Weekly Planning – Why it Matters What Next Week Looks Like
Most companies will pay lip-service to the importance of planning ahead and staying on top of their game, but only the most successful companies make organization and time management habits a key focus of their company culture. The resulting increase in efficiency and productivity are what sets these top performers apart from the rest, and allows them to dominate the market in both good times and bad.
The key to creating a consistent goal-oriented work culture is to have every employee focused on maintaining a detailed and objective plan for the next week.
Why Next Week?
The week is the most effective time period for planning. A single day is too vulnerable to the uncertainties involved in any business, while a month is too difficult to visualize effectively and invites procrastination. The natural work week is the perfect complement to how employees think about their jobs and how they visualize their tasks and responsibilities.
Having a detailed plan for each subsequent week keeps employees focused on directly addressing their upcoming tasks and responsibilities, while also providing a slightly removed perspective that allows them to get a sense of the “big picture”. Employees who are constantly thinking about how their daily routine is affecting and affected by their larger weekly schedule are in the ideal position to organize their time and responsibilities in a way that allows for multi-tasking and maximizing productivity. It also allows them to notice patterns in weekly outcomes, both positive and negative, that can be used to enhance future weekly plans.
A Detailed Weekly Plan
Whether you are fleshing out next week’s sales pipeline or organizing a team meeting, it is important to have a detailed weekly plan written out for you to follow. The act of creating a written visualization of your weekly plan will help to make all the upcoming tasks and responsibilities concrete in your mind, and not just abstract thoughts waiting to surprise you. When you fail to fully acknowledge upcoming tasks and responsibilities is precisely the time when you become reactive instead of proactive, and you find yourself being run by your schedule instead of you running it.
Take the time to create a detailed weekly plan, and you will quickly discover how much more productive you are and how many daily headaches you can avoid by staying ahead of the game every day of the week.
