“Theme” Every Working Day for a More Productive Week

Planning your day is an important part of being productive. You can plan your way to a busy schedule, but time management is more than that. You should consider splitting up not only your day, but the whole week as a whole to maximize productivity: the trick here is to organize your workdays into topics .

Instead of jumping from task to task on any given day, try grouping all similar tasks together and scheduling them for a specific day. By putting similar tasks together on the same day, you stay in that “zone” longer, focusing only on what needs to be done in it. If everything you need to do has something in common, you will be focused on the central theme of the workday as you move from task to task.

How to split themed days

Mike Vardy , productivity expert, shared his idea of ​​productivity with SaneBox: “Intention plus attention.” If you complete similar tasks in one day, you’re aiming for an intent—achieving whatever goal you set for the day’s topic—and staying focused on it from task to task.

Consider, for example, doing all administrative work on Mondays. Designate Mondays for answering emails, sending new emails, taking calls, or scheduling appointments . Creative activities such as brainstorming or designing can be done on Tuesday and Wednesday can be dedicated to research.

You can also split your days into projects, according to Leonard Alexandru, CTO of Deloitte, who wrote about the value of theme days . Instead of devoting time to several projects each day, consider giving each project a specific day of the week to work on, so a project that requires a lot of management attention should take a whole day, and a project that requires you to focus on marketing , communications, sales or something else should be on the other.

Alexandru recommends setting each day’s theme as an all-day event in whatever calendar software you use so you have a reminder at the top of the page of what to focus on each day. For example, simply knowing that your Thursdays are for client meetings saves you the worry of deciding what to prioritize that day or when to schedule those appointments. This eliminates decision fatigue and allows you to focus on tasks without having to think about what activities should be done in which slot during your busy week.

Calendar Options

Your digital planner like Google Calendar will be helpful here for your time and setting your daily theme, but consider getting a physical calendar as well, as writing things down can help you remember what you need to do even more. Try these:

• The Weekly Desktop Planner ($8.99) has large enough fields for each weekday that you can explicitly write a topic in each one, but it only covers seven days, so if you need to revise next week’s topics, just turn the page.
• Notebook Planner with pages for individual days and full months ($7.10) helps you visualize the macro and micro levels of your projects and their timelines.
• The Daily Planner ($9.49) helps you visualize each day to the minute because each page is just one day. There’s even a place to set your top priorities, so put your topics in there.