happen in the classroom, but we can set people up to be successful when they leave by helping them create an action plan for when they are back on the job. Perhaps this will look like a calendar where people start to block off time for their “big rocks” while also creating space for the “little rocks” which represent that things that are perhaps urgent but not important or perhaps important but not urgent. Read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to better understand these principles.
• Mastery – This is not happening in the classroom but will be an eventual outcome if our objectives are geared towards these ideas.

We won’t apply the model to Goal Setting, but you can see the premise. One tool that I like to use when doing goal setting is the SMART model. If you are not familiar with it, SMART is an acronym for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-Bound

All goals should follow this model so that each learner knows when they have been achieved. Michael Porter (strategic planning guru from HBS) said, “If a goal does not have a number, then it is not a goal…it is a hallucination.”

I hope that this information has been useful. If you are interested in applying these concepts further and would like to see how we would use these same concepts in a classroom, we would love to have you attend one of our public courses. We talk about these same concepts, but more importantly we model them so that our learners see how participant-centered design and delivery have a huge impact on achieving the training goals and objectives that we set.

Scott Enebo is a training consultant at The Bob Pike Group.