How small steps and personal guidance can help you put what you learn into practice.
If, like me, you enjoy taking courses to help improve different areas of your life, you may have noticed that finishing a course and using what you learned are two different things.
Courses can give you the information; they can show you how to do something, and you can download the worksheets, but what they cannot do is implement the changes for you.
This is no different from the courses we’d take in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Then, we’d often get sent on courses by our employer; we’d have a lovely time, and sometimes a great lunch, and come back motivated. Then within a few days, when the natural humdrum of daily life brought us back down to earth, we’d jettison a lot of what we learned and fall back into old habits.
The trouble is, knowing what to do is rather different from doing what you know.
As a teacher, this is a dilemma I’ve wrestled with for quite some time. How do you bridge the gap between knowledge and application?
One thing I have learned as a teacher is that when you take one learning point at a time and give it time to embed into daily habits, the changes you want can begin to take hold.
For example, in the Time Sector System, one of the first things a student can start with is to organise their work by when they will do it.
If you collect ten new tasks today, not all of them will necessarily need to be done today. So, the question becomes: “When will I do this?” Some may need to be done this week; others, though, are less urgent, and you can move them off to next week.
By practising that question every time you look at a collected task, you give yourself a chance to make it a habit. Instead of seeing another task, you begin to think about when you will do it.
Making these small changes is still difficult; you will likely need to keep reminding yourself to ask the question for a few weeks. And if things get unusually busy, it’s easy to drop the new practice entirely.
Yet, isn’t that all part of learning? Try something new, fail, adjust, try again, fail again and adjust until it begins to work? That’s certainly how I learned to use Korean chopsticks.
When I began thinking about how I could help my students through these setbacks, I remembered one of my own experiences. When I went on Franklin Covey’s time management course in the early 90s, I remember being very excited to implement everything all at once. I had the Franklin Planner, the inserts, and a full year of planning pages.
I began with the easiest part: Planning my days. I began by writing “Planning and solitude” at the top of my task list. This was a fifteen-minute window at the start of my day where I would sit quietly to write out my appointments for the day and the things I wanted to get done.
I tried writing out my governing values and filling out the address book, but failed miserably at doing those. But the one thing I focused on was that each morning, before I started my day, I would do my “planning and solitude”.
Within a couple of weeks, it had become almost natural and a lifelong habit was forming. To this day, I still give myself fifteen minutes each morning to review my appointments and establish what my most important tasks for the day are.
Later, I did complete the governing values section, and they too eventually became an integral part of my whole system.
Starting with one thing gave me something I could build on. But choosing where to begin and knowing what to adjust when something didn’t quite work can be difficult. That’s where I wanted to give my students more support.
That’s why I created the Productivity Academy: to help people put these principles into practice and create a calmer, more focused way of working.
The power of the Academy is in the personal guidance I can give each member. Start by telling me where you struggle most; I can then help you choose where to begin and what to focus on first.
Each month, you can join live training sessions where you can ask questions and learn a technique in a little more detail.
The focus, though, is always on implementing what you learn one step at a time. You do not have to learn everything immediately.
And when members slip back into old habits, they now have a way to get help to get back on track.
The goal isn’t to be perfect immediately; the goal is to learn something useful and apply it to your life so that it works for you. And give yourself room to enjoy the learning process.
If you’ve taken courses, understood the ideas and then struggled to use those ideas consistently, that’s the gap I created the Productivity Academy to help you with.
If that sounds like the kind of support you’d like in 2027, you can find out more about the Academy here. I’d love to be able to help you too.