Steps to take to prepare for your working week

Focus on the (weekly) prize

In order to maximize your week, its important to know what the most important priority for you is. Take a post-it note or a piece of paper and write it down and stick it on or beside your monitor. If the goal itself is small, then you might way to list your Top 3. I’d recommend just 1 to begin with. Place it somewhere very visible, where you are likely to see it 10 times a day or more.

Working from the top down, this priority is likely to be either your final goal or objective, or your quarterly goal or OKR. It could be your assigned task that typically takes several days to complete. Or it could be an interim goal or milestone that will take lead you to your final goal.

Whatever it is, you must be able to actually complete the objective rather than it being an ideal or pipe-dream.

Focus on the daily prize. List the steps to complete the goal

Working backwards from the final objective, list the steps that must be completed in order to complete your goal. They may be to arrange a meeting in order to get information or ensure that actions take place. They may mean that you need to complete certain tasks, filling out Status Reports or RAID logs in preparation for stakeholder meetings. This would mean that you need to analyse the project in advance to review the progress and risks. Whatever the steps, write them down. Here are some quick tips on preparing for meetings, preparing for upcoming negotiations and quickly estimating the size of projects just before you meet a client.

Review your calendar. Remove overlapping meetings

Review your calendar and rearrange or remove any overlapping meetings. Clean your calendar at the start of the week/day, to ensure that you minimise any conflicts or frustration during the day.

Review your calendar. Rearrange meetings that do not align to your weekly goal

If you are not working on your objective, then you are working on someone else’s. This may be okay and we do need to help out, but it is not what you will be judged for or bench-marked against when your performance is reviewed. If you wish to know the outcome of a meeting, but don’t wish to spend 1 hour finding out, then ask for the minutes to be sent to you afterwards, noting that you can’t accept any actions from them.

Review your calendar. Schedule blocks of time to work on your weekly goal

Your calendar is for more than other people booking your time. Add large blocks of time to focus on your priority objectives. Review to ensure that you have left more than enough time to complete the task within those time-slots, by assuming that you will still be interrupted sometimes. Allowing for emergencies and urgent issues, you should ensure that the majority of this time is listed from Monday – Wednesday.

Review your calendar. Prepare for upcoming 1:1s

Focus in on your ‘one on one’ meetings with your team members. Note down topics that you would like to discuss with them. Note any observations that will assist them or help them grow.

Plan your day

Whether you participate in Daily Stand-up meetings or not, you should write down and focus on what you plan to complete today. You can do this easily by working backwards from your end goal and seeing that needs to be completed today.

Review your risks.

Now that you have a grasp on your goal and its associated task, try to determine what risks or issues could arise. If these are project related, then list them down and add them to the Risk Register or Issue log. Now work out the steps that you need to undertake to mitigate those risk.

Review your project schedule

As a project manager, you should review the project schedule and update the tasks and milestones with their percentage complete. If these are misaligned, where tasks have not been completed according to the schedule, then note down the actions that you need to take to address this. If its not possible to determine the progress of a multi day task, as its too early, then ask for progress update over tea or coffee and steer the conversation towards the task progression. Discussing practical steps to complete the task with the team member typically makes matters clearer in their mind and can assist.

Conclusion

Completing just some of the above checks will put you far ahead of your peers.