Productivity: Focus & Time Management

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Overview

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Chris Croft is an international speaker, author, and management trainer with more than 20 years of experience helping individuals and organizations improve performance. Known for his practical, engaging teaching style, Chris combines real-world examples with actionable techniques that learners can apply immediately in their everyday lives. This course provides a practical, no-nonsense introduction to personal productivity and time management. if you feel busy, overwhelmed and unable to prioritise your to do list then this is the course for you! Through short, focused lessons and interactive workbooks and quizzes, you will examine your current habits, learn to distinguish between urgent and important, and prioritize tasks. You will explore how goals, planning, and list systems help you take back control of your calendar (and therefore your life!). You will learn specific strategies to handle interruptions, email overload, and unproductive meetings, including assertive communication techniques, negotiation, and setting boundaries. The course covers how to analyze recurring crises, design basic systems and templates, and use digital tools, calendars, and workspaces more effectively to support focused work. By the end, you will be able to evaluate your own productivity barriers, apply a toolkit of time-management techniques in real situations, and create an ongoing improvement plan that fits you.

Syllabus

Welcome to Productivity

This opening module introduces the Smart Tips: Productivity course and helps learners get ready to apply its ideas right away. You’ll meet trainer Chris Croft, see how the course uses short, practical lessons, and reflect on your own productivity habits through a simple self-assessment. This foundation helps you approach the rest of the course with a clear sense of how the tips connect to your work, studies, and daily life.

Prioritising Your Days and Tasks for Maximum Productivity

This module helps learners shift from reacting to whatever feels urgent toward investing time in what truly matters. You’ll explore how to separate urgent tasks from important ones, make more space for meaningful work, and reduce the crises that come from neglecting planning. These ideas are valuable in any busy setting where constant demands can crowd out long-term progress.

Reducing The Unimportant Tasks in your Life

This module focuses on freeing up time by cutting back on work that adds little value. You’ll practice ways to say no, negotiate over time, delegate appropriately, and avoid making commitments you cannot keep. The module also helps you spot hidden drains on productivity, such as weak systems, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and other time stealers, so you can protect your time more confidently.

Handling Interruptions: Politely and Assertively

Interruptions often cost more than the few minutes they seem to take, because they also break concentration and delay returning to meaningful work. In this module, learners will examine the true cost of interruptions, respond to them more assertively, and redesign their workspace and habits to reduce disruption. These strategies are especially useful in modern work environments shaped by constant messages, drop-ins, and competing demands.

Meetings: make them useful, focused, and efficient

Meetings can be useful, but they often become a major source of wasted time when they start poorly, drift off track, or include the wrong people. This module helps learners improve meetings from several angles: handling latecomers, starting with structure, keeping discussions focused, assigning actions clearly, and deciding when attendance is unnecessary. These are practical skills for any workplace where meetings compete with time for real work.

Procrastination

This module addresses a common productivity challenge: delaying important work even when you know it matters. Learners will examine procrastination as a habit and apply practical methods for getting started, building momentum, and following through. The strategies in this module can help turn avoided tasks into visible progress and reduce the stress that comes from repeated postponement.

Goals: the secret to your success

This module connects productivity to direction by helping learners decide what is worth doing in the first place. You’ll explore how goals shape priorities, how to make goals easier to achieve, and how to refine them so they become clearer and more motivating. These skills help ensure that better time management leads to meaningful progress, not just greater busyness.

Lists: reduce stress and increase control

Lists are simple tools, but when used well they can reduce stress, increase control, and turn large ambitions into steady daily progress. In this module, learners will build list systems that capture important tasks, separate big projects from daily actions, and keep future possibilities from cluttering current priorities. These habits can make work feel more manageable and more purposeful.

Building Your Diary/Calendar

A diary or calendar can be much more than a place to record appointments. This module helps learners use a diary to capture commitments, protect time for important work, preserve flexibility, and reduce the mental effort of trying to remember everything. These practical scheduling habits can improve reliability while leaving enough space to handle the unexpected.

Repeating Tasks: the biggest time gain

Some of the biggest productivity gains come from improving tasks and problems that happen again and again. In this module, learners will identify recurring issues, look for root causes, and create systems that reduce repeated effort. By shifting from one-off fixes to smarter processes, you can save time every time the task returns.

Emails

Email can become a constant source of distraction when it is checked continuously and handled without a clear system. This module helps learners regain control through better inbox habits, more intentional setup, fewer alerts, and clearer writing. These practical changes can reduce reactivity, improve communication, and stop email from dominating the day.

Technology

Technology can either support productivity or create new friction, depending on how it is chosen and used. In this module, learners will examine practical digital tools and habits that save time, improve organization, and reduce avoidable loss. Rather than chasing every new tool, the focus is on using technology deliberately to support reliable, efficient work.

Working environment

The way a workspace is arranged has a direct effect on concentration, decision-making, and stress. This module helps learners improve both physical and digital environments by organizing materials, reducing distractions, creating systems for deferred decisions, and challenging the habit of multitasking. The goal is to build a workspace that supports focused, effective work every day.