How I arrange my weeks

I certainly don’t think I’ve mastered this but I’ve experimented a lot with how I organise my weeks.  I don’t have a weekly organisation template for you, but I do have thoughts on how you might arrange yours.

Warning, I might use lots of buzz words like “productivity” and “efficiency” in this article. I’m not huge into productivity gurus, and I think with a reasonable balance of focus, reflection and discipline anyone can get a good amount of work done in an organised way. Having said that, they’re useful, catch all terms and will do fine for this article.

Organising Meetings

Meeting days kill your productivity. If you factor in travel or zoom tech issues, prep work, follow up and over runs, a one hour meeting is really half a day. Plus, they’re super draining and I find that I’m just really flat after them. Also, the dance to organise a meeting can be crazy frustrating. For these reasons, here are my weekly rules for meetings:

• Designate two days a week for meetings, and stick to that.

• Preferably, have meetings in the afternoon. You’ll be drained afterwards, so you won’t get any work done anyway

• Organise specific times with clients at the beginning of your engagement. Lock in a set time with them for all meetings. It’ll get rid of the meeting times organisational dance, and it will keep you honest

Designate time for thing you don’t like doing

Its easy to find time to do the things you like, but I find that I push the things I don’t like around and never get to them.  For example I hate paying bills so I designate a specific time for paying bills so that I don’t forget to do it.

This will also help with missing things through the gaps, or responding to things on an adhoc basis.  I have a lot of back and forth with potential clients before an engagement starts and I’m always worried that I’d have missed something from them so I set a specific time in my week to check in with leads and make sure they’re not waiting on anything from me.

Designate (or limit) the time for things you love

I love strategy and marketing. It used to be that if I had a free hour in my week I’d fill it with updating my website or revisiting my strategy. I found that I was always coming up with a reason to do more on the business side of things and that meant I wasn’t getting enough project work done.  So I designated an entire day to strategy and marketing work. That meant I stopped giving myself the excuse to jump in and do some strategy work because I knew it would have to wait until ‘business day’. This freed up the rest of my week to focus on project work.

Leave a day for moving things forward

This is kind of the same as the last one, but David C Baker, who I’m a big fan of talks about organising your week as follows:

2 x days off from work per week - you’ll feel fresher and more productive if you switch off for two days

4 x days getting things off your to-do list (this means project work, admin work, billable hours)

1 x day to move things forward. I love strategy so for me this is business day. You might be working on researching some new design work, or upskilling on PD or learning more about building codes and regulations. Set aside a day to get a deep amount of work done on it

Move Project Work Around

Of all the things to shuffle around I find project work the best for this. This is because its natural for project work to expand and shrink (we’re terrible at estimating the amount of time to complete a task). It’s also always the case that the engineer who promised to get their drawings to you on Tuesday so you can update your set on Wednesday will be two days late and you’ll have to shuffle it around anyway.

Do a Works in Progress ‘Meeting’

OK if you’re solo or a small team this doesn’t have to be a formal meeting, but designate time to organise your week. Discuss (or reflect if you’re doing things solo) on what you have to do during the week to keep projects ticking over. Who do you have to nag for things, what do you need to complete, what are you waiting on. I’ve worked at places that do this on a Wednesday afternoon (middle of the week) and first thing on a Monday.

Personally I find that late morning on a Monday is good for this. It allows me to quickly cross off anything I meant to do the week before before I sit down for the meeting.

Check in with Clients – regularly

This is one of the most important parts of your week. In fact, I only do this fortnightly, but a regular check in with clients is essential to keeping them informed on how their project is going and gives you a chance to remind them how useful you are because you’ve done all these things for them.  I introduced this after about 6 months in practice and its been a game-changer. Not only does it mean that clients are never left out of the loop, but I also arrange my to-do list around this. I’ve put together a more detailed article on this that you can find here.

The nitty gritty of your days

There are so many different approaches to ‘maximising your productivity’ every day.  Eric from 30 x 40 Design Workshop does ‘manage’ and ‘make’. This means managing projects, following up with clients and other project stakeholders in the morning and generally getting things of your plate. This leaves your afternoons free for getting some deep work done on projects.

I’ve tried this and I think it works pretty well, but I found that I would often get sidetracked ‘managing’ things in the morning which would often derail my day and I’d struggle to get momentum back on to project work.

What I do now is aim for 4 hours of deep work a day - usually first thing in the morning. That means I know that I won’t get sidetracked, I’ll be spending 4 hours on a design, or a documentation set or something billable. Next I aim for three small tasks of about 30-60 minutes. This could be something else on my calendar, like paying bills or issuing invoices. Then finally about 3-4 small tasks, like responding to emails.

Keep an eye on your calendar, not your emails

This ties in the previous one. The worst thing for your 4 hours of deep work checking your emails first thing in the morning. Resist the temptation to open your emails first thing in the morning. You run the risk of getting derailed before you’ve even started. Plenty of people will say only check your emails at designated times per day. I try to do this late morning and late afternoon before wrapping up for the day.

Final thoughts

Like I said, I’m not going to tell you how to organise your weeks, but I’ve been experimenting with these principles for a few years now. Each of these has had a real impact on how much work I get done, how consistently I do specific tasks and help to reduce driving all over the city meeting with clients every day.  I hope you got something from this.