Career Catalyst - "Using Your Time Well: Doing "more" through intentionality and purpose" with Dr. Gail Berger

In a year that has brought us new scenarios of how we work and live our lives from day to day, it was more than fitting to cap our year off with a Career Catalyst that focused on time management. In a presentation titled, “Using Your Time Well: Doing "more" through intentionality and purpose”, Dr. Gail Berger, PhD, Clinical Associate Professor at Kellogg School of Management and Deputy Director of the Kellogg Center for Executive Women, enlightened us with lessons and exercises aimed at bringing introspective thought on how we use our time and how to use it well to maximize our potential.

Dr. Berger began her presentation with a focus on differing types of work, such as multitasking versus switch tasking. In a group exercise to show differences between the two, participants engaged in a short but effective exercise that highlighted the time processing differences. This exercise made clear how distracted tasking can hinder effective work and brought thoughts of if we are utilizing our time well and how to change ineffective and time sink behaviors. Furthermore, this begs the questions of what distracts us from our daily tasks and what ways can we be more effective with our focus during our hours of work. Time management methods like having focused “power hours” and daily goal setting ideologies such as the Ivy Lee method provided the attendees with manageable strategies to control and focus our attention on our work. Great take home messages were to audit your time, prioritizing time for tasks that are important and require deep attention and how to decline tasks that may detract from your overall productivity, something with which we all struggle.  

As we step into a new year, our perspectives have been changed by the global pandemic and the radical adjustments we have made to transition our work environments from the office and lab spaces to home. But these changes have shown our resilience and our drive to push through difficult situations and continues to show the great capabilities of our science community. With Dr. Berger’s fantastic lessons in mind, how can we be intentional and purposeful to enhance our productivity and bring clarity to each of our individual missions as we move on to new challenges that the new year brings us.