Helping your clients identify their personal time management style
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As a professional organizer, you know that time management and organization are very closely connected. A client who hires you to organize their space will nearly always end up spending less time finding things and putting them away. However, when a client needs help specifically with time management, the Organizing Assessment Questions I suggested last week will not be as relevant.
Whether you use personality type or not, the following questions will help you and your clients to understand their time management strengths and challenges.
Time Management Assessment Questions
- Are you more productive when you work alone or with others?
- Are you good at estimating in advance how much time tasks will take?
- Does perfectionism keep you from completing tasks in a timely manner?
- Are you easily distracted?
- Do you work best by making a list, setting priorities, and sticking with them, or by just getting started and working on several tasks at once?
- Do you tend to take on more than you can handle?
- Do you get more excited about starting a new project, or about completing a project?
- Does your calendar system work well for you?
- Do you forget about meetings and other appointments?
- Do you forget about birthdays and other special events?
- What causes you to procrastinate?
- Do you make time to relax and enjoy life, or focus more on getting things done and being productive?
- What is your reaction when unexpected events interfere with your plans?
- Which of your current strategies are working well?
- What are your biggest challenges or weaknesses in terms of time management?
Your client’s answers to these questions will usually be influenced directly by their personality type, as described in the previous posts in this series.
What other questions do you ask during a time management or productivity assessment?
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Great list of questions. It’s really helpful. It’s hard to create questions off the top of your head while meeting with the client so before the meeting, make a list of questions and while at the meeting, write down what your client says will help you both.
I think that’s true regardless of the type of work we do, Sabrina. I’ve tried numerous times to prepare a script for my initial meetings with web design clients, but for some reason it’s never “stuck.” 🙂
Helping people with time management is one of my favorite things to do because it is so crucial to our happiness. I find many women, in particular, are so busy that important and meaningful things fall to the wayside. This list is a perfect tool I will definitely be using with my clients! Thank you!
That sounds very rewarding! I have a couple of older books in my personal library that you might find interesting, The Working Woman’s Guide to Managing Time and The 25 Hour Woman: Managing Your Time And Life – I especially enjoyed the first one.