Weekly planning and reviewing has been one of the key things that has helped me in using my time effectively. The following is a summary of the process that I use each week, you may be able to use or adapt it for your needs.
Start by listing the categories of tasks that you need to get done, for me that’s
- Personal & family things
- My main job
- My freelance work
- My covers band[1]
- DIY and general house jobs (always seem to be loads of these)
List them as headings in a rough order of priority, and then make lists of tasks under each heading. For example:
Personal & Family
- Arrange my wife’s birthday
- Make a budget
- Make a dentist appointment
Main job
- Create the slides for the project status update
- Plan the strategy for the tech team next year
- Do the database migration
- Fix bug in customer support system
Freelance
- Send invoices to client
- Build the new contact page on client’s website
Band
- Learn new songs
- Cold call agents and ask to be put on their list for future gigs
- Send set list for next gig
- Record demos
DIY
- Re-hang the bathroom door
- Paint the baby’s room
Once you’ve done that, you can organise them in the following grid:
| Urgent | Not Urgent | |
| Important | ||
| Not important |
This part is taken from the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, which I would definitely recommend, but briefly there are 4 groups or “quadrants” here:
Important and urgent
These are crises which need immediate attention – you may not even get a chance to add these to your weekly list because you might need to drop everything and act right now. For example, if my server goes down and all my client’s sites are offline I would need to fix that right away.
Important but not urgent
This is the one you want to focus on ideally. These are things which no one is hassling you to do, but which will make a big difference to your life and goals. In my list above this would be things like making a budget, planning next year’s strategy, and cold calling new agents. No one will hold me to a deadline for those things but if I do them I can be significantly more effective
Urgent but not important
This is where I (and probably most people) tend to get stuck. The main things that fall into this category are things that other people want you to do, but which aren’t true priorities. These can be hard to avoid if they come from your boss – but it’s infinitely easier if you have a clear idea of how you’re spending your time. More on how to track this in a future post
Neither urgent nor important
Basically things that you do when you’re procrastinating – social media is a big one, also watching stuff on YouTube, constantly checking email, TV, video games, obsessively organising your desk, inbox, or the files on your laptop.
What is important?
Essentially it’s up to you. Some people ask “If I follow this strategy, won’t I just spend my time doing boring stuff and never having any fun?”. Quite the opposite – I’ve listed examples above which are in line with my priorities, but if social media is genuinely important to you then it obviously falls within the important category.
Importance and urgency are obviously not binary. Some things are more important or urgent than others. Planning the team’s strategy would by my most important task in my job out of the things listed above, but the database migration is also important. Interestingly, the database migration is probably more urgent, and if I wasn’t using this strategy my instinct would be to do this first, but when I order my priorities I can see that while it is important, strategic planning has to come first.
Sometimes importance depends on context. I actually really like watching TV, but I’m mainly looking at this planning from a work context so I’ve listed TV in the fourth group above, as if I was watching it during the day then that would be a massive waste of time. But planning my work time using this process allows me to do things like watching TV when I finish work, because if I’m productive during the day I don’t need to work into the evening
One thing I find really helpful in determining what is important is to look forward three years and think about what I would really like to have accomplished. Then I can look at my list and think about what will take me towards that goal, and what would take me away from it. You can also do the same thing looking back: i.e. what did I do three years ago which has really moved me forward, and what has made no difference, or even negatively impacted me. I took the decision in 2016 to almost completely cut out all social media, purely because I realised that my life has not been improved in the slightest by all the time spent scrolling on Facebook. If I hadn’t had a Facebook account for the previous three years, would my life be any worse? Absolutely not, and I was spending at least half an hour a day on it, so logically it had to go.
Once you’ve organised your priorities into the grid, you can plan out what you’ll do each day, putting the important things into the schedule first, rather than starting with the urgent ones.
Part 2 of this post will be about how to be better (or at least not completely terrible) at estimating how much you can realistically do in a day, and how to say no to everything else.
[1] In real life I’ve put the band on hold indefinitely but for the sake of this exercise lets imagine it’s still a thing