Getting Your Ish Together Before the Weekend

I’ve landed in San Francisco this weekend and working out of the SF office for the next week. There’s lots of fun personal things going on over the upcoming days, but my workload is also unrelenting. With 2015 planning underway, a slue of client events and holiday pitching in full swing, every day is full and could go well into the night if I let it. Not wanting to carry workload into fun weekend plans and have press releases on my mind while site-seeing, it’s imperative that I put my ducks in a row when I’m here in the office.

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to keep work at work and truly enjoy the weekend you’ve waited for:

Give yourself a deadline for the day – Having set hours for your day always helps priorities and organize your workload. Think about when you want to leave for a Summer Friday or half day… mostly likely you blew through your to-do list just because you thought you had no time in the day. If I know I am going to start at 7:30am but be out by 4:30, my list will be accomplished by 4:30.

Schedule your breaks in your calendar, and mind your meetings - When you want to leave for lunch, take a Pinterest break, take a walk with a friend – schedule it. Keep the time short but planned. Be sure you start every morning knowing when you need or want to leave your desk, and you’ll be more productive in those hours you’re sitting down.

If something comes up (and it always does), don’t panic – While your to-do list might look nice at 9am, chances are everything will change by 1pm. Be smart about what needs to get done (any deadlines to a client are first), but then work with your team to move things around. Most likely, internal deadlines can be adjusted to meet your needs.

Set times to check your phone over the weekend – Don’t be obsessed with checking email over the weekend. Let your teams know that you’ll check in periodically, but won’t be available 100%. Then be sure to check once in the early AM, once in the afternoon, then once at night. That’s it.

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