Planning the Year

Over the past few days, I've asked ScriptEd's staff to participate in a calendar planning exercise for the next year so we can make sure that we're staying on top of everything.

I decided that this would be a good exercise when I realized that my first two weeks of January are nearly entirely booked with meetings already. I know there are really important projects I need to focus on in January that will require me to sit, think and write for uninterrupted periods of time, so I realized I needed to be more proactive about my calendar.  I'm trying to block out periods of work time in in advance so I'm not totally booked in meetings and unable to work on long term projects.

Here's what we did:

1) We took three pieces of chart paper, and wrote the months of the year out on them (four months per piece of chart paper).

2) We got stacks of post-it notes and different colored sharpies. Each pen color represents a work stream (Fundraising, School Programs, Internships, Strategic Planing, and HR-- there might be more additions soon).

3) We wrote the major dates for each work stream and posted it on the chart paper.  We are using post-it notes rather than writing directly on the chart paper so that we can add/remove dates as necessary.

4) As we went through each work stream, I began to block off time in my calendar to work on the projects I'll need to focus on through out the year.

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This calendar will stay hanging in my office through out the year so that everyone has a visual reference of the bigger picture of things.

We'll see how it goes! I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Want to read more on time management? Check out this article Becca shared with me.

My office wall