Time Management Activity : Arrange the Cards

Overview 

This Fun activity will help you prove to your class participants the importance of planning and delegating tasks in being able to properly manage time . This fun competitive activity will sure get everyone energized and motivated. 

Time
25 minutes

Tools/Items required

Several decks of playing cards ( a deck of cards for each group depending on the number of groups and the size of your class) , Stop watch to record the time.

Set up 

Split the class into equal groups of  4 to 6 persons per group, give each group a deck of playing cards.
Tell the groups that the purpose of this exercise is to work as effectively as possible in your teams to complete the following task (See rules below) and that each team is competing with other teams and the winning team is the one that can finish the task in the shortest possible time.

Rules 

You need to lay out the cards exactly as outlined below.  All cards must be in neat tidy rows with no cards touching.  The aim is to complete this task in the fastest possible time – you are directly in competition with the other teams in the room!

You have 5 minutes to prepare your strategy and undertake any practice runs.  You may use any resources in the room to assist you in your task.  At the end of 5 minutes you will be asked to submit an estimate time in which you will complete the task.  You will then be asked to complete the task against the clock.
Good Luck!!

There will be 3 rounds to the game, the idea is that each team improves their time throughout the successive rounds of the game.

What’s the point from this activity?

The main learning point from this activity is to make the participants practice and experience the importance of planning and delegating/dividing  work among them  to properly manage their time and achieve the required task in the shortest time possible.

Discussion & Debrief 

What usually happens when running this activity is that participants don’t usually come up with a good strategy during the first practice runs so they end up taking a very long time to get the task done. But what happens on the following runs is that once they start making a good strategy and divide the work among themselves, each group’s timing significantly improves on the next run and the more they improve their strategy and their plan the better time they make on each of the following runs. And this is the main take away from this fun activity that once we have a good plan in advance  we will be able to get the required tasks in the shortest possible time versus having no plan at all and ending up confused and put a lot of unnecessary effort  and time in a task that should have taken much less effort and time if we had a good plan in advance.