Don’t Build a Workweek Agenda But a Creativity & Execution-Focused Agenda

Since starting my professional life I’ve never liked using To Do lists or workweek planned to the minute. I feel like they’re just a way to constraint your brain and block you from being creative. Of course this applies to me and I can understand that some people need them to operate.

Don’t copy paste every methods you read.

This kind of thing stresses me out :

How can you be creative within this tightly scheduled agenda?

Of course some people working in some areas have to have such a tightly planned agenda (surgeons, professors, etc.).

But if you’re like me doing some creative work (yes I consider marketing to be a creative job!) then this can’t work !

BUT

How do you add some order in your daily chaos?

I really like this way of organizing your days:

Organizing your days in huge blocks allows you more flexibility in the tasks you’ll perform and therefore more time to be creative.

How can you do that?

I’ve tried something and if you want you can try your own version of my method.

1. I measure everything I do within a day for about 2 to 3 weeks
2. I analyze what I’ve been doing
3. I build my creative week

Measure

This is the easy but tedious part.

Don’t plan your day (except your meetings of course) and log everything in a spreadsheet. Literally everything! Even when you reply to a text from your boyfriend or girlfriend, even when you go on Facebook or to the toilet. Everything!

here a screenshot of mine:

Create your own categories to classify your tasks. Some of mine are: user research, meeting, execution, admin, support, etc.

Do this for 2 to 3 weeks to make sure you have a large enough set of data points.

Then you Analyze

Analyze

Then you compute all your logs in order to see by day of the week how much time you spend on different tasks (I computed mine by minutes and by hours to have a better understanding based on different time scales).

Here it it:

Now you can clearly see how much time you’ve spent on different things. I tried to order the categories by order of importance. Since I’m a manager, 1:1s are my top priority, then it’s about execution, etc.

Classifying like that will allow you to see if you’re spending your time on the right things. For instance it seems like I spend a lot of time on meetings other than 1:1s (a full work day!) or reading writing emails/slacks (more than 5 hours per week!).

What would happen if I could cut these and spend more time executing (which includes doing stuff but also step back and let my creativity kickoff)?

Optimize & build your execution/creativity focused week

Now that I see I’m spending too much time on meetings + communication I’ll try to cut these as much as possible by allowing a certain number of hours in my agenda to those.

Therefore I tried to build my week like this with large slots of creativity:

• 5:30am → 6:45am: Creative work (drawing, writing, etc.)
• 6:45am → 7:30am: Physical activity
• 8am → 8:40am: commute + reading
• 8:40am → 10am: emails + slack
• 10am → 3pm: execution + creativity
• 3pm → 5pm: admin work
• 5pm → 7pm: meetings (1:1 + regular meeting)
• 7:30pm → …: whatever

Hopefully this will help some of you to go through your days in a less rigid/cold fashion.