Streamline Your Workflow by Assigning Tasks by Day of the Week
Switching between different tasks throughout the day can make it harder to focus and make those tasks more difficult than necessary. Instead of shifting your focus throughout the day, try dedicating specific days to specific tasks.
This is an idea called context switching. I’ve been doing this for a while, but Fast Company dropped this practice earlier this week.
The idea is pretty simple: instead of shifting focus throughout the day, group similar tasks so you can stream them. In the Fast Company example, the business owner used the first two weeks of the month to meet new customers and the last two to work with VIPs.
I usually take a concept and break it down by day. So I can always do one assignment on Mondays and Wednesdays and another on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Perhaps you will reserve all personal appointments or visits for Wednesday or Friday.
What makes sense depends on your personal job responsibilities and workflow. Breaking it up has many benefits. Two big ones:
- You always know what you are working on. Instead of juggling five plates on Monday morning, you can start the week knowing that “I’m working on new proposals today” or whatever you’ve assigned yourself.
- You don’t end up with hellish days full of unrelated things just to have a day at the end of the week when you browse Facebook.
- You don’t have to constantly change your focus throughout the day, which allows you to really focus on what you are trying to achieve.
For me, it’s more about organizing things. When I have multiple projects that I am working on, it’s easier to group these things into one day than trying to split the work into an hour or two a day all week. By setting aside a specific block of time for something, I can really focus on it and often complete tasks significantly faster than if I called them. This will streamline the process.
I have found that meetings tend to take up a lot of my time. I spend time preparing before and thinking about them after, which is great, but it means that a 1 hour meeting takes about 2 hours out of my workday. Bringing them all together in one day takes away the stress of packing things too quickly so I can get to the meeting on time and struggling to refocus when the meeting is over and I need to get back to work. Spending the day going from meeting to meeting is not good, but easier.
Clearly this won’t work for all job types, and how you sort it out will depend a lot on what you’re doing. While some people may devote whole days to projects, for you context switching can mean that you simply devote the afternoon to a specific task each day, and leave the multitasking adventure in the morning or set aside a few hours for each specific task. day.
The more similar tasks you can combine into one pile, the easier it will be to group them.