How many times have you got to the end of the week completely shattered having worked really hard and then sat back and realised that you have achieved very little of what you set out to do? For many people this is the norm rather than the exception and so we need to look at how to have an effective week.
As you might guess the answer is planning – spoiler alert planning is not enough!! We all know we should plan and many of you will have read lots of blogs, read books and seen videos on the subject but somehow it seems to work well in theory but always falls apart in practice.
This is the method I use to have and effective week. It doesn’t work 100% of the time but it does close enough to make it really valuable to me. For most people planning is the easy bit. It’s all the things that come along to ruin the plans that cause the problems. Life would be so simple if it wasn’t for other people!!!
In order to ensure an effective week we need to ensure that three things happen:
FIRST
We must understand our objectives / priorities and we have discussed how to do this on many occasions using the The Ivy Lee Method – How To Have An Effective Day Once you have your three, four, five or six priorities then you can begin to plan.
SECOND
Plan.
There are many different ways of planning, and we will discuss them in later blogs. You can use your calendar, an app or something else.
Personally, I like the Key2Success Planner from Branden Bodendorfer Key2Success this enables me to plan each day of the week in thirty-minute sections. When you are planning remember that things always take longer than you think and that you need gaps for breaks. The thirty-minute sections fit well with the Pomodoro Technique The Pomodoro Technique – How A Tomato Can Make You More Effective
Planning should take place before the week begins. If you leave it until the Monday morning then you are already lost in a mess of emails and other requests that have been generated over the weekend. The best time to plan next week is on a Friday afternoon before you finish for the weekend (or whatever your last day is if you work a four-day week). If you can’t achieve this then I’m afraid it’s a Sunday night job but try and avoid this.
When planning always ensure that you are not fully committed for the week. You will always need an amount of time every day to deal with those things you have missed but need to be sorted.
THIRD
Implement and manage your plan. This is the most difficult bit and is where things normally go horribly wrong. You begin the week with a beautiful efficient and productive plan and before lunchtime on day one it has all gone out of the window. This is normally because unforeseen things hurtle out of the woodwork to knock you off course, usually because your boss or a client or customer has a sudden urgent (to them) request.
How do we deal with this?
When something unforeseen arrives, we need to ask ourselves one question:
Is it more important than the task I have planned? By important I mean does it move us more toward our objective than the planned task? If yes, then replace the planned task with it, if no, schedule it for another time. Simple in theory but not in practice. Your boss says it is suddenly a priority, it needs to be done now. You can’t say no – he / she is your boss, but you can show them your plan and ask them (as your boss) to assist by saying what they want you to drop from your schedule in order to do it. Doing this over a number of times will educate them to be better organised and to take responsibility for screwing up your week. It really works. It also means that when they ask why you haven’t completed a task on time the answer is because they told you to do something else. If you have a boss that tells you everything must be done no matter how much extra work is piled on you then you must either become more effective or change bosses. The latter is preferable as you can’t win against disorganised unreasonableness.
If it is a client or customer, then it is down to you to take the decision of whether or not to refuse the work in the timescale given. Clients and customers have to be educated too. Remember do something for the disorganised client or customer and it will usually be at the expense of the organised one. Which one do you want to upset? Which one do you want to keep? Your choice. You can’t do everything.
I’m not pretending the above is easy – it’s not but you will gain so much from it. Planning will bring a degree of realism to your week and get you away from the belief that you are the superhero who can do everything. Always remember, you can do almost anything you want, you just can’t do everything. It’s a question of priorities.
Employ the above rigorously and you will find your week becomes much more effective. Don’t expect it to work perfectly from week one but, as with most things, the sooner you start the sooner you will achieve your goal of having an effective week.
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