On December 6th, TRG International hosted the TRG Talk: Project Management at our regular place - PJ’s Coffee Sala. The Talk began with Mr. Rick Yvanovich, Founder and CEO of TRG International, introduced this month topic "Improving personal efficiency" and our speaker of the day - Brian O’Reilly, MBA, PMP from Industrial Relations and Technology Transfer centre at VGU. 

This month Talk aimed at helping all attendees to understand the importance of enhancing their personal efficiencies by prioritising goals, activities, and more.

Read more at: Three reasons why people should attend seminar

According to his expertise and experiences, Brian believed that goal setting, time management, and the individual’s actions towards achieving the goals are the most important factors in the process of improving personal efficiency.

Effectively manage your time based on the level of urgency

Great time management equals being effective. In other words, we must spend our time on the important tasks, not just the ones that are urgent. To do this, and to minimise the stress of having too many tight deadlines, we need to comprehend this distinction:

• Important activity: The activity which has an outcome that leads us to achieve our goals, whether they are professional or personal goals.
• Urgent activity: The activity demands immediate attention, and is usually associated with achieving someone else's goals. This type of activity usually receives the most of our concentration because the consequence of not dealing with it is immediate.

Brian started introducing to all attendees the Eisenhower Decision Matrix - a decision-making matrix to help individuals clearly distinguish the different levels of importance and urgency.

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix

• Urgent and Important Task: They require our immediate attention, and also work towards fulfilling our long-term goals and mission in life.
• Important but Not Urgent Task: They don't have a pressing deadline. Nonetheless, they help you achieve your important personal, school, and work goals as well as help you fulfil your overall mission as a man.
• Not Important but Urgent Task: They require our attention now but they don't help us to achieve our goals or fulfil our missions. (These kinds of tasks are interruptions from other people, and often require us helping them to meet their own goals and fulfil their own priorities.)
• Not Important and Not Urgent Task: They are not pressing nor do they help you achieve long-term goals or fulfil your missions. They are primarily distractions.

The second step in time management is to examine your daily activities and put them into one of the four categories above. Once done, you have to perform the activities in the order of priority as followed:

After the explanation, every group put the theories into practice by writing down their important/ urgent tasks and the not at all important/ urgent ones. Brian concluded this part stating that project planning is one of the best key elements to improving your efficiency, and you had to move your focus towards the ones that are important and focus less on the not important.

The role of technology in improving personal efficiency

Anyone who embrace the technologies available today understands their values and have experienced the positive results from them. Technology can help you and businesses to improve the way you carry out tasks by automating some manual, labour intensive activities and freeing up your time to achieve other strategic goals.

Read more at: TRG Talk: Project Management - Technology & Project Management

Different technological solutions can boost the productivity of your workforce, for example:

• Help you work more, work faster and work anywhere
• Enable collaboration between different teams
• Help you track and analyse performance

Tips on optimising your daily schedule

Before concluding the Talk, Brian emphasised the importance of making a daily plan ahead of time which can enable you to see a clearer path for yourselves as well as maintain a better, healthier work-life balance. Below are the 7 tips to further enhance each individual’s efficiency that Brian shared.

1. Plan your day/week in advance
2. First thing first
3. Rush unimportant tasks
4. Uninterrupted blocks
5. Emails after 11:00am
6. One key job every day
7. Finish time-need to relax.

About TRG Talk

TRG Talk is a series of events co-organised by TRG International and PJ’s Coffee Vietnam in order to promote the latest trends in the IT industry and the HR world, as well as tips and trick in improving your project management skills.

About TRG Talk - Project Management

A good Project Manager must be able to identify problems and risks. He/ She also needs to know how to minimise these issues and is able to make the decision needed throughout the entirety of the project. Do you consider yourself a good project manager? Do you have the required skills and power to handle the situation and the people involved in your project?

TRG Talk - Project Management is a monthly meetup that allows project managers to discuss in detail what it takes to become great at what you're doing. The event takes place every first Thursday of the month.

Next event: 

Project planning is often the most challenging phase for a project manager as at this stage, you need to make guesses about the staff, resources, and equipment needed based on your mere experiences. 

In fact, the more detailed, realistic, and effective your plan is, the more chances you can deliver the project on time, within budget, schedule, and with the lowest risks possible. 

According to experienced project managers, the art of project planning relies largely on mastering planning tools and related metrics since these factors allow greater operational control of projects. 

What are the necessary planning tools and skills to keep the projects on track? How to interpret your metrics and data into useful insights? 

TRG Talk: Project Management - Effective Tools  & Skills in Project Planning is delighted to invite Jax Hamilton, author of "Let's waste money - Why large projects seem to fail", on stage to share her 25 years of experience in project management role in different countries, especially in South East Asia for the last 12 years. 

This event is limited to the first 24 people and FREE entrance, so hurry up and grab your seat!