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Online Management – My Executive Me

Rachel Thomas Reznik

Suddenly there’s no routine, no anchors, no someone or something that you need to get to. What a fantastic opportunity to learn to be your own boss. Do you excel at giving orders and defining targets and goals for others, but have a hard time defining these for yourself? Can you manage an entire team at work, but have a hard time sitting down to an online course? You will be able to hone and improve your skills by exercising your brain’s management skills. Executive functions are high cognitive functions that help us manage ourselves: setting up, planning, prioritizing, commitment to a task as well as thought flexibility and decision making are all skills relating to these functions.

At school, in the military and even in academia, our time is mostly managed by others. This is now an excellent time to develop critical management skills for success in life.

1) You are the Boss Each of us manages at least one business, and that is ourselves. This is a business in every sense of the word, and as such, it has many voices, needs and desires, challenges, successes and failures. If you were taking on your family business today, how would you run it? What would you do first? Imagine yourself a business owners – what would you call your business? I call my business Rachel. I am the manager as well as the business itself – no small challenge.

2) Self-Investigation When you think about your daily routine, take the last semester for example – I want you to answer two simple (but complex) questions – what worked? What didn’t work? The more precise and detailed your answer is, the better it will work for you. For example: “my brain shoots out sparks during the early hours of the morning”, or “I find it really hard to get going, especially when the assignments are big and unclear”, or “team work is really challenging for me, and in order for it to work each person’s tasks should be precisely defined”, or even “I don’t always sleep enough hours at night and stay awake until the small hours of the morning”. Make a list of your most common mistakes versus the methods that do always work for you. This list will help you a lot in preparing for the upcoming challenges.

3) Habits and Anchors Habits and anchors that have already become deep-rooted can help us in managing our new daily routine. What is a regular habit for you? These are the things that can help you build a new routine. Fixed meal times (does your stomach start grumbling at 11:30 every day exactly?), wake up time every morning, regular running hour? Meetings with a therapist? Habits save us a great amount of time (and a lot of headaches). When trying to figure out what to do first and what next – check first what you will wear: jeans? shirt? socks? Do you invest any thought into the order of your actions each time over again? Probably not. The aim is to develop a small but set number of personal habits.

4) In order to be a successful Executive Me pay attention to five basic components of self-management:

A. What is your goal? Planning – Plan what the results are that you want to see at the end of the day, and then define the tasks. It’s easier to perform a task when its broken down into smaller portions. Previously we had parents and teachers who would break our tasks down for us. Now we are our own bosses, so we need to break down our own tasks into various parts and plan when each part will be performed.

B. How do we start? Beginning a task – every task (like every good story) has a beginning, a middle and an end. Beginning = the organizational stage before starting – everything that needs to be organized before you can start the task. Just like in the kitchen (choosing a recipe, checking you have the ingredients, reading the instructions, organizing the kitchen, etc.). Middle – performing the task (the hardest part). This is the stage that requires serious concentration and the highest attention while completely avoiding any distraction. End – it’s possible that you haven’t yet finished the task but you’ve defined a particular time/goal for the finish, and it has arrived. A minute before you get up to move on to the next thing (a TV episode you’ve been dying to watch…) write down what it is you have to get back to – where you stopped and where you’ll pick up next time when you get back to the same task. This tip will really help you get back from your break. Also, separate between each of the stages – begin ing – middle – end, and define a time before moving on to the next task – use timers! We said just like in the kitchen… It’s important to make note of where you get stuck, where you’re procrastinating or wandering off.

C. What to do first? Prioritizing – one of the most difficult things we face as executives is decision making. Prioritizing forces you to make decisions – what comes first and what later. Sometimes when we prioritize, we think we have to relinquish something, say no to something. The truth is quite the opposite – we are just choosing something else. How does one prioritize? Work with a detailed diary and schedule, check what’s urgent versus what is important. What level is the challenge in the task versus your availability. When is the right time of the day for you to do more challenging study, and when is’t it better for easier study? Can’t decide? Start doing! Manage yourselves and don let yourselves get stuck. Everything you do is moving forward towards the outcome you set for yourself.

D. What time is it? Estimating time - many people have an objective difficulty with estimating time. When we become Executive Me, we must commit to our timetables. Leave notes in a few places throughout your home, reminders about your biggest time consumers. Make sure to place a number of clocks around your learning environment and throughout your home. Turn your watch and your timer into your partners and not your enemies. When estimating the amount of time a task will take you, always add 50% to your original estimate. Studies show that we all have a tendency to underestimate the amount of time required. At the most you will finish before time and be able to go on to the next task. Also, your sense of success from good time planning will vastly improve your performance.

E. What happened? Self-feedback – an important skill that often takes a worrying twist. Constructive self-feedback can become a monster and we become our own worst critics. Being judgmental does not stop us from working at our best. Analyze your performance, and your methods in a cold manner – we said that you are the boss – and draw conclusions just as you would in a business or military analysis

5) How do you show appreciation to your employees? Maintaining motivation The best executives know that they must maintain motivation with their employees in a regular and frequent manner. Success in studies in general and in on-line studies in particular requires long periods of concentration, control of distractions, organization and deferral of gratifications. High motivation will be a great help in overcoming these challenges on the road to performance. Calculate and define for yourselves what will motivate your, what you are striving towards (for each academic course). Figure out what might get in the way of motivation (assignments that are large and overly complicated, unclear instructions, uncertainty, boredom) and try to figure out how you overcome these pro-actively (before your motivations is in decline). So, we have a situation with no routine and much uncertainty, but we have an opportunity to learn to become My Executive Me.