6 Actions for Planning Your Work Week As A Manager
Planning your work week as a manager is the different between doing a great job and doing an okay or even a poor job. The more people you manage, the more moving parts, demands and deliverables you have to stay on top of. Always reacting and firefighting is a stressful place to be and rarely results in great work.
Planning ahead gives you:
- More time to create good solutions to problems;
- More time to get the right resources in place for when they are needed and
- The vital ability to carefully manage the expectations of others
The 6 actions for planning your work week as a manager
- Check alignment with the bigger picture so you spend more time on valuable work
- Prioritise your work based on what is important and urgent
- Decide whether to delegate or do yourself
- Book time in your calendar
- Plan contingency time for the unexpected
Other very good benefits of planning your work week include
- Better prioritisation of tasks, activities and projects so you and your team spend more time working to reach your more valuable goals
- You typically get better outcomes and results because you are more focused, have less interruptions and encounter less problems
- Less stress and pressure because you are solving problems well ahead of when those problems start impacting the team’s output
- Better relationships and a stronger reputation as you are able to proactively manage expectations and give those relying on you more time to plan and adjust to changes
In short, you would be mad not to plan ahead as a manager in my view. The benefits you get, the reduction in stress and pressure and the time saved far outweigh the time spent planning.
Always plan out your day, week and month as much as practical in any management role.
I take 6 actions every week to ensure that I know what is coming up, what challenges I am likely to face and what tasks, activities and projects I or my team need to undertake so that we can meet and beat the goals my team has been set.
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Checking alignment with the bigger picture – The first action for planning your work week as a manager
Alignment of yours and your teams work to the department or functional goals and if you are in senior management, the company goals, really does matter. The more time you can spend and get your team spending on work that creates the most progress towards achieving functional or company goals:
- The more likely those important goals will be reached and
- The more valuable your work will be perceived as by your bosses
So every week when are planning out the following week, keep asking yourself “How is what you are planning helping reach team goals?”
If there is good alignment, bump that task, activity or project up the priority list. If it has poor alignment, push it further down the priority list. This exercise creates more team focus on the more important tasks, activities and projects.
If you don’t know about or understand the company strategy and how your team is helping achieve that strategy, discuss it with your boss.
Do your best to keep the bigger picture in mind when prioritising tasks, activities and projects within your team. The work you do will be more valuable as a consequence.
The Second Action – Prioritise Your Work Based On What Is Important And Urgent
Any leader of a team has a constant stream of requests, challenges and demands placed on them and their team members. Other teams want help, information, tasks to be completed, or output so they can do what has been asked of them.
On top of this, your team has a list of tasks, activities and projects needed to reach goals and deliver the results bosses expect.
It is really easy to focus on:
- The most urgent tasks, so you reduce the follow-ups and pressure from others
- What you like doing or what you find easy to do or
- The quick little tasks that give you a sense of progress etc
Instead, concentrate on doing the most important tasks and fitting in the less important tasks around them.
Create a 4 box grid with importance on one axis and urgency on the other. Against each of your tasks, label them or put them on your grid under:
- Important and urgent
- Important and not urgent
- Urgent and not important
- Not urgent and not important
Think of your time as a bucket. Put the rocks in first which are most important tasks and fit the sand around the rocks. The sand being the less important tasks.
Focusing more on the important rather than the urgent is a great way to prioritise the work that needs to be done.
Decide Whether To Delegate Or Do Yourself – The Third Action For Planning Your Work Week As A Manager
As a manger, you have a team, and you have influence over people outside of your team. Authority and influence give you the options – delegate or do yourself.
Remember – delegating is not a complete time saving. To delegate well, you will have to invest time to ensure the work is done well and in the timeframes needed. How much time you need to invest depends on who you are delegating to, what you are delegating and the situation.
Most of the time delegating will save you time personally but not always. In addition to time, delegation is also essential for building skills and experience in the team which will save you a lot more time later on.
Think carefully about what you are delegating, the skills and experience of the people you could delegate to and their current availability. When you do delegate work, always follow-up and check in during the timeframe the work is being undertaken rather than just at the end. You will reduce your surprises and stress levels and get a much better result.
If doing the work yourself is quicker than delegating and you don’t have the extra time to invest in teaching others, plan to do the work yourself.
At this point you should have a list of tasks, activities and projects that either you are going to do over the next week, or you are going to delegate to team members. Each of your task will be prioritised in terms of importance and urgency.
Fourth – Book time in your calendar – Simple And Effective For Planning Your Week
Before booking time into your calendar, take each of the tasks, activities and projects on your list and allocate the estimated time to complete. For work you are doing, you will have one entry. For work delegated, you will have the time you will need to invest in delegating AND the time for your team member to do the task.
When you have allocated estimated time against each task, activity and project, you can organise when you will do each by blocking time off in your calendar.
If you don’t block off time, other people will book meetings into your calendar, preventing you from doing the work or creating interruptions.
Interruptions are deadly to high productivity and reduce the quality of your work. Per a Forbes article, the average office worker is interrupted every 3 to 11 minutes and it can take almost 25 minutes to return to their original task. Managers get more interruptions than average office workers.
Book time in your diary to reduce your interruptions. Find a quite meeting room to work in. Put your phone on silent. Don’t look at emails. Focus on doing the work you have set yourself. Taking this approach will create more time for you because you won’t lose as much time due to interuptions. You will finish your work quicker and do a better job.
Use your calendar and where and how you work to minimise your disruptions
The fifth action for planning your work week as a manager is plan contingency time for the unexpected
Organising and allocating every hour of your week to tackle your to do list will result in you being stressed, under much more pressure and doing a worse job.
Every manager will have unexpected requests, tasks and challenges pop up daily that need to be dealt with.
Book in time for these unexpected requests and events. Use your judgement and think about what is normal in your working environment. I suggest booking in 1-2 hours of your day to cover unexpected requests and events. If you don’t use this time for the unexpected, you can do planned tasked earlier.
Booking “contingency” time into your calendar is good for your stress levels, your motivation and positivity and the quality of your work. Always include contingency time in your planning.
The Sixth Action Is Update Your Plan Of The Work Week At The End Of Every Day
Spend 5 minutes at the end of each day reviewing what had been achieved during the day, and what is still outstanding. I used to do this when I was on the train home at the end of each day. Adjust your planning accordingly.
Events within a typical workplace will force you to replan regularly to ensure you maintain a realistic and sensible plan that enables you to get your work and your team’s work done. Be proactive in your re-planning.
in summary
When you are a manager, there are too many moving parts, too many tasks, activities and projects to keep track off in your head. To be effective you must plan out your week ahead, and to some extent your month ahead for you and your team.
The 6 actions for planning your work week as a manager are:
- Check alignment with the bigger picture so you spend more time on valuable work
- Prioritise your work based on what is important and urgent
- Decide whether to delegate or do yourself
- Book time in your calendar
- Plan contingency time for the unexpected
- Update your plan for the work week at the end of every day
If you have any questions on “6 Actions for Planning Your Work Week as a Manager” please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Planning your work week ahead of time becomes more and more important as your job becomes more complex. As a manager or leader, I don’t think you have a choice but to carefully plan out your time if you want to do a great job. There are just too many moving parts to keep track of.
These principles are ones that I have been using for years, and they work brilliantly. I have been very lucky to have been very successful in my career and these principles have been a big contributor to my success. They will be just as important in your success too!
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