Everyone has asked themselves this question one time or another. Transitioning back into work mode from the weekend or a long overdue vacation can be challenging but for leaders, it’s crucial. This transition requires effective planning and a willingness to adapt your plan should you notice your priorities need to be adjusted or if new ones arise.
While we’re planning for our week ahead, we wanted to share some of our tips and strategies we take to plan for a new week. We invite you to share the steps you take to increase your productivity and to guide your team toward success in their upcoming workweek and beyond.
Here’s our planning strategies and tips:
While some may take the position that planning for the week ahead doesn’t require one to take lookbacks, our posture is slightly different. We recognize the past doesn’t dictate the future; however, we believe there are benefits in conducting lookbacks. Therefore, we start our planning this way.
Our Lookbacks help us to identify our accomplishments, challenges, and unfinished tasks that need to be addressed in the upcoming week. They provide us with the framework of what’s ahead and an opportunity for us to build in a celebration of the wins and challenges that we may have failed to acknowledge in the week prior. We encourage you to build these celebrations into your planning if you don’t already do this!
Once our lookbacks are complete, we believe this is the perfect opportunity for us to start putting together our weekly schedule which starts with planning our self-care. Effective leaders recognize the importance of maintaining their physical and mental well-being. Therefore, our planning starts with incorporating weekly self-care activities into our schedule. Pardon Our Posture promotes and encourages our team to schedule and stick to their self-care activities.
Once our schedule is designed in such a way that pours back into us, we reschedule those tasks and projects from our prior week that were left undone but need to be addressed in the upcoming week. Don’t beat yourself up, it happens to all of us, just plan to get them done in the upcoming week.
We recognize the value our team brings therefore we plan and schedule a weekly team meeting to not only communicate the weekly plan but more importantly to discuss the lookback performed, solicit our teams’ ideas, feedback and to foster transparency and alignment. If challenges are identified, we welcome them and work together to develop contingency plans to address these challenges proactively and allocate resources if necessary. We continuously review and monitor our plan to monitor our progress and to make the necessary adjustments.
Our tips and strategies at a glance:
1. Conduct a lookback to review and celebrate accomplishments, challenges and to reschedule undone tasks.
2. Self-Care-think about and schedule self-care activities, but most importantly commit to sticking to them.
3. Prioritize task.
4. Create a weekly schedule.
5. Plan & schedule teams meeting to communicate weekly goals & objectives for the week.
6. Display a willingness to make adjustments and be open to feedback.
7. Reallocate resources, if necessary
8. Develop a contingency plan to proactively address challenges.
9. Schedule reviews to monitor and make necessary adjustments.
10. Remember to end the week by reflecting on the week to plan for the upcoming week!
Pardon Our Posture wishes you a wonderful and productive week. We invite you to share the tips and strategies you use to transition back into work mode. We would love to incorporate some of your strategies in our upcoming planning.
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