7 Strategies To Help You Make Your Week As Productive As Possible

As a busy mum that qualified as a coach and set up my business with two daughters under 2 years old - it was essential for me to know how to prioritise and manage my time to make this possible.

Understanding how you can get the most from your time is vital, so your energy is going towards the things that are important to you.  There are two key areas that we can focus our attention on to enable us to do this, one is making sure our time is spent on our priorities, and the other is ensuring any time spent working on these is efficient and effective.   

Below are 7 strategies that can help you to achieve what you want and need from your week:-    

1. Get Clear on Your Values  -  Once you know what is important to you, you’ll know how you should be prioritizing your time.
2. Track Your Week - Use a weekly tracker and record your activities and commitments in half-an-hour timeslots. When you understand where your time is currently being spent, you can see how and when you can make positive changes.
3. Carry Out an Audit - Look at everything you do during your week. What optional tasks, commitments or obligations have you picked up that are no longer serving you? If there are things that are no longer in line with your values and priorities, it may be time to cut them loose and free up some time in your schedule.
4. Block out Your Diary at the Start of the Week - Allocate specific times for specific tasks at the start of the week. If you know certain tasks require your full attention to get them done, pre-set an out-of-office email response and an alarm to switch your phone onto aeroplane mode.
5. Reconfirm the Night Before what You’ll Achieve the Next Day - That way if things have moved around in your diary, you can reorganise your day to ensure you still achieve what you want to get done.
6. Get Ready Ahead of Time - Set up your working area so that everything you need to get started is ready. If you are planning to write an email or work on a document, draft out the first few lines on your computer -  this will allow to you to get into the flow of work super quickly when you start.
7. Get Rid of Your Long To-do List - Instead of having a long ‘To-Do’ list that looks overwhelming and you never get to the bottom of, create a ‘Have to Do’ list and only include 1-2 items every day. This means you will see your progress every day by completing your tasks. Everything else goes on a ‘Would Be Nice To Do’ list and anything you manage to tick off of that is a bonus. This approach is a great way to make consistent steps forward and keep motivation high.

Take a moment to consider the strategies above, how would they help you start achieving real progress in the areas you want? Which one would make the biggest impact?

If you are looking to take on something new that is important to you, the pathway to success is allocating your time to the things that are a priority and implementing simple techniques so that the time spent working on them is used efficiently. By focusing on the two key areas above and using the strategies outlined, you can start to achieve what you really want and need from your week!  

Victoria Harrison is a qualified Coaching Academy coach who previously worked in HR, she now runs her own coaching business working with clients in 1:1 and group coaching programs.  She specialises in working with aspirational mums to get unstuck, and take the skills they've learnt as a parent to build and boss the life they want. 

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