Topic outline

  • COURSE INTRODUCTION

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    • Time: 11 hours
    • Free Certificate
    Time and stress management are two basic components of success. Our challenge is to budget our time wisely and create a system to identify, evaluate, and eliminate personal and work-based distractors and stressors. This course teaches you how to manage your time and reduce stress in your life.

    Unit 1 introduces the concepts of time management and strategies for managing your use of time in your daily life. Unit 2 discusses ways that time management strategies help us become more productive and engaged workers – whether we are working by ourselves or with others. Unit 3 introduces the concepts of stress management and strategies for reducing stress in our work and daily lives.

  • Unit 1: Time Management

    Unit 1 introduces the concepts of time management and discusses the importance of goal setting and time tracking. For example, you have had to put aside other activities and tasks to allow time to take this course. Were they important or urgent, and did they align with your goals? How did you decide what activities to modify, reschedule, or eliminate? Did you hand some actions off to someone else? This unit emphasizes putting you in control of your time and giving you the planning tools to meet goals. You will learn that distractions, lack of planning, and a failure to prioritize can sabotage your personal and professional life.

    In the materials below, you will learn about tools you can use to gain control of your time. For example, creating a to-do list can help you manage your time. Using the Eisenhower Matrix can go a step further and help you prioritize which tasks need your attention. Remember that efficiency may necessitate recruiting others to help you complete your work. In business terms, you want to optimize your time as a return on investment. How can you maximize balancing your personal and work time to achieve a healthy, rejuvenated, and successful life?

    Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.

    • 1.1: What Is Time Management?

      If you were on a game show and asked to identify your most valuable resource, would time be your answer? Time is a finite resource that has the most potential to create value for you personally and professionally. Although everyone has access to the same amount of time each day, it is up to you to allocate this precious commodity in the most productive way to yield maximum benefit and the least stress. Using effective planning techniques, setting goals, delegating tasks, and prioritizing help us work smarter, not harder. Moreover, practicing these new skills helps us gain control over self-defeating stress levels that typically accompany ineffective time management.

    • 1.2: Tools for Time Management

      We often face obstacles of our own making. For example, creative people may feel their minds are cluttered with ideas and distractions. Project managers may not realize the importance of using their team members to effect a positive outcome. Students may dismiss the benefits of using time management tools to prioritize activities that are important but not urgent. The articles below show us how planning, organizing, and delegation can result in positive decision-making.

  • Unit 2: Enhancing Workplace Productivity

    Unfortunately, most of us lack the benefit of a quiet corner office on the penthouse floor or the ability to retreat to a soundproof room to concentrate on our work. We must often perform our jobs amid multiple sources of noise and distractions. Do you or your manager measure your productivity in terms of how many tasks you can perform at once without really looking at the quality of the outcomes? The following resources will help clarify the impact of these obstacles on your success.

    In this unit, you will learn how we undermine our productivity and gain tools to improve our ability to focus, prioritize, and improve our decision-making and problem-solving skills. Pay particular attention to how goal setting relates to personal and professional accomplishment.

    Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.

    • 2.1: Setting Appropriate Goals and Priorities

      Setting goals can provide a powerful motivation tool to help you and your team keep track of your accomplishments. However, be sure to avoid feeling overwhelmed by endless to-do lists.

    • 2.2: Determining What Is Important

      We have learned that time is a valuable but limited resource and the importance of writing specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound goals. However, reaching your goals brings more complexity to our decision-making and problem-solving tapestry. To-do lists are the starting point for corralling our thoughts, ideas, and activities. Let's examine how to determine the urgency or importance of each task and how to effectively meet its project management or academic challenges. These readings provide valuable tools for gaining control of your time and increasing your ability to balance relationships and academic, social, and professional commitments.

    • 2.3: Methods for Increasing Productivity

      The productivity level of any process refers to the effective effort where output is measured per unit of input. In other words, how efficient are you at obtaining your goals, given your effort? Remember our discussion of SMART goals? Each component of this acronym plays an important part in getting to the finish line. Pay special attention to the "actionable" element to increase your efficiency and effectiveness. You might surprise yourself by attaining your goals if you use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to identify important and urgent demands on your time and avoid procrastinating on less enjoyable or more difficult tasks.

    • 2.4: Reducing Distractions and Staying Focused

      Are you a victim of distractions when you try to complete a project on time? For example, do you find TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media irresistible when you try to complete your work? Strategies for staying focused and managing our time include enabling ad blockers and bookmarks to stay focused when you are on your computer. It often helps to designate a distinct workplace or use different email addresses or phones to separate your personal and professional lives. We often reward ourselves for completing a pre-planned goal.

    • 2.5: Avoid Multitasking

      Many jobs and situations require us to multitask, but research has shown it can be unproductive and damage our health. The following resources offer examples of the negative consequences of multitasking.

  • Unit 3: Stress Management

    What are stressors and distractors? Why are certain jobs more stressful than others? Why do some people handle stress better than others? How can you use stressors and distractors to your advantage? Let's discuss some common myths and truths as we figure out how much time we need to devote to certain tasks.

    Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.

    • 3.1: What Is a Stressor?

      Most of us feel stressed from time to time. Of course, the degree of stress we experience depends on our ability to cope with unwelcome or unexpected events or stressors. This tension affects our minds and bodies.

      You have probably heard of the fight or flight response to stress. Walter Cannon (1871–1945), an American physiologist, was among the first to explore stress and how our bodies respond to stressful events. He described the ""fight or flight response"" to stress, which suggests our body quickly arouses the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system when confronted with a stressful event so that our pupils dilate, our breathing quickens, we begin to sweat, our heart rate increases, and our muscles tense or tremble. These physiological responses prepare us to fight or escape from stressful events.

      This coping mechanism helps us protect ourselves from perceived or real threats (stressors). Examples include the fear of public speaking, phobias (such as spiders, snakes, bridges, and water), and fear of a lack of control in a given situation. Of course, some stress levels are a healthy sign of realistic awareness. We may have to meet a physical or mental challenge that immediately demands our knowledge, ability, or experience. These same stressors that prompt us to run to safety motivate athletes to perform their best when facing competitors. Let's examine the causes of stress and ways to reduce unhealthy stress.

    • 3.2: Managing Stress to Boost Mental Health

      Stress can negatively affect your mental health – but it doesn't have to! Now, we'll explore how to manage stress.

  • Course Feedback Survey

    Please take a few minutes to give us feedback about this course. We appreciate your feedback, whether you completed the whole course or even just a few resources. Your feedback will help us make our courses better, and we use your feedback each time we make updates to our courses. If you come across any urgent problems, email contact@saylor.org.

  • Certificate Final Exam

    Take this exam if you want to earn a free Course Completion Certificate.

    To receive a free Course Completion Certificate, you will need to earn a grade of 70% or higher on this final exam. Your grade for the exam will be calculated as soon as you complete it. If you do not pass the exam on your first try, you can take it again as many times as you want, with a 7-day waiting period between each attempt. Once you pass this final exam, you will be awarded a free Course Completion Certificate.