Weekly planning – How important is it?
Do you know this too? It’s a busy time at work and you have a lot of to-do’s that need to be done. However, you can’t keep up and don’t know where to start for the week. You’re getting unproductive and feel like you can’t get it all done.
Then this blog post will help you 100 percent. Weekly planning can give the foundation you might need to have a successful week and achieve your goals. Today, we’re going to show you 5 simple tips that help you planning your week in order to solve more tasks during your work week in the same amount of time.
1. Prioritize
“Put the big rocks first”
Steven R. Covey author, speaker
This simple motto can add tremendous value to your week planning. Always do the biggest and most decisive tasks first. To find out which tasks are important and crucial for you, ask yourself the question:
Which 20% of the tasks make up 80% of the outcome?
This will automatically determine the order in which you tackle your tasks, sorted by importance and relevance. In order to be able to present the tasks even more transparently afterwards, the probably best-known time management tool, the Eisenhower method, helps.
Important, urgent: A priorities:
All tasks that are very important and absolutely need to be addressed.
Important, not urgent: B priorities:
Tasks that should be done, but won’t have much consequence if you don’t tackle them right away.
Not important, urgent – C priorities:
These are the tasks you should delegate to others.
Not important, not urgent – D priorities:
You don’t need to do these tasks and it is not important, delete them.
2. Use your calender to write down To Do’s and define times
In order to do your work in the best possible way, it is important to write down the things you want to accomplish. You can do this with classic To Do lists or by creating a list on your PC. In this case, you can also use the calendar, in which you can clearly display your week. At this point we recommend the Outlook calendar.
For what reason?
Because you can transfer the calendar events you create in Outlook directly to timeghost and enter the event as time entry in your Feed. This way you have a great overview of how long you have worked on which task from the project.
If you are interested in trying the connection between timeghost and Outlook, you have the opportunity to test timeghost 14 days for free.
3. Plan the day before
In order to make your weekly planning as effective as possible, it is advantageous to plan already the day before or the Friday before what tasks you have to accomplish in the upcoming week. This way, you can get started with the tasks right away and don’t have to plan at all. Not only do you create a time advantage for the coming week, but you can also plan the week more objectively if you do it before the week starts.
4. Reward for the achieved goals
By setting your weekly tasks, you can define the success of your projects and tasks and authorize targeted rewards. When achieving goals, rewards can keep you motivated throughout the current week and give you the push you need in difficult situations. In any case, your motivation will increase and so will your productivity. Once you’ve achieved what you set out to do, reward yourself and indulge in rewards.
5. Planning the week with Azure DevOps
At timeghost, we plan our week with a program from Microsoft: Azure DevOps. For us, this program covers the entire program for perfect weekly planning. On the one hand, tasks can be created that can be assigned to individual people within the team.
For the upcoming week, the individual tasks are prioritized and sorted by importance. After completion, the individual tasks can be characterized as “resolved”.
If you want to know more about how to plan your week with Azure DevOps, feel free to watch this short video that gives you a good overview of the program’s features and possibilities.
Enter your tasks of Azure DevOps in timeghost
Finally, we enter our completed tasks in timeghost to assign the task as working time to a project. For this purpose, we have created a PowerAutomate connector in our software that automatically transfers completed tasks from Azure DevOps to the timeghost feed. With timeghost, you get the perfect overview of the progress of the already defined weekly tasks and especially you see how much time was required for each task.
Conclusion
What we want to share with you in this blog is, firstly, that it is important to write down your tasks and prioritize them to determine the order. In doing so, sort your tasks by importance and urgency. When you reach the goals, reward yourself and treat yourself. Programs or software that we can recommend for improved weekly planning is Microsoft Azure DevOps for planning, prioritizing, and processing tasks and timeghost to get an overview on how much time you have spent on several tasks of a project.
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