How did you find it? Did you manage to plan your day or tweak your existing planning habit in some way?
If you’ve blocked out your time for this week, for your Fixed and Important appointments or work time. What does your week now look like?
Is it easier to see what fits where, or not, now you can see how busy your week is?
If you need to build your planning habit, set a daily reminder in your calendar and block out the first 15 minutes of every day.
Make a review part of your planning process.
Each morning check your plan, does anything need to change? What worked, what didn’t? What could you do differently? It also acts as a reminder of what you have achieved and to help you focus on the following day/week.
Use the weekly plan to create structure in your week (see additions to the planner attached):
Set a start and end time to your day, especially if you have a tendency to just keep going until you’re finished for the day or too tired to do any more.
Meetings - decide when you are available. Do you have good boundaries around your work and personal life? Do you need to limit the number of meetings on any one day or across the week. How about meeting free days? If not every week, especially if you have preparation and follow-ups to do.
Strategic time - setting aside regular blocks of time when you focus on planning ahead. This is particularly important if you’re running your own business or leading a team. Weekly, monthly or a few times a year.
Project work - does it make sense to have different days for different projects or work on different types of tasks on different days. At the beginning of the day or week when your energy levels are higher, focus on important work.
Email time - blocks of time when you can work on, respond to and write your emails. Not on an ad-hoc basis throughout the day.
YOU time - make sure you’ve planned in YOU time every day, otherwise you’ll end up stressed and burned out. Time for exercise and activity to relax and unwind and to look after your health and wellbeing.
Avoid over scheduling - build in some flexibility to allow for the unexpected or urgent. However carefully you plan, these will happen. Leave gaps between meetings. Unplanned time at the beginning and end of the day. You’ll be less reactive the more you plan and less stressed when you have time buffers across the week.
Consider how much of your work day you can actually plan. Is the nature of your job more reactive or normally filled with day to day busyness? Only plan as much as you can realistically achieve.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at to-do lists.
