Productivity
How To Make Friday Your Busiest Day
Friday is my busiest day. Most folks power down and go into weekend mode. Not here! Ask yourself, ‘why do I go down a gear on Friday?’, ‘How does this benefit my career?’ Ok, let’s be honest. We do this because others do it. Right? This is a high-risk way to manage your career. You’re letting others determine how you behave. And it damages your career in many, many ways. Here’s an alternative approach.
How to make Friday your busiest day and reap the rewards
7 Mistakes to avoid:
- Don’t fill your day with low-impact tasks.
- Don’t get pulled into fluffy things that you don’t really want to.
- Don’t do project meetings when you know it will kill your whole morning.
- Don’t go to long lunches.
- Don’t leave early.
- Don’t waste time studying analytics, trends, click-thrus etc… you know what they’ll say, don’t you?
- Not Saying NO enough.
Do this instead.
You’ll get more success if you:
- Plan with intention – Use Friday to plan the entire week ahead. Spend at least 2 hours on this. Planning is decision making. When you plan, you make decisions.
- Get Ready for Monday – planning on Friday lets you hit the ground running on Monday. See the difference? You’re already a step ahead of everyone else.
- Do Strategic Meetings Only – Book meetings with key contacts on Friday. Most will say Yes. They’re in down mode, so they’re easy to arrange.
- Find Like-minded people – Connect with people that have the same values as you. Look around the office and ask, ‘who’s killing time v who’s using it’. Link up with those doing it right.
- Do high impact tasks – disconnect from activities that suck the life out of you, your projects and your enjoyment in life.
- Share useful information – everyone wants ‘relevant’ information. Select the 5 pieces of useful information you’ve read during the week and circulate these.
- Authority – Establish yourself as someone who provides ‘useful’ and high value information not just cats doing ninja tricks.
- Stay late – when everyone is gone, you can get focused and do more work. Global clients will still be up. Call them. Chase them up. Your colleagues won’t. They’re gone, so now is your chance.
What’s going on here?
It’s about behavior.
- It’s how others impact the way you behave and respond.
- To succeed, in the way you want to succeed, you need to observe how others make you behave the way you do.
- Admit it.
- Put a plan in place to create your own blueprint for success.
- Find ways to do this every day.
- See where you fall down, where you can improve and what you’re doing right.
- Keep at it.
Success is like developing a muscle. You have to train it, assess it, and increase it. Luckily, there are no short-cuts. If you persist, you’ll succeed. You have to!
What do you think?
Do you plan to make Friday’s the busiest day? What would change if you did?
