I had a colleague the other day make a social media post with a picture of a 2020 daily planner he had purchased and a comment something like, "Well I haven't been using this and probably won't need to until Covid is over! Makes a great dust collector though!"
It got me thinking about how we’ve been adjusting to new and different work schedules and processes, learning to navigate through these trying times, and the whole "planning thing" in particular.
I'd counter that planning is even more important now than ever before. Stay with me a few moments and consider the following:
Even with this new and changing reality of work and home (and working from home, and being at home working) we have things we need to get done. We have things we want to get done. And we have things that pop up unexpectedly while we are to get them done. The process is actually no different than anytime pre-Covid where we worked to get things done and other things jumped up out of nowhere demanding our attention and making it harder to complete it all in the run of the day.
Perhaps the biggest change in planning while we are making our way through the pandemic is a change of focus. Trying to make long range plans, say much more than three months out, just isn’t realistic. Short term planning is the way to go. It’s about being aware and about being realistic to your own situation. Plan a month out? A couple of weeks? Maybe for you it’s just to the end of the week or even just to the next day. You’ll get a sense of it when you start making and working the plan as to what’s best and realistic for you.
Regardless of how far out you can plan, or how natural planning comes to you, many of us can feel overwhelmed about what to do first, how to choose what to do next, and whether something should even be on our list. In the absence of any guidelines we can end up saying yes to everything and there you go again feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. The most effective organizations take the time to lay out their corporate values, which in turn are used to form strategic goals, those results the organization is looking to achieve over a specific time frame. When faced with a decision of where to fit a new activity or project, or even whether to take it on in the first place those organizations can come back to their values and goals to help guide their choices. Don’t have formally set organizational values or strategic goals? No better time than now to start thinking about them and set them in place! Remember though, through the pandemic you might as well be realistic and keep your time frames shorter so that you can be more flexible as world and local conditions fluctuate.
When most of us look at those day-to-day tasks it’s not that the tasks themselves, but the approach or process that we use to accomplish them that has changed somewhat. Effective time management tools, processes and behaviours (yes, behaviours!) remain the same, however, and make it more likely we will get to those things in a timely fashion and that nothing slips through the cracks. It’s about lists, but more than just lists. It’s about time estimates for each task, prioritizing them (remember A’s and B’s?), ranking them within those priorities, and being aware of how much of any given day should be filled with tasks (for example, even back at the office, was eight hour truly eight hours once you took out lunch, scheduled meetings, and some kind of fudge-factor for the unknown interruptions destined to happen?).
Planning lets you know when to stop adding things to tomorrow’s list and write them to the next day… or maybe even the next week if that’s more realistic. And that’s one of the keys… making each daily list realistic. Trust me, it’s far more satisfying to start with a realistic list and be able to cross most, if not all of it, off by the end of the day. And can you even imagine the feeling of that one great day when you finish today’s list mid afternoon and decide to jump start tomorrow’s to-do’s early??
Although the focus of planning is often from a work perspective, another topic near and dear to me, work-life harmony, also comes into play. Just as we have things to do and meetings to attend at work, so do we have things to do and appointments to get to at home. Planning needs to be an all around life habit, not just work-based, to truly be effective. It’s not unheard of to develop a personal mission statement, based on a set of personal values and from there think about personal strategic goals, again being realistic with time frames. As I think about it, I probably have scarier consequences if I miss a commitment I made with my other half than if my boss or client was upset with me!
When you think about these few points, and there are others to be sure, the importance of planning is easy to see. As I mentioned above it’s about having the right tools, processes and behaviours to make it a habit in order to see the benefits of reduced stress and anxiety and higher productivity to name just a few. And of course, make it realistic to your personal situation.