 Get ten times your productivity and impact in the Social Sector with this planning strategy. A friend or spouse asks you on Friday with the weekend coming on “How was the week?” What do you say back? Were you overwhelmed with your email inbox while co workers and bosses threw down surprise meetings that lasted over two hours? Did you feel super busy while being interrupted by home issues that crept into your precious working time? Was time scarcity creeping in on your mind and forcing you to constantly switch tasks to stay afloat? - Or - Could you smile with satisfaction and explain how your week was incredibly productive as you moved methodically through complex tasks delivering some major pieces of work on time. Could you relate how you set aside time for deep concentration, production and planning while also staying ahead of administrative issues? You even had time to work out and meet your Mom for lunch while she was in town.  Which scenario sums up your normal week? All of us are somewhere in the middle. Hopefully you’ve already identified where your pain points lie in your weekly schedule and life. Once you know the big picture and have thought a bit about your life and work planning you can design your idea week and day for maximum satisfaction and achievement.
How to plan your week Establish a standard idea week plan for yourself. This is the starting point. Of course life happens and the unexpected arises but you will have a performance and satisfaction oriented system that you know works as the backbone for your routine. The 10X, or ‘ten times what you start with’ is a common phrase in the technology startup community, but is just starting to be adopted in the social sectors. This implies an exponential impact or outcome on your original state. The techniques described below can have this impact on your work and satisfaction. This week should include at its core focus blocks. These are periods of time for engaging in deep work where you fully concentrate. You eliminate all external input and get your best most important work done. This is the type of work that gets you to stand out among your social sector colleagues or come up with a solution that gets your nonprofit that next big grant. You should ideally have two or three focus blocks per day, sequencing your most important work happening in the morning when most of us are at our most creative and rested state. Use batching to combine similar tasks. The deep work that happens in a focus block is the most important thing you can do with your time. However there is a host of other issues clamoring for your time. Crucial meetings and time to build relationships with those you admire or could help you achieve your career and life goals. Taking care of the seemingly endless administrative and contracting issues that we deal with in the social sector. Outside of work, paying your bills and taxes on time, making sure the kids schedules work...the list is long and demanding. Identify each category. My professional categories are: Administration, networking, correspondence (email and calls), project development, production (my deep work), strategy, administration, and taxes. Make sure to group these activities together. Switching tasks costs up to 20 minutes of lost time in refocusing our brains on a new issue. This can add up significantly over a work day in the social sector. Use the power of no to eliminate tasks, obligations and work focus that is outside of your life and work strategy. Think about putting in place a ‘low information diet’ where you cut down on mental clutter in your life. For me this came from social and mainstream media consumption. National Public Radio and BBC was constantly droning during every available minute. Bringing your focus to a higher level such as consuming news summaries rather than the hourly news drip frees up cognition. Each piece of info we encounter takes mental energy to process. For each item, we must quickly decide: Do we remember, do we forget, do we record, do we take action, do we choose to ignore? Free up this energy to focus on what really matters: your mission in the social sector and the rest of your life with your family and friends. A solution that works:Your Ideal Calendar Make a new online calendar subset to the one that you use for work or life. Label this the ideal week. Create a full week of work and life where you have three full focus blocks, time for physical exercise, and time with your family and friends. Have this available to select at the beginning of your week and day. The simple act of scheduling this non work time in advance allows us to better enjoy that time without mentally scrolling on to the next tasks. Here is one idea: This is an example of my ideal calendar using my favorite scheduling tool Google Calendar. But a paper day planner works, or even a drawn matrix of the week on blank paper. You likely already have a method for planning our week but it may (as it was for me at first) be filled with other people’s priorities and bent around their convenience. Take back that narrative and make this week about you, your mission and those that you serve. Then batch other people’s needs in designated time blocks. While your co workers in the social sector are riding their email inboxes and working in a reactive, and distracted cycle, you will be quietly executing your weekly plan that is organized around focus blocks allowing you to do your best work for those we are trying to serve. Along the way we are also differentiating ourselves as high performers within our organization and have a more relaxed, satisfying work environment and life after hours. We have to be flexible. This ideal week might never happen exactly as planned in our crazy social sector lives. But this approach gives us a strong working default. This gives us a known working model to fall back on. This framework is a place to refocus attention when chaos happens.
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