eBook - A Simple Handbook for Achieving Maximum at Work - Weekdone

A Simple Handbookfor Achieving Maximum at Work

Külli Koort

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The Ultimate Guide for Making Time for the Work That Matters

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Copyright © 2014 Weekdone, LLC

All Rights Reserved

You are welcome to email, tweet, blog, and pass this Ebook around the web, but please don’t change any of its contents when you do.

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Table of Contents

Eisenhower Principles of Productivity 4

Quadrant #1: Urgent and Important 5

Quadrant #2: Urgent but Not Important 5

Quadrant #3: Not Urgent but Important 5

Quadrant #4: Not Urgent and Not Important 5

Finding time for tasks that really matter 6

Limit the number of your plans 6

Focus hard on one thing only and don’t give up until it’s done 6

List your progress and reflect on it at the end of the week 6

If you feel stuck, communicate the problem 7

Say no 7

Plan your next week on Friday 7

Focus on outcomes and results, not on process or actions 7

Share plans with others and let them know what you’re working on 7

Divide your week into regular functional area days 8

Don’t overload others with information 8

Finally, get the ‘week done’ 9

Are you ready to finally get the maximum out of your time? 9

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Eisenhower Principles of Productivity

„Efficiency is doing things right; Effectiveness is doing the right things“ - Peter Drucker

The biggest challenges we face today are often associated with prioritizing:

How much time should be allocated to one task?

Which task should be done first?

Is my activity even connected to the company goals?

Unfortunately, not enough people ask these questions on a daily basis. Employees around the world are struggling with huge workloads. There is no doubt that questioning every single activity takes time and energy.

There is one time management process that sets out to answer all of the questions above. This time management process is the Eisenhower Matrix, which originates from Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Did you know? “Many historians feel that Dwight D. Eisenhower was the last great US President. An extraordinary military leader and strategist, he served two low-profile terms during which he established the lasting US policy on the mid-east, fathered the US inter-state highway system, expanded Social Security, and integrated the military services and southern universities, among other accomplishments.”

The Matrix is a simple 4-square grid with axis indicating the task urgency and importance. You can use this method for your time planning as well, preferably as part of a weekly planning tool, such as Weekdone.com. To find out what you should be doing, review all your tasks and divide them among these 4 squares.

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Quadrant #1: Urgent and Important

Items you could not foresee and those that have been left to the last minute. should be combined here. When using weekdone.com for your weekly planning, try to enter the Urgent/Important plans first as much as possible and focus on those.

Plan to handle the unexpected or reschedule some other item.

Debrief when complete to determine how you will respond next time.

Quadrant #2: Urgent but Not Important

Items listed here stop you from getting your work done. Delegate them or reschedule them.

Just say “NO!” or coach people to solve their own problems.

Quadrant #3: Not Urgent but Important

Complete the items in Quadrant #3 to achieve your goals.

Allow enough time to do these things right, or they will become Urgent. When planning the week, have also few Non Urgent /Important tasks in your weekly status report.

Quadrant #4: Not Urgent and Not Important

These items are distractions. Ignore them or drop them. Or, decline the request. Not everything that can be done must be done – or even planned. Simplify and declutter your to-do list by throwing these straight into the dustbin.

“Remember, the Eisenhower matrix expedites time man-agement when used daily.”

You list all the tasks for your day in one or another of the boxes. As you list them in the box, do so by priority. When finished, address the Urgent/Important Tasks immediately and dismiss the Not Urgent/Not Important tasks.

If possible, delegate the items in the Urgent/Not Important box or leave them for the future, when there are no more important tasks. The Non Urgent/Important tasks should be assigned a completion date, but they should never take priority over Urgent/Important tasks.

The key benefit to the Matrix is its elegance. It lends itself so easily to accessibility and function. The template is easy enough to draw and photocopy and you are able to achieve the maximum benefit when you use it along with weekly planning tool.

After figuring out what really matters and which issues need to be addressed, you need to find the time to deal with these tasks.

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Finding time for tasks that really matter

“80% of people don’t want to go to work on Monday mornings.”

Two common things they say on Monday mornings are “I have too many things to do” and “There’s not enough time to do it all”. If you look at your task list and have no idea where to start it will lead to procastination.

There is no reason to get demotivated, because if you know your priorities and have created a weekly plan, then you are already half way there. Here are 10 best tips to be productive and enjoy your week. It’s all about achieving more by doing less:

Limit the number of your plans

Start with weekly planning. It’s crucial to focus on what’s important and to do those selected things really well. Usually only a few of the dozens of items on our to-do lists are tied to big crucial goals and high-impact objectives.

It’s ideal to limit the number of weekly plans you absolutely have to achieve to a maximum of 5 per week. That’s one big hairy goal that you have to achieve per day, whatever it takes.

Focus hard on one thing only and don’t give up until it’s done

Too much choice is bad. It’s human to choose the small and easy-to-accomplish tasks, not important strategic ones. Achieving many small goals gives us an illusion of progress. At the same time multitasking lowers IQ by 10 points and kills productivity by 40%, according to Harvard Business Review.

If you listed your 5 key goals for the week, choose the most important one of them and start working on it. Not two or three. Just one.

By not having multiple options, you can’t choose the path of least resistance. Keep grinding until the plan is accomplished and you can report it as progress.

List your progress and reflect on it at the end of the week

Choosing a few key plans for the week is not easy at first. What helps is reflection at the end of each week.

Was what you did important and worth one full week of work?

During the week, whenever something gets done, don’t just delete it or tick it as done, but write it down as progress. On Friday, look at your progress list and study each item. Have you cheated a bit? Could you have done something else instead?

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Repeat the process weekly, learn and iterate. You’ll soon get pretty good at listing your key goals.

If you feel stuck, communicate the problem

Not everything you plan gets done. Quite often there are external reasons. Things get stuck or delayed. Don’t procrastinate on things you can’t solve yourself. Ask for help from your manager, your team mates, advisors or anyone else.

Companies like Skype have used the 3-part PPP (progress, plans and problems) process for their team communication and planning for years. Some companies call it ROC: results, objectives and challenges. There are other names, but the logic is the same. You set a goal and it either gets done in a week or there must be a serious reason why it did not move ahead. A plan always becomes a progress or a problem.

Say no

Be picky. Because something can be done, does not mean it must be done. Be mindful of your goals. Take a minute or two to think whenever someone asks you to do something or you start writing something down as a to-do.

Start saying no to many of the things and focus only on selected plans. Leave out unimportant things. Do only the big things.

Plan your next week on Friday

Reflection each Friday is important. Planning your next week on Friday evening before leaving work is even better. You’ll keep your weekend worry-free and you can start right away on Monday morning.

Focus on outcomes and results, not on process or actions

Looking at our to-do lists, we often write down not measurable results to be achieved but actions or processes. Furthermore, quite often it is hard to say if the task has been achieved or not.

If possible, try to focus on results instead. This way it will be much easier to declare a goal accomplished and move on to next big weekly objective.

Share plans with others and let them know what you’re working on

In a team environment, always explain to others, why you have chosen one goal over another and how your resources are divided. When your plans get accomplished, communicate the progress. Expect the others to do the same.

Whenever a challenge comes up, share that as well. It helps both with getting feedback from others as well as keeping the team on the same page.

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A weekly paradigm is often ideal for these three – not too often, like daily e-mails and not too seldom, like monthly reports. Use either e-mail, Google Docs, intranet or a specialized tool like Weekdone, whatever works for you.

Divide your week into regular functional area days

People who have different responsibilities can divide their week into 5 days of different work areas. Then stick to them each week. Communicate your days’ focus to your co-workers as well.

When Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square was doing 80-hour work weeks between the 2 companies, he was very strict about his daily planning. So he themed his 5 days like this:

• Monday: Management meetings and “running the company” work

• Tuesday: Product development

• Wednesday: Marketing, commu-nications and growth

• Thursday: Developers and part-nerships

• Friday: The company and its cul-ture

Don’t overload others with information

You would not want others to disturb you and waste your time. Being interrupted, be it via e-mail or meetings, is an annoying waste of time in any team. Be nice to others and whenever possible, do not e-mail them, do not call for another meeting.

All in all, you can enjoy your daily work much more by limiting yourself to a smaller number of important goals and executing those really well. Keep it simple. Declutter. You’ll do more by doing less.

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Finally, get the ‘week done’

“1 hour of planning will save 10 hours of doing”

No matter what products your company sells or what kind of services you provide, at the end of the day, you need to get things done. The best chances this happening is to prioritize your tasks, find out which need your immediate attention and which ones you need to delegate now. Write down most crucial plans and work productively throughout the week.

While you are doing the best you can, remember the Pareto principle: The Pareto analysis technique is all about doing 20 percent of the work with a direct impact on the 80 percent of the results.

This is going to help you out, especially if you are able to complete the majority of the 20 percent early on. You’ll be amazed as although you are completing less work during the week and are less busy, you are actually finishing more and able to move ahead with your weekly work schedule.

Did you know? “Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.”

So, when you walk into work on Monday, you need to sit down and look at everything you need to do throughout the week. Write all of this down either in weekdone.com Plans section or your other favorite task manager. Then for each task think what kind of impact it has and move it to the top of your priority list. You are going to see some of the smaller tasks you need to complete are actually going to have a substantial impact on some of the longer tasks.

Are you ready to finally get the maximum out of your time?

Keep this handbook near and come back to it whenever you feel unproductive or overwhelmed. Stop, reflect and stay positive. Success is never easy, but it is achievable. Try out the winning combination of the Eisenhower matrix, Pareto principle and the weekly planning tool.

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Often we find ourselves too immersed in task management and productivity applications. We don’t seem to be able to step back a bit. We need to look at the bigger picture.

Our mission at Weekdone is to make you, the user, understand your data and make it actionable. We give you a visual, easy, yet comprehensive overview of your team’s productivity.

Jüri Kaljundi CEO & Chief Productivity Officer Weekdone weekly reporting [email protected]

Have some questions about weekly planning? Do not hesitate to send your feedback, thoughts or questions to Külli at [email protected] and she will find time for you.

You can find us at: weekdone.com twitter.com/weekdone facebook.com/weekdone google.com/+weekdone

To plan your weekly goals and monitor progress, try out Weekdone. The status report service is free for individual use and teams of up to 3 people. For others there’s a 30 days free trial.

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eBook - A Simple Handbook for Achieving Maximum at Work - Weekdone