05 Jul Your Ideal Schedule
Fundraising mojo comes from knowing that you’re productive at work. It feels GREAT to get things accomplished, doesn’t it?
Getting things done requires you to own your own work schedule and workplan. You need to know what your ideal schedule looks like, and you need to learn how to stick to it!
Answer these 3 questions:
- When are you most productive? Morning, afternoon, late afternoon, nighttime?
- What are the #1 distractions at your office?
- Think back to the last time that you were most productive in the office. How did you do it? What structures did you put in place to make it happen?
Look at the answers above. What does your ideal weekly schedule look like?
Nope, you’re not allowed to say, “my work is fluid, and I have to go with the flow.” Not acceptable. You’re a professional, and you are going to hold yourself accountable to your workplan. You need to have a schedule which reflects your priorities and your goals for the year.
Blocking time to be productive
Block four 90-minute work sessions per week into your calendar to actually WORK . Do you have any serious distractors in your office life? (i.e. location of your desk is too close to the front door, or you’re responsible for answering phones) How can you mitigate these, or delegate responsibility to be more efficient?
Other people’s priorities
Fundraisers are the glue in our offices. We get caught up in other people’s priorities. Two examples include:
- We go to meetings that may or may not be relevant to our work
- We tend to be very responsive to other people’s requests (think of a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is highly responsive. How responsive are you?)
How many standing meetings are in your weekly calendar? How responsive are you to other people’s requests? These two items can kill your best laid productivity plans. If you’re scoring a 6 or higher on the responsiveness scale, remember that your inbox is a holding tank list of everyone else’s “to-do” list.
Takeaway: It’s amazing what people figure out on their own when given 24 hours to think about it.
Planning is the single biggest antidote to chaos. #fundraisingmojo ← Tweet this
TAKEAWAY
Map your ideal workweek. Allocate 4 work sessions with yourself. Put in only your important meetings and be honest with yourself about your “responsiveness” to other people’s requests.
Test it out this week and observe what happens.
Drop me a note at [email protected] or leave a message in the #fundraisingmojo facebook group. Share your success!