Being Effective Through Weekly Planning
Weekly planning is an important activity that should be a habit for every business professional. Neglecting it can cost you in the long run, and even in the short run.
Schedule your weekly planning time. I have a recurring Friday appointment with myself for doing my weekly planning. Doing it on a Friday gives me a chance to do anything I may have overlooked during the week. I've found that it helps me to have peace and quiet (closed office door), but you may like some background music.
Use a weekly planning checklist. Assemble a weekly planning checklist to help you remember all of the steps and elements of your weekly planning process. For mobile workers: If you travel a lot, you will probably want to have your planning material with you. (You can generally keep it all on your PDA or paper planner or combo of both.) I've sometimes done a good part of my weekly planning while on an airplane flight back home, using my weekly planning checklist to guide me.
Review past week activity. Before you do any actual planning, it's important to do a good review of the past week to see if you've missed anything. This review would include going through all of your inboxes, physical as well as electronic, to look at memos, notes to yourself (including yellow stickies), and anything where you've put info that you might need to do something with. If you haven't implemented the habit of keeping your email inbox empty, you'll want to look at all the email that came in during the week to ensure you haven't forgotten to flag any you have action on.
Review ALL tasks on your task list. I also like to go through my entire task list to see if there are any tasks I intended to complete but didn't. I also check to see if I need to rephrase any of the tasks to ensure they are really action-oriented. I then set target dates during the current week for key tasks that I intend to complete that week.
Review your project list. After reviewing your task list, it's time to get into to examining every active project to ensure that you identify a Next Action for each project. This is also a good time to double-check that you have defined a clear Successful Outcome for each project. Each next action should be included as an item on your task list.
Review your roles and goals. Those familiar with Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
already know that a key part of weekly planning is to Review Your Roles (such as Active Learner, Project Manager, Team Leader, Husband, Father, etc.) and identify the "Big Rocks" for selected ones. Invariably when I do this I think of something I should do during the following week that is not already on my Task list. Often it's something like "Have lunch with ..." or "Get away for the weekend," but it's something I feel like I need to do in a specific role. The weekly planning session is also an excellent time to review your mission and also your goals, to see if you're on target with your goals and to take action if not.
Schedule meeting prep time. My next step is to review upcoming appointments to see if there are any meetings or deadlines I need to prepare for. This is also when I review my Tickler mechanisms (folders, for example).
Note that it's a good practice to show project deadlines on your calendar. The way I like to do this is with an all-day appointment.
Schedule your "Big Rocks" on your calendar. The final steps in the process are to identify Focus Items and to consider scheduling time for the most important tasks. I generally schedule my "Big Rocks" for a specific day and time. You should also consider setting aside time to work on specific projects or to do specific types of work.
Consistent and thorough weekly planning can help put you and keep you on top of your game. Hopefully the tips provided herein will help you in your weekly planning.
