Organizing Your Day
It’s the new year and I always find myself getting organized for the coming year. And for the past few months I have been refining how I organize each day.
How do you organize your day?
Do you do this yourself? Or do leave that to your personal assistant?
I hope you don’t just leave your day to your personal assistant. A leader should have some insights into what makes them effective during the day and lets them sleep at night. These insights might include the following:
Meetings that are required versus optional.
Paying attention to your energy highs and lows throughout the day.
Times that you must protect for family, exercise, and/or reflection.
Ensuring space for movement and breaks. My Oura ring insists that I move every 50 minutes for just 2-3 minutes. Other studies indicate our minds and bodies are most optimal when we take a break every 90 minutes.
I have toyed with different ideas over the years and I will share with you a few ideas that I have found to be helpful for myself.
While working for someone else, I created a simple template that was inspired by one of my former leaders. This leader had a way of fitting current status and action items onto one page during our weekly meetings. My own template was a simple one pager with separate blocks for each team member or group I connected with. I would add follow up items for each block as a reference during our next meeting. Another page tracked “bring forwards” for major dates and things I needed to remember to do in the future and “pending” for others’ actions. And it was always close by.
Today I am working for myself and I currently keep 3-4 pages in front of me in order to stay organized and keep on top of things, both personally and professionally:
Today’s key actions, my daily habits, my “watch” list and my “bring forwards” for the next one to two weeks.
My next 4 weeks on one page.
My annual calendar on one page highlighting bigger and/or memorable commitments, deadlines, and events.
Once activities start lining up for the next year, I add next year’s calendar on another page.
As my leadership consulting and coaching business is just starting and my photography contracts are minimal right now, I’m not as busy as I used to be. However, I know this system is flexible enough to grow with my businesses.
UPDATE: I have been introduced to Notion as an all-in-one workspace for individuals and teams. I have successfully replaced my paper tracking with different templates in Notion and am in the process of transferring files and data from other related apps. I am taking comfort in knowing I have one place to look for my information.
UPDATE 2: I find myself continually changing how I track things. I have cancelled my Notion subscription and opted for a mix of paper and digital systems. This keeps things fresh :)
Photo: Tammy Brimner/TLBVelo Photography
