I tend to view professional development opportunities with a slight degree of suspicion.   “So, you think I should take time away from my cram-packed schedule to attend an all-day session with an ambitious and somewhat ambiguous title like Managing Multiple Priorities?  I’m barely staying on top of things as it is, and besides, ain’t nobody got time for that.”  However, if I have learned anything from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it is that effective people make time to plan ahead and work on developing good habits.  So, I signed up for Friday’s training.

Through a combination of humorous personal anecdotes, hands-on activities, and straightforward wisdom, our trainer, Sally O’Boyle of Fred Pryor Seminars, guided us from a general assessment of our time management challenges to series of actionable steps to remedy our personal management pitfalls.  For me, the lessons on priority-setting and procrastination were especially helpful.  Rather than go into too much detail there, here are a few tips from which we all can benefit:

My husband, Bill, and I live here in Lexington and have a 24 year old daughter, Courtney.  We also have a 9 year old Chocolate Lab, Sammi, who thinks she is 2 and keeps us on our toes.  I am originally from Lexington, but was transplanted to Charlotte in 1981 thanks to IBM.  I returned to Lexington after my freshman year of college in 1989 to spend the summer with my grandmother.  I fell in love with Lexington and didn’t return to North Carolina, and decided to establish my residency before continuing my education.  During that year, I became a mom and had to put my college off for a while.