Scheduling for Freedom
As the ramp up begins for product makers going into the holiday busy season, consider your other commitments. On top of work, there are family needs, school for children, fall gatherings, sports, and general household needs. Your mental checklists begin to circulate in your head as you sleep, workout, or drive home.
The sun comes up later and goes down earlier making motivation difficult some days. Life feels a little crazy. To make sure the chaos does not create a situation where you have a misstep, planning is required.
Schedules can give you freedom too.
I personally use and also teach an agile style approach to planning work. This means every quarter, I sit down to map out goals and the work required to get there. All of those tasks are added to a queue, I call Backlog. Then every 2 weeks, I sit down and built out my next two weeks of work based on meetings, clients, my goals, and personal life from the work I have queued up in the Backlog.
This approach gives me the flexibility to adjust as life shifts but I still have an outline built to ensure I’m focused on the right work! Focusing on the right work, rather than the busy work, ensures you can reach your goals without working a 40 hour week.
“In an 8-hour workday, the average person is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes.”
If corporate workers can keep their paycheck by truly working around 15 hours each week, why do you feel the need to work 60? We don’t have to work crazy hours to be successful! We just have to focus our work so we are productive during our dedicated work hours, on the right tasks. By putting our phones out of reach, closing the office door, and removing all computer notifications, you can accomplish a lot in 60-90 minutes.
Mental Preparation
Even though I schedule out my cycles in advance, each Sunday I spend about an hour preparing for the coming week. I make sure I didn’t miss anything when I originally planned the cycle… like an early dinner with friends, a networking event, or a new client call that was scheduled over the weekend. This Sunday prep allows me to wrap my head around the week to come and what I want to accomplish and why.
This extra time ensures I don’t drop the ball! I would hate to miss connecting with someone because I didn’t have my calendar in sync. I know product makers would be devastated if they missed a cut off time for ordering supplies or forgot to follow up with a potential wholesaler. Moving your to-do list out of your head, off paper and into an online system ensures this won’t happen.
While you can certainly implement these changes on your own, I’d love to help you.
Summary
Schedule your work with flexibility built in
Mentally prepare for the upcoming week
Use a tool like Click-Up to manage your work
