5 Things to-do to Increase your Productivity Over the Weekend
Whether you’re a business owner or not, you are likely to work over the ‘standard’ forty hours per week regardless of what industry you’re in. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember the last time I did work a flat forty hours. Much of this comes with the territory of being a small business owner since you often wear many hats, and you never seem to find enough time in any given day or week to get everything done.
My week is filled with conference calls or Webex meetings with clients, tons of emails, text messages, chats. My daughter is a figure skater, so I load my laptop and continue the show on the road. I have had other parents at the rink tell me that I’m lucky that I can work from anywhere. And to a certain extent, they’re right. Smartphones and other portable devices have made it that we’re able to work from anywhere at any time. These technologies have allowed us to work from anywhere. This can be both a blessing and a curse since you’re not tethered to your desk, and you can get work done from anywhere with a good internet connection. However, it also means that you can answer an email, text, or take a call whenever, which means that you end up doing more of this than you’d prefer, and you’ll continue working long after you might have planned to.
For the sake of your sanity you need to have a firm cut-off every day. The work will be there tomorrow, but you need to allow for some family time personal time to decompress and recover. Not only will it prevent burnout, but you’ll be a little sharper the following day when you’re ready to pick back up.
That’s during the weekdays, but what about the weekends? Those two days seem like perfect days to bang out some more work. The kids might be up early watching TV. Maybe the wife sleeps in late or is baking something. You see this as a perfect opening to sit back down and knock out some more things. But what you do is essential. You shouldn’t just pick up where you left off on Friday; instead, you should plan for your next week and reply to emails that you maybe have forgotten to send throughout the week.
I use several techniques to help minimize the after-hours and weekend work. By 6:00 pm, I stop answering the phone, email, texts, whatever. You should set a hard stop daily and stick to it. Your clients, partners, vendors etc. will take notice over time and stop trying to reach out outside of your designated work hours. If you get into the habit of taking people’s calls or replying to their emails, they’ll continue to expect you to be available during these times, and your day will continue into ‘your time’. Consulting work is undoubtedly not for everyone, as it’s often chaotic, and if you don’t prioritize organization and structure, you’ll miss deadlines and tasks. I have clients who themselves are consultants and often struggle with this.
So after a chaotic day, you’ll be left with 20–30, maybe more unread emails pages of notes that you took after a day full of calls. Be sure to itemize that tasks. Anything time-sensitive, be sure to act on those first thing the following day and itemize the rest of the non-essential tasks. Often, related tasks will arise throughout the week, and you can lump them into one function and perform them together. You may initially feel like you’re procrastinating, but you’re really being more efficient.
Email management. Inbox zero, snoozing, rules, and filtering….No matter what technique you employ, there’s no getting around managing your email. There’s also no right or wrong way to go about it managing your email. And no matter how many companies have attempted it replace and kill email, it’s not going away, and it’s easily the most critical place where time is spent. It’s easy to stress over this because it continues to flow in no matter how many emails you do.
Weekends especially are slower for email, making it the prime time to catch up on it. Say, mid-morning on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon are perfect times to get caught up or at least try to. I noticed that occasionally, clients would write back on emails that I had sent during these times, and over time virtually every email I’d send on a weekend was replied to. As mobile phones became more prevalent, emails were immediately answered, which resulted in this back and forth between myself and the client. Before long, a weekday just turned into a regular workday with the same back and forth on emails, so I quickly realized that this was not what I wanted at all, so I started scheduling my email. Even though I would type them up on a Saturday or Sunday, I schedule them for mid-morning delivery that following Monday. Once I started doing this, I finally achieved the desired result of catching up on email without generating more work. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a few other positive things about emailing this way.
If you time your email delivery to about 10:30 the following Monday, your recipient is probably on Monday morning meetings. This usually occurs after they’ve already signed into their mailboxes their morning emails, further delaying the inevitable ping pong volley of back and forth email. I also discovered that not emailing my employees was very positive for them over the weekend. I hadn’t realized it, but emailing them on weekends added unnecessary stress. They felt they needed to respond immediately not to upset the boss, even though that was not my intention. I didn’t find out till later, but some would stop whatever they were doing on their time to answer my email.
So my Saturdays and/or Sundays might look like this:
1- Sort through email, any email that requires action, create tasks in my task manager. Sort them by order of priority. Then go through and block my calendar for the following week, allowing me time to perform the tasks. I won’t take calls, meetings, answer emails, or texts during these times.
2- Go back through my email and anything that requires a response, write a scheduled reply back to those emails as I mentioned above.
3- Open my project management application (which is different from the task manager) and check all the completed individual tasks, update the completed percentage, and add whatever new tasks I want/need to complete for the following week.
4- Itemize all the billable hours and add them to each client’s monthly invoice. You must do this weekly; if you wait to do this at the end of the month, you’ll have way too much to catch up on.
5- Block your calendar for the following week. If you don’t use a calendar-booking service, I recommend that you start and get your clients and partners used to using it, and if not, at the bare minimum, it will give them access to your availability. So review your weekly tasks, estimate how much time you need to complete them, and then block your calendar accordingly. I tend to spread mine out across the week rather than having large blocks in a day or two. I have some demanding clients who won’t wait two days to speak to me, so this works best.
This is the system I have found works best for my industry, client base, and workflow. I hope that this helps you in some way. Do you have any suggestions, comments, or questions? Drop ’em below.
