Work Smarter Not Harder

Organisation skills and productivity

Firstly, in talking about and exploring organisation skills and productivity, and self care and its impact on productivity, my intention is not for social workers to be given more. It is to try and give social workers the skills and ideas to be more efficient at what they are doing, more organised, more disciplined maybe, so that they can get out of the door on time (emergencies aside) confident that all is in order (not necessarily done but in order) and all is as well as it can be. The pay off for this is an increased ability to be able to switch off. You know everything is in order ready for you to pick up the next day – so, hopefully, more often than not, you can put it out of your head. The same is true and more important I feel for a weekend so that you have the time to recharge. So that’s my motivation – I can’t see a problem with that. I can see how managers might hi-jack the idea and see it as a way to give people more… or we could give the majority of managers I know the credit and accept that they’d rather manage happy staff. Managers are not evil. Well not all of them 😉

Being Organised is a skill to hone

We teach student social workers communication skills when to a greater or lesser extent they can already communicate. Why? Because professional communication is different. We teach student social workers report writing skills. Why? Because professional writing is different to letter writing, or academic writing. So why not teach them ‘being organised and productive’ skills because… being organised and productive as a professional does require a skill set and a knowledge base different to what people already may know. And I know from talking to students and practitioners that some of them are productivity ninja’s and some students turn up to start their social work degree without a diary because they hadn’t thought they’d need one…. and a whole range in between. Because if you don’t know, you don’t know.