Why Your Planning Doesn’t Work (And The Myth About Waiting For Tasks)
This week, what can you do when your plan for the week is destroyed and your waiting for list get out of control.
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Episode 178 Script
Hello and welcome to episode 178 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, you’re finally doing your weekly planning session, you have your focused work times blocked on your calendar and you are confident you will be able to get all your important work done that week.
Then, one email from your boss late Monday afternoon throws everything out. You have to ditch the plan and all the things you have been waiting for are required right now.
How do you manage that? Well, hopefully, in this episode I will give you some strategies to help you stay in control.
Now before I do that…
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Okay, it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Melissa. Melissa asks: Hi Carl, This year I have done really well on doing a weekly review every Saturday morning and I get my week planned and organised. But, I find most weeks, by the time I get to Wednesday, I am far behind on my plan because I get given other work from my boss, I am waiting for my colleagues to get back to me with important information and my customers are always contacting me asking for help. How do you stay with your plan when so many things keep forcing you to change everything?
Hi Melissa, great question and I am sure a lot of people find themselves in the same situation as you do. I know it happens to me more often than I like.
So, firstly, it’s fantastic to hear you are consistently doing the weekly planning session. That’s important because it keeps you on top of your bigger picture direction and helps to avoid missing anything important. A lot of the reasons why people find themselves overwhelmed and directionless is because they don’t spend any time stepping away and reviewing where they are with their projects and goals.
If you don’t know where you are, how will you ever know what you need to do next to get the project or goal completed?
And let’s be honest here, a weekly planning session takes no more than thirty minutes if you are doing it consistently every week. If you are not doing it consistently, then, sure, it’s going to take you a lot longer because you will inevitably have a lot more to review.
Now, no matter how well you plan the week, unless you are hidden away in a log cabin high up in the mountains with no connection to the outside world, things are going to change your plan. When your plan for the week comes face to face with the week, sparks are going to fly. It’s as Mike Tyson put it:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
However, understanding that things are going to change—you just don’t know what is going to change—is a great place to start.
The key here is to build in flexibility. It’s no good trying to meticulously plan out your week based on what your next week calendar looks like on Saturday morning with time blocks for every hour of the day. That will never work. There are too many variables.
Instead, establish what your important work for the week is. What are your “must dos”? These are your non-negotiable tasks—if you like, they are your red-lines. No matter what, these tasks, meetings and appointments must take place.
It is these that go on your calendar—after all, you have decided they are your non-negotiable tasks.
Your non-negotiable tasks are not just about your work either. Your family and friendships, time for exercise, rest and personal development should form part of your non-negotiable plans for the week.
For instance, if making time to have dinner with your family every day is part of your areas of focus, then you make sure that happens and never schedule work related calls at those times. It’s the same with your exercise time. We all know by now you need to move. You body was not designed to spend all day sat down. You need movement. So, make sure that some form of exercise each day is scheduled. That could be a twenty minute walk after lunch and a thirty minute walk after dinner. Exercise is a personal choice. You do not have to go to a gym. Just make sure you have time for movement every day.
Now, hopefully, once you have your non-negotiable, must do tasks in your task manager and the required time to complete these are blocked out on your calendar there should be enough blank space for you to manage any emergencies that will inevitably come your way.
Now, here’s a tip. Start the week as if you expect the week to turn crazy.
What I mean here is front load your week with your most important work. If a crisis or an emergency is going to happen, you want to know that you have already completed your most important work for the week—or at the very least started doing the work.
There’s no way any of us can predict when things will go wrong. The only thing we can predict is that at sometime in the week something is going to happen that will require us to find some unplanned for time.
Knowing this, if you can, block out Monday for your most important work.
In my experience, Monday’s are the least likely days for sudden emergencies to happen. Most people spend Monday catching up with what they need to do that week, gossiping about what they did last weekend and telling anyone who will listen how much they hate Mondays.
Take advantage of this. Make Monday mornings your deepest focus work time.
Getting your most important work done early in the week, means you have the time and space to deal with all those unexpected requests, crises and emergencies later in the week, safe in the knowledge your most important tasks for the week have already been done.
I actually, block both Monday and Tuesday morning for my most important work. Monday is the day I try to get all my writing for the week done, and Tuesday is when I plan out the content I need to create later in the week—it’s the content planning time that takes up a lot of my time when creating content. So, I want that done early in the week so no matter what happens later, the hardest part of the creation process is done.
The rest of your week needs to be kept as flexible as you can make it. If you can, try to make Wednesday or Thursday your flexible day. By that I mean keep your work time blocks to a minimum.
Knowing you have space on a Wednesday or Thursday to deal with any unknowns that come up earlier in the week, takes the pressure off from worrying about finding time to work on whatever needs working on. It also means you have the space to catch up with anything that has fallen behind.
It also helps to review your plan for the week on Wednesday too. This acts as a method to refocus you on what your objectives for the week are. It also means you can reschedule less critical work if necessary.
Last week, for instance, I had a few unexpected emergencies come up with a seminar I was doing for a company on Thursday. This meant, Tuesday was spend dealing with tech issues to make sure I could connect to the company’s Microsoft Teams system—I understand security is important, but perhaps IT departments need to understand that no company is an island. Employees do need work with people outside the organisation from time to time—anyway just a thought.
These issues thew me out of my plans for the week. However, I always have Wednesday morning free so I can catch up if necessary and that is exactly what I did. By Wednesday afternoon I was back on track and I made the necessary adjustments to my planned tasks for the week.
Now what about all those waiting for tasks? Here’s the thing about waiting for lists. What is the outcome here? I’m pretty sure the outcome you wanted when you requested whatever you requested was not to sit and wait for something to happen. That objective would be bizarre. No, the outcome you wanted was to receive whatever you requested.
So, anything in a waiting for list is an uncompleted task. You have not got what you requested, therefore the task is not complete. Moving a task to a waiting for list after you sent the request is just shuffling tasks from one list to another. It’s not completing the task. The task is only complete once you receive the information you wanted.
So, if you want to complete that task, you need to do whatever it takes to get the information you are waiting for. Whether that means you pick up the phone and scream and shout at the person not supplying you with the information or you send a polite, but firm email. Remember the objective is to get the information, not necessarily to build friendships or popularity.
You want to reduce your waiting for list? Get tough, get nasty and do whatever it takes to complete the task. And yes, that means you need to get tough and nasty with your bosses if it is they who are not giving you the information.
Look, when it comes to your annual evaluation and the person doing the evaluation gives you a poor score because you are not completing your targets and KPIs, it will sound pretty pathetic if you try to justify yourself by blaming others for not sending you the information you needed to complete your KPIs. So stop seeing waiting for tasks as somehow being different from the original task. If the original task has not been completed then it’s not complete and you just have to reschedule whatever it is to another day when you do have the information in order to complete the task.
Focus on the right outcome and do whatever you need to do to clear you waiting for lists. There should be almost nothing in there.
Hopefully, that helps you, Melissa. Try to front load your week where possible and keep the mid-week as flexible as possible for dealing with the emergencies and crises and review your plan too.
There’s nothing wrong is rescheduling tasks. We all have to do that a lot more than we would care to admit. But life will always throw you off track, that’s just life. Ships are constantly battling winds and seas pulling them in different directions. But as long as you know where you are going you will always find the right port. That’s the same in life. There are constant pulls and distractions trying to pull you away from your planned course.
Just make sure you have a little time each week to review your plan, and readjust where necessary.
Thank you, Melissa for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.