Achieving Balance: Time Management for Modern Professionals
$1,000
This certificate program consists of three required courses (listed below) and one elective course option.
This certificate is comprised of four single-day courses.
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Due to changes in work and technology, people’s personal and professional lives are more connected than ever before—and more fragmented, more busy, more crammed with tasks and obligations. Faced with this seemingly endless cycle, people declare “email bankruptcy,” triage tasks, react instead of planning, and sometimes lose their work-life balance entirely. How can we regain that balance? How can we achieve confidence, clarity, and the ability to plan?
In this one-day seminar, Dr. Clay Spinuzzi uses a mix of research, theory, and experience to discuss the challenges we face in planning our time and projects. The seminar covers:
How We Got Here: How changes in work and communication have made our work lives so fragmented.
What Mediation Is: How we mediate (or control) our own behavior “from outside” with symbols and abstractions—and how we can stack these abstractions to give ourselves new abilities.
How to Plan Our Personal Time: How to use nine levels of symbolic tools to represent our time, tasks, and plans so we can achieve clarity.
When to Say Yes and How to Say No: Five basic principles for making those abstractions work in practice.
How to Plan in Groups and Organizations: How to understand common disruptions in organizations that derail planning; how to plan and evaluate chains of symbolic tools so your team can synchronize expectations.
Participants are encouraged to bring examples from their current planning materials (to-do lists, bullet journals, calendars, project management systems, etc.) to the seminar. Dr. Spinuzzi will also provide samples of these materials for participants if they can’t/don’t wish to bring in their own.
In small workgroups, participants examine these materials and discuss:
- What challenges do you personally face in planning your time and projects?
- What abstractions are being used here?
- Where do these belong on the continuum of the nine levels of symbolic tools?
- What levels of symbolic tools are you missing?
- When do you struggle with executing your planned tasks? Where in your planning materials do you struggle? Which (if any) of the five principles is hardest to achieve for you?
- How do these planning materials interface with your team or organization? Do they clash with others’ tools and/or with the logic of your organization?
- What unofficial workarounds are being used in your team or organization? What does that tell us about the tools or tasks to which they’re applied?
Details & Registration
Time: 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 0.6 CEUs will be awarded upon completion of this program (six hours of instruction)
One-Day Seminar Pricing:
Registration fee includes all course materials, catering (lunch and refreshments), WiFi access, and parking.
- Standard Registration: $1,000
- UT System Staff/Alumni Registration: $750
- Educator, Nonprofit, Government, Military Registration: $750
Get employer support! We’ve gathered resources to help you make the case for your employer to support your HDO education.
If you have questions prior to registering, please see our Professional Training FAQ or contact Andrew M. Vasquez, HDO’s Enrollment & Success Coordinator at hdo-pro@austin.utexas.edu.
Course Leader(s)
Clay Spinuzzi is a Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at UT Austin. Dr. Spinuzzi leads HDO 386: Persuasion and Argumentation in the HDO Master’s Degree program. He has presented at industry conferences, including SXSW, and recently led a SXSW core conversation on communication in distributed workplaces. His research focuses on how organizations circulate and coordinate information to solve complex problems.
Dr. Spinuzzi has published several award-winning articles and four books: Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press, 2003), Network (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Topsight (Amazon CreateSpace, 2013), and All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Who Should Participate
- Senior/Executive Leadership
- Middle Management
- Team Leaders & Supervisors
- Human Resources/Recruiting Directors & Managers
- Individuals and groups who struggle to manage their time and projects and/or have gotten into reaction loops
- Individuals and groups who know how to plan, but struggle with follow-through
- Managers who seek to understand why their teams can’t effectively align their planning
My favorite element of the seminar was learning about the different levels of being organized. I now have a better understanding of my current level of organization and new tools from Dr. Spinuzzi to help me upgrade and be more successful.
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From Certificate Seeker to Competitive Advantage in Just Four Days
Built on strong academic fundamentals and real-world relevance, HDO Certificate Programs are designed to enhance the portfolios of mid- and upper-level professionals.
Over the course of your program, you will gain immediately-applicable tools and skills to accelerate your career, whether your goal is advancing in your current organization, deepening your capacities to excel in your existing role, or developing additional skills for a transition to a new position. In the process, you will learn alongside and network with experienced professionals from a wide range of industries.
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“My favorite part of the Certificate Program was, hands down, the cross-disciplinary faculty. What remarkable minds! I gained multiple new lenses through which to view workplace challenges. I felt so lucky to have exposure and access to these extraordinary educators. The HDO faculty is world class. I can’t stop raving.”
Sarah Gerichten, Director of Marketing, Square Root, Inc.
Transform Your Organization with Group Training
By applying cutting-edge research and expertise from UT Austin’s top faculty to your organization’s unique challenges, our training programs are designed to:
- Build a dynamic organizational culture that fosters innovative thinking and embraces change.
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- Enhance leadership skills at all levels, from first-time managers to senior leaders and executives.
