Every six months, I take a day to review and reflect on how things have been going and the changes that I want to make moving forward. This day is my personal strategy offsite.
As part of the process, I think about the things I want to do more of and the things I want to do less of, and how much time I should allocate each week towards my professional goals. I then create a sample of what a perfect day would look like and a mockup of what an ideal week would look like apportioning my time in alignment with my goals.
With my review and planning done, I go to my work calendar and clean it up to make it look like my ideal week. I delete or stop attending meetings that are not useful. I block out time for focused work on my goals. Then, to give some flexibility for the things that arise, I make sure that I leave some gaps or mark some of my project-work time as “free,” allowing others to schedule it if needed.
Each week has unique challenges: unforeseen work appears, a critical customer meeting dominates, or a work emergency takes over my calendar.
At the end of the week, I look back at the calendar and figure out how much of my time spent maps to my planned time allocation.
Often, I find that new things are creeping in if I am not attentive. As my time starts to diverge from my ideal allocation, I must decide if I change my plan based on my new reality (and possibly adjust my goals) or if I re-assert my plan and delegate or drop the new constraints on my time.
I track each week’s time allocations in a spreadsheet. It helps me understand where I am spending my time over the year. In addition, it makes it very clear if I am spending too much time on low-value work. The spreadsheet also shows if I am unrealistic about how I allocate my time in a week which is helpful for when the next six-month planning comes.
This process may seem very rigid, and in many ways, it is. However, I’ve come to it over the years through iteration after finding myself feeling very busy but not making meaningful progress towards my personal or professional goals.
As we grow in our roles, new opportunities and responsibilities appear. Our peers, team, and others want our input and time. This activity gives us the impression that we are doing necessary, valuable work. At the end of the week, though, we may look at our full calendars and wonder what we accomplished. If this situation feels familiar to you, it may be worth adding some rigor to understand how you want to spend your time and how you actually spend your time.