There are all kinds of great task management utilities out there, from Remember the Milk to Basecamp to Inbox Zero. But in the end, sometimes the best task management is done on paper. Maybe that’s why Sam’s weekly work planning template remains one of our most-popular posts over two years after he published it.
Sam’s work planning template is simple but effective. Print it out, fill it in, and take it everywhere you go.
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Some absences are easy to plan for, like if you have a vacation and know you will be gone the first week of October.
Other absences, like when your first child comes ten days early, are easier to handle when you stay organized leading up to the big event.
If you are always tackling your next deadline or latest e-mail, you will never find time to develop your business—or even just get ahead of your deadlines. If this sounds like you, the key is to start planning your schedule instead of letting your calendar dictate it.
In order to integrate work planning into your schedule, make it a habit. Schedule an hour every week for work planning, and schedule days to work on things, instead of just the days things are due. Here is how I do it.
If you work at a firm with more than two employees, you have undoubtedly encountered long email chains in reference to a case, an upcoming meeting, or marketing event. From my brief experience of corporate life, long email chains quickly becoming unreadable and distilling the useful information is skill within itself. A new program, Cc: Betty, may help solve that problem.
My most-productive weeks are the ones where I sit down on Sunday night or Monday morning and decide what I should be working on each day of the upcoming week. I like to set out two or three “most important tasks” (MITs) for each day. If I get those things done, I feel good, even if they are the only things I accomplish that day.
You can do this sort of work planning on anything, from a scrap of paper to Outlook, but I have fallen in love with TeuxDeux (pronounced “to do”), a “simple, design-y to-do app.” It has no bells and whistles, just a beautifully simple interface and the tools you need to rough out your days.
Also, the intro video rocks:
Identifying bad habits and consistently repeating alternative actions can help you break out of bad routines.
The first step to any change is acceptance—recognizing that something needs to be changed. If you are constantly late for work, maybe traffic is not to blame. Consistent procrastination might be the result of laziness, not an abundance of work. The good news is that most bad habits are relatively easy to change.
After trying out numerous methods of tracking my cases and related tasks, I have finally found what seems to work best. I love Getting Things Done (GTD), but the system does not necessarily translate smoothly to a law practice. I have tried using Outlook, but my productivity suffered from not being able to look at the “big picture” at a glance. So I went back to paper. I tried numerous things, and eventually settled on a hybrid of GTD and the weekly work plan my wife uses.
My work plan is a weekly affair. I take Sunday night or Monday morning to sit down and type up my weekly work plan. My template has five days up top for Most Important Tasks (MITs) for each day, and below are a row for each case, broken up into columns for “case,” “upcoming dates,” “do now,” “do later,” and “waiting for,” the basic GTD action categories.
My work plan serves as a “tickler” as well as a catalog of important due dates (I put all my scheduling order dates on it) and a holding cell for every task on every open file.
You can download my work plan template in Open Document Format (ODF) or Word format (DOC).
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