Personal Productivity

The pace of work has never been faster. The amount of change is unprecedented. The standards of performance are rising. The tools that help us burn out are abundant. Our challenges just keep ramping up. The stakes seem so high. For better or worse, this pace of change is here to stay. As a top performer, if you can’t change the circumstances around you, change the circumstances within you. This program will give top performers what they need to stay strong and get stuff done – for the long haul.

Your memory helps you to shape your understanding of your present, and your application of your memories helps you to shape your future. How well your memory works has a direct impact on how much you get done in a day and the quality of your work. Your memory is a window into the health of your brain, how you care for it, and how you use it. It also helps to define who you are – for yourself and for those around you such as family members, friends, colleagues and others. This very engaging, interactive, and memorable workshop is about your memory – how it works, how you can better use your recall capacity, and much more. We guarantee you’ll remember it for years to come!

Management is frequently described as the art of getting work done through others. This requires a set of skills and talents that Administrative Professionals can develop to extend their influence, meet their manager’s expectations, create a professional image, take initiative, solve problems, resolve conflict, plan current and future activities, and have a springboard for career development. If you are in the role of executive secretary or administrative assistant you’ll find this workshop to be essential to your present job and critical to your future. This workshop is not a lecture. It is a “hands on” opportunity to identify your existing management skills, develop new skills and bring increased opportunity to your organization and to you personally. The list of practical exercises includes confidence & conflict resolution role-plays as well as a ‘guess my personality type’ exercise based on the True Colors personality indicator. For prioritization, students will learn how to create a Daily Map in order to prioritize tasks.

Microsoft Excel is the preferred spreadsheet software for many individuals and businesses to manage their data and reporting. Yet most are only using 20% of the features of this powerful productivity tool. In this one-day workshop, you will learn the basics of creating, modifying, formatting and printing worksheets. You will learn to use basic formulas and functions and manage large workbooks to analyze and understand data.

Microsoft Outlook can be a powerful productivity tool or a constant source of distraction, depending on how it’s used. This workshop focuses on using Outlook more deliberately to manage email, time, and commitments by making clearer decisions about how work is captured, tracked, and followed up on. Participants explore practical approaches for handling messages, coordinating schedules, and tracking work, and they apply selected techniques during the session, so Outlook supports their work instead of adding noise. The emphasis is on everyday workflows and decisions that help professionals stay organized, responsive, and focused in a busy work environment. Note on Versions: This workshop is designed for users of Microsoft 365 Outlook, and the skills also apply to Outlook 2019 and 2016. While some features or layouts may differ slightly between versions, the core tools and workflows covered remain consistent.

Tired of feeling overwhelmed, behind, or like your calendar is running you? This isn’t just another time management workshop—it’s a bold, practical reset. This energizing, hands-on workshop will show you how to take back control of your schedule—with a system that actually works for you. You’ll learn simple, powerful strategies to plan smarter, protect your focus, and communicate your priorities with confidence. Whether you’re managing a team, a full inbox, or just too many tabs open in your brain, this course offers real-world tools you can start using immediately. You’ll walk away with: A personalized time management system that fits your workflow A strategy to get your inbox down to zero by the end of each day Practical tools to reduce overwhelm and increase clarity A complete 21-point self-assessment to help you understand your personal style of time management and how to make that style work for you and in working with others

More and more people are encountering stress, overwork, and the pressure of time constraints in their lives. Some stress is actually good for you because it inspires you to meet life’s challenges. Too much ongoing stress causes an almost continuous activation of your body’s stress-response system. The overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can increase your risk of obesity, insomnia, digestive problems, heart disease, depression, memory impairment, and physical illness. It is important to recognize when we are in DISTRESS. This workshop will provide practical tips and techniques to help you achieve better results and health through the effective management of distress.

In today’s workplace, the administrative support position is the nerve centre of business, industry and government at all levels. Called upon to increase the effectiveness of the office environment, the administrative assistant needs to manage strategies, public relations, resources, time, stress, difficult people conflict and crisis situations calmly, effectively and professionally. This workshop provides management skills vital to today’s support position. This energetic, fun and fast-paced course will show you how to achieve respect as an indispensable member of your office team. In a comfortable and controlled learning environment, you will explore and expand upon techniques and methods, and learn the critical skills required to get the work done on time, keep the office running at peak efficiency, and balance work and personal life.

Most professionals don’t struggle because they lack discipline; they struggle because their work is invisible, scattered across inboxes, chats, and memory. When tasks live in too many places, the workday is spent restarting instead of making progress—creating a constant cycle of reactive work and growing pressure on both individuals and teams. This workshop provides a clear, functional system to regain control. Participants learn how to capture and organize work into one reliable place, allowing them to make fast, confident decisions about what actually gets their time. With practical strategies to reduce context switching and review overload, individuals improve follow-through while organizations benefit from clearer handoffs and better alignment. The result is work that moves forward consistently, with fewer missed items, less rework, and greater trust across the team.

The practice of mindfulness – centering your attention in the present by focusing on the breath – has been around for thousands of years. A growing body of scientific research demonstrates that a regular mindfulness practice can have a powerful impact on your well-being and wellness through how you think, feel, act, relate, perform and collaborate at work – reducing the daily stress of life in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. On an individual level, mindfulness practice helps you to control your emotions and stress – anger, frustration, fear – so you can be inquiring, thoughtful, logical, rational and strategic, and focus on the work that needs done, rather than on the situations that may distract you from your priorities. In effect, being mindful and aware allows you to be compassionate, acknowledge emotion and move towards logic and reason in any situation. This results in a better state of mind, health and wellness for mental clarity and endurance through the daily challenges of life. This one-day interactive workshop, facilitated by a long-term workplace mindfulness practitioner, will show you how to integrate mindfulness with emotional intelligence and organizational behaviour theories and tools, so you can immediately begin to enhance your own well-being and improve your relationships and effectiveness at work.

Now more than ever employees are practicing flexible work options and many of us have arrangements to work from home. Overcoming work-from-home challenges are crucial in order to improve our workplace performance, and engagement. This session will help participants stay engaged in the work from home process. Learners will be given tools and techniques that can be easily applied to their WFH with clear methods on how to increase their productivity and results by applying a WFH framework with proven success. Participants will gain an understanding of the challenges faced when working from home and learn techniques to overcome these challenges as they enhance their WFH routine and overall performance strategies.

In today’s fast-paced business world, effective collaboration is key to success. Our Mastering Microsoft Teams workshop is designed to equip your team with the essential skills and advanced features of Microsoft Teams, transforming the way you communicate, manage projects, and collaborate. This one-day workshop covers everything you need to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and foster seamless teamwork. If you’re looking to improve group coordination and integrate powerful tools like Planner, OneNote, and Forms, this training will elevate your team’s capabilities and keep you ahead in the digital workspace.

In today’s digital workplace, efficient file management and secure collaboration are crucial for business success. This workshop provides hands-on training to harness the full potential of Microsoft OneDrive for Business, enabling seamless integration with Microsoft 365. Participants will explore practical strategies to organize, share, and manage files effortlessly, ensuring productivity and security are always prioritized.

Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking program for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers users’ notes, drawings, screen clippings, and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network. This workshop is intended for new users of OneNote and will help you get started with this powerful program.

In today’s fast-paced work environment, effective task management and collaboration tools are essential for team success. Microsoft Planner offers a simple, highly visual way to organize teamwork. In this hands-on, instructor-led workshop, participants will learn how to harness the full capabilities of Microsoft Planner, including seamless integration with Microsoft To Do and Lists. Through practical exercises and demonstrations, attendees will leave with the skills and confidence to implement Planner for personal productivity and team project management.

This one-day course will help you understand how to create and modify tables in order to organize and enhance data; use the Mail Merge feature with different data sources and main documents to create form letters, envelopes and mailing labels; use styles to create consistently formatted documents and to facilitate changing paragraph and character formatting; create and insert Quick Parts to reuse data and content and create documents with consistent standards; and create and use templates to provide consistent document editing and formatting.

Our lives are becoming ever more complex. We seem to have more to do and never enough time to do it all. We have practically unlimited real time connectivity, and an expectation that we are contactable 24/7. Much of what is put in place to make our work environment better actually has the opposite effect and adds even more complexity to our workday: Endless initiatives to help us do more with less IT systems that we need to spend time learning how to use, before they will help us Policies, procedures, regulations and legislation to keep us safe, secure and consistent We find ourselves making more decisions, about more things, with not a lack of information, but with too much information. Emails, news feeds, updates, phone calls, interruptions, the need to search for files, facts and information, and meetings, all contribute to the complexity of our work life. With all of this, how much of our day is truly productive? What can we do? The answer, while it may seem counter-intuitive, is simplification. Do less to achieve more, slow down to go faster. This workshop will be highly practical. It will involve drawing on experiences, issues and positive examples from your place of work. You will build your own personal 8-point action plan that you take away and start to work with immediately. The techniques we will cover in this workshop are equally applicable in your home and work environments.