- Hey friends.
Today I wanna show you how I plan my week
as the creative director in a remote tech company,
show you how I decide what I need to work on,
how I figure out when I'm gonna fit that work in
in between all of the meetings.
Today's Monday, it's the perfect day to be doing this,
to be planning for the week,
so let's get into it.
(gentle music)
Okay so full all disclosure,
I normally start planning for my week on a Friday.
I try and do it before I wrap up my day on a Friday
so that I can start Monday with a rough idea
of what I need to do that week.
But the reality is that some Fridays
just get super freaking busy,
and last Friday was one of those days I didn't do it,
but that's okay it's not too late.
I can plan now and still have a super productive week.
Normally, the way I start my planning process
is by opening up monday.com.
This is the project management tool
that we use as a growth team at Convert Kit
to plan out like cross team projects.
So normally I'll open that and check the status
of the different projects we have going on
and what my deadlines are,
my personal ones for those.
But this week is a cool down week at Convert Kit.
We work in cycles of six weeks
and then a two week cool down for planning,
for reflection, for like tying up loose ends.
So, because it's a cool down,
I know there's nothing actually in there for me right now.
So what I'm gonna do is jump straight into 15Five.
This is a tool we use at Convert Kit for,
it's kinda like performance management I guess.
We have our objectives in there,
but it's this check feature that I use
to first start planning my week.
This is designed that I spend 15 minutes filling it out
and my manager spends five minutes reviewing it,
and they like get caught up on what I'm focusing on.
I find it really helpful as a manager
to read the check-ins from the people on my team each week.
And this is where I put in my like overarching idea
for what I think I need to get done this week
and we get into the like
the exact specifics a bit later on.
So as you can see here
I have marked my priorities from the previous week complete
but if there was something I hadn't done
then I click this copy to next check-in button
and it appears here instead.
So now I'm just gonna go through and put in some thoughts
of what I may need to focus on this week.
(gentle music)
Okay, so here it is,
my like kind of long list of the stuff
that I know I need to get done this week.
This list doesn't include any of my regular meetings
and things like that
because those are in my calendar already
and I know they're gonna happen.
This is the things that I need to fit in
and ensure that I'm doing around meetings, basically.
As you'll see right now,
there's not a whole lot of design tasks on here.
Pretty much the only one is this one here
about our design system,
and that's just like the stage of work
that I'm in right now,
it goes in ebbs and flows.
I am the creative director, I lead our brand team,
but I also am a designer for Convert Kit as well.
We're a very small team.
And honestly I could very easily
leave this off my list for the week,
but I always make sure there is something
that I'm doing for the week in Figma
to like scratch that itch
and make sure that I'm still like happy
with the work that I'm doing.
Often what I'll actually do
is come in here throughout the week
as things come up
that I know I'm not gonna work on this week
but that I'm gonna need you next week,
and I'll add them in
'cause it can sort of like save as you go.
You don't have to fill it out all in one go
as I'm doing right now.
But yeah, clearly last week I didn't do that.
Once I've got that overall plan figured out,
what I've really been enjoying doing lately
is calendar blocking.
So I'm gonna take a lot of these things
that I just wrote on my list
and I'm gonna start putting in some slots on my calendar
for when I think I'll work on them.
And as you can see it because I'm in Europe
but most of the team that I work with is based in the US,
most of my meetings are concentrated
between like three 3:30 and 7:00 PM,
and I set my working hours at 11:00 till 7:00.
So I'm gonna start putting things in from 11 o'clock
for the rest of the days this week.
(gentle music)
So I've got most of the things in,
and as you can see
there's still a of empty gaps,
which is kind of nice.
And I wanna fill up every single day right at the start.
I tend to take a look at the day as part of this catch up.
45 minutes I schedule each morning,
in that I go through Slack, and my emails,
and Base Camp and like, you know,
check if there's any new information
or shifts I need to make,
new priorities I need to be working on,
things to address rest that day.
And so anything I find in there
can easily fill up other gaps
or I can just like move things
that I have planned for later in the week
to earlier in the week,
and then like, you know,
if I get through it quickly, great,
then there's always more work that I can do.
I set up these calendar blocks
on like a separate calendar that's called Daily Schedule.
So it's not going to like hinder anyone
from booking meetings
and no one at work sees this side of my calendars,
it's just for me.
I see what's coming up next on my watch
in the calendar complication,
and yeah, it just really helps to keep me moving on
and like keep me reminded
of what I'm meant to be doing next.
And then as we break it down to a day,
obviously I've got a lot of my daily things
that I need to get done hear on the calendar.
I also tend to write a little list in my bullet journal too
just for that satisfaction of marking things off.
And sometimes there's things that are so small
they really don't need to be a calendar block,
but they still need to get done.
So I'll write them down to make sure that I do them
as part of the catch up or, you know,
in one of the blank spaces that I have.
I hope this is some thing that you enjoyed hearing about,
I am a nerd for this stuff
and I kind of change up my systems from time to time
when I feel like what I'm currently doing, isn't working.
So yeah, I'd love to hear how you plan your week.
How do you decide how you're gonna spend your time at work?
What goes into that decision making process
and what do you use to arrange it all?
It's really funny that as I've been
documenting this for this video,
I've kind of noticed just how much of this lives in my head
and that's probably not a good thing,
I probably need to add in something else
or maybe be utilizing Monday more
in the cool downs as well
to make sure that I have it written down somewhere,
the overarching projects that I'm focused on
so that they're not just living up here.
Thanks watching though,
hope you found it useful,
I'm not looking forward to hearing about
your own methods for this in the comments below.
And if you're new to my channel
and you wanna see me actually like do this work
and put the system into practice,
then I do make vlogs of my life and work
as a creative director in tech
and hopefully do livestream sometimes as well,
usually on Friday.
So that big design system block
that I put in my calendar for this week
is hopefully gonna be a live stream.
So yeah, subscribe, stick around.
Hopefully we'll see you in the next video,
and yeah, have a good week.
Bye.
(upbeat music)