So I'm not entirely sure how I really thought I can get away with checking email
twice a day, but I was definitely optimistic at this time. Well, Hey there,
welcome to Mak TV. My name is Mak,
and this is a space for first-time managers who are looking just to up-level
their skills,
as well as their confidence so that they can lead their teams to success.
So I'm super excited about this video today as I always am.
But I definitely am excited about this video today because I'm going to give you
a little bit of a behind the scenes look into how I use to schedule
my time during the week. Now, a lot of you have reached out and said, Hey Mak,
like, how did you use to get things done? Especially since it's so nutty,
particularly as a new manager. And like I've mentioned in the past before,
I actually kept a lot of my calendars.
I actually have no idea why maybe it's because I love the cute quotes that were
in the calendars, but anyways, I kept it,
but I'm really glad I did that because now that gives me an opportunity to give
you an inside look as to how I used to do things. Now,
of course, for privacy reasons,
I won't be able to show you everything in the calendar.
So I've actually blocked off some names as well as like company information,
just to protect obviously the company and my team members.
But I'm going to show you pretty much everything else.
And I've actually already like picked one week that was a little bit light in
nature and where my handwriting wasn't so terrible so that you can actually see
what I'm doing. Okay. So, like I said,
I'm just going to give you a little bit of behind the scenes of one,
one week and basically how I used to plan it. All right.
So let's get started on this. Okay so first things first,
I actually used to spend a little bit of time Sunday night,
actually planning for my week now. Yes,
I know I was using my personal time to do this,
but I felt like I needed to do this in order for me to be truly effective during
the week. Now I don't necessarily recommend this for everyone. Right?
You can do it Monday morning. Or even Friday afternoon for the following week,
if you like. So long as you're actually taking the time to plan out your week,
rather than waiting for the week to pull you along. Because when you do that,
what you're actually doing is reacting to everybody's panic or everyone's issue
rather than strategically spending the time that you need to,
to move the team forward and focusing on the systems and the processes and
the development and the training and all that great stuff in order to help your
team be successful. So again,
you don't have to do it on a Sunday night like I used to,
you could do it Monday or Friday afternoon, right?
As long as you're spending some time apart from all the day-to-day things that
you're doing spent in, um, actually planning for the following week,
as long as you do that, you're pretty good.
Okay so I'm going to jump to the computer now and kind of give you an overview
of what things kind of look like for me. Okay. So, like I said, Sunday night,
I would grab my calendar and then block off the staples or basically the
non-negotiable stuff.
So for me that was my one-on-one meetings with my team members.
As you can see the level 10 meetings with the executive team and senior
management team, um, we had team huddles as a company.
So that was something mandatory we had to go to. So I would block that off, um,
then you know,
my own team meetings with my department and then meetings with my own leadership
team, right? So these were things that were staples in my week.
So I would start with blocking off the time for that.
So each of these items were blocked off in my calendar by time.
So as you can see here this week from two to five on Wednesday,
I was going to be doing three one-on-ones. And on the same day I had,
a level 10 from 10 to 11:00 AM.
So nothing else theoretically would interrupt me during that
time. Right. And that's why I blocked it off there. Okay.
So once I blocked off all of my non-negotiables for the week in my calendar,
what I would do is pick my top three rocks for the week. Okay.
Now yes, rocks are an EOS term.
It's basically smart goals that you need to get done within 90 days. So yes,
it's for a quarterly basis,
but I actually titled my weekly priorities, my rocks. I don't know.
It was just what I did in case you were like,
wondering why is this girl using the term rocks for her weekly priorities?
It's because I just do what makes sense to me.
So you should do the same thing to make sense, you know,
do whatever makes sense to you. So getting back to what I was saying here,
I would jot down my three rocks or my three important goals that I needed to
accomplish for the week to be successful. And that's why, as you can see,
I have my little animation on the calendar here. It's like a circle.
It looks like a circle, but in my head it was a rock.
So you might be asking like, where are you getting these rocks from?
And how do you determine what gets to be the rock for the week?
So here's what I did. I actually followed, um,
my PPIP method to time management and prioritization.
Which is basically a process that I used and developed to help me make sure that
I was managing my time effectively,
as well as prioritizing the most important things that I had to do.
So what I would do is every like beginning of the month,
actually every end of the month,
I would run everything I had to do through this PPIP method and then
house everything that I ran through the method in a Trello board.
And so what would happen is every Sunday, when I was planning out my week,
I would open up my Trello board and look at the things that I had run through
the process and decide at that point,
what should be the top three rocks or priorities that I should be working on for
the week. Okay.
But I was always pulling from like a dashboard basically
where I had,
where I had already determined what the most important things were based on,
you know, meetings, recommendations, feedback, thoughts, et cetera.
I would pull it from there and make sure that I was constantly working in a
strategic matter, right. So that's basically how I got, um,
my top three priorities.
And I actually teach my students how to do this in the new manager accelerator
program. Right. Because this is really important.
You need to know what's important to work on.
Okay so after I would set up my three big goals,
I would block off time in my calendar to work on those things because
knowing I need to do something and then making time for it, uh,
and not making time for it would obviously get me nowhere. Right.
So I would definitely make sure that I'm blocking off time to get those things
done.
So I would basically estimate how long I thought those top three priorities
would take me. Um,
and then I would calendar block the time so that I would not be interrupted or
attempted to do something different during that time. Right. Because again,
I chose those three things for a reason.
And the reason was because I knew it was going to make us successful as a team.
So I had to spend time focusing on it.
So after calendar blocking time for those rocks,
the next step would be to calendar, block time for my smaller tasks,
which again was pulled from my Trello board. Um,
and sometimes my notebook too, that I carried around with me, you know,
in meetings or whatnot. So I would pull, pull all that.
I also scheduled time for checking email, as you can see here.
So I'm looking at this now and I'm kind of laughing because I
remember what, what caused this was.
I was listening to a talk by Tony Sheih and he said that he used to check
his email like once a day in the morning so that he wouldn't be constantly
interrupted during the day with emails. And so I thought, well,
if Tony Sheih could do it, I can do it too. I don't know what I was thinking.
No, that, that did not work for me. Um,
so eventually I actually upped it to twice a day.
And then I think by the time I left, I was checking it like three times a day.
Um, so I think it's really important for you to find your own sweet spot of how
often you want to check your email as long as you're not checking it throughout
the day, or you don't have it popping up, you know, at every point in the day,
because that is super distracting and you then you're just become a slave to
your email and that's absolutely no fun and you don't get things done.
So I definitely do suggest you figure out what the times are that you're going
to check your email and make sure that you stick to that. Okay so lastly,
I, as you can see here, I scheduled thinking time,
which I've talked about in the past and earlier on in this video.
So thinking time is actually a concept that I stole from a book called
the road less stupid. Which I talk about on this channel all the time,
but it's a book by Keith Cunningham and he suggests that it's really important
to spend some time just thinking.
To stop and actually think about what you do. And that way,
what you can do is actually determine if the things that you're doing
make sense.
If you can find the right questions to be asking yourself in terms of,
you know, whether or not, um,
what you and the team are doing on what the team and you are doing actually
makes sense, right?
So it allows you to like basically spark smart thinking and think more
proactive proactively than reactively in nature.
And so that's what I really like about thinking time.
I highly suggest scheduling out, even if it's like 10 to 15 minutes every week,
just to reflect on your week and think about what went well, what didn't go,
well, what can be improved upon, um, you know,
and use it even to just identify different problems that were on the team and
how you can fix it, maybe the following week or, or the following quarter,
whatever you decide to do,
as long as you're using that beautiful noggin noggin of yours to think through
solutions and then of course execute and make it happen.
And that's pretty much it in terms of how I used to plan my week.
I really relied on, as you can see,
calendar blocking and time batching and pre-planning.
And as the years went on, my calendar looked a lot better than this.
I'll be honest with you. And it was definitely more organized than this,
but I did have to start somewhere, right.
And I followed a similar process as well when it came to organizing like
projects for the team.
I started with basically the end in mind in terms of what needed to be
accomplished and then working backwards from there,
which I actually did a video on that not too long ago on project planning,
like the very basics of project planning for a manager,
which I will link for you somewhere around here.
And then you can just check that out.
So if you want to dive deeper though into my PPIP method that I talked about in
terms of how I was able to determine what the top three priorities were for the
month. Um, and then of course distill that down into the week.
Then I highly suggest you check out the details for my new manager accelerator
program,
because that is where I get do a deep dive on that for my students.
Alright. So that's pretty much it for this week's video.
I hope that you enjoyed it. I know it was a little bit different than usual,
but I thought, Hey, we've got to change things up a little bit on the channel,
right. Just to keep things a little bit interesting. Alright. So like I said,
I hope you enjoyed it.
Don't forget to give it a thumbs up if you liked it and to subscribe so you
don't miss out on any other fun videos I share on this channel every single
Tuesday. All right, I'll see you next week. Bye.