How do I plan my day as a Manager
As a manager you have many responsibilities. A proper planning of your day would be important to be efficient. In this blog, I will list items that should be considered to plan your daily routine.
Let’s start this blog with a quote.
The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine. — Mike Murdock
In general, everybody agrees that as the weekend nears, many things would have got piled up. Due to this, we are always trying to catch up.
Same goes with management. If your daily routine is not planned well, then be ready to do catch up every day. Constant catch up will result in unnecessary pressure and delays. This will make you not being happy and in turn your team members and senior management will also be not happy.
To avoid this, everybody says, plan your day with some thinking, so that you reduce the catching up activities.
In this blog, I will provide a list of items that you must consider while planning your day as a manager.
Here is the summary of items that you must reserve time in a day. These may not be applicable everyday. But having reserve time for the items will help you to reduce the catching up.
1. Family and Self health care
2. 1on1s with team members
3. 1on1s with peer and senior managers
4. Updates and Reviews of plans and reports
5. Technical sessions
6. Research and study
7. Responding to emails and chats
Below are the list of items that you must adjust in your calendar as needed.
8. Weekly meetings for projects with stakeholders
9. Recruitment meetings
10. Customer meetings
11. Other meetings that would be necessary
Lets deep dive into each one of them.
#1 Family and Self health care
Whatever day it is, plan your day by reserving time to spend with family and take care your health.
This time is important as it will help you to reset yourself from all the pressure that comes with the role.
If you are working for multiple timezones then split this time in the day.
As a manager, you can recommend to your team members as well to reserve time for their family and self health, so that there is a reset button for them as well.
#2 1on1s with Team members
In a manager’s day, there must be time reserved for conducting 1on1 meeting with the team members. Each 1on1 should be of 30mins duration.
This time will be needed to connect with your team members and attend to their issues and concerns.
In a day, at minimum conduct at least one 1on1 meeting. If the team is slightly large then you can have two in a day. Make sure that you schedule these 1on1s ahead of time and make it recurring, so that you can prepare.
Also, split the 1on1 meetings. Don’t schedule one after the other. Plan one in the morning and one in the evening. This will provide you with the buffer time to adjust in case the first 1on1 meeting goes longer.
#3 1on1s with Peer and Senior managers
These 1on1s may not be needed everyday. But make sure you have scheduled these either weekly or biweekly.
The 1on1 meetings with peer managers and senior managers will help you to connect with them, build trust and bring transparency across teams.
These meetings will help you and the person on the other side. A strategic relationship with peer managers will make sure your team will get the required help as and when needed.
#4 Updates and Review of plans and reports
One of the function of a Manager is to create, update and report plans. If you have read my Basic Principles of Management blog, the first principle is planning.
Any plan should be regularly reviewed with the stakeholders to showcase the progress and employee bandwidth utilisation.
Keeping plan up-to-date will help you to understand whether there are any delays or any risks. This will also act as a preparation to your 1on1 meeting with the team member and peer managers.
#5 Technical session
Managers can’t code, but being part of technical reviews, like design and code reviews, will help you to understand how the team is progressing and approaching the given work.
The technical sessions will also help you to understand where the team is spending more time and is there any opportunity for improving the process.
These sessions will also help you to make sure the team is adhering to the process that must be followed. It is manager’s responsibility to remind the team regularly for following the process.
#6 Research and study
Many managers say that not enough time to learn new things or cannot catch up with technology. The reason is that there is no reserve time for researching and studying on the relevant topics.
Reading about the updates about the tools used and following few tech channels will help you to understand how the rest of the world is solving similar problems.
So it is important to reserve time for researching about new tools, architecture and design patterns; attending online technical summits. This time can also be used to study on how the current features are designed and implemented.
Take back the learnings from your research to the technical session conducted by your team and provide guidance on how to do things better. This is the way you continue to get involved in technical aspects.
#7 Responding to emails and chats
Since many of us work remotely, communication through emails and chats cannot be escaped.
Reserving dedicated time for responding to emails and chats becomes important as this will make sure you are communicating regularly.
The chat messages is bit challenging as everybody expects immediate response. Identifying which chat messages needs immediate attention and which can be responded later, will help you to avoid getting carried away with it.
Make sure you reply to any email or chat within 24hrs. This will make sure that the information keeps following and helps to builds a trust with others.
Let me quickly touch upon few points on other ad-hoc meetings or work that you must have sometime reserved to adjust your daily routine as needed.
- Reserve time on a weekly or biweekly basis to meet with internal stakeholders for the project updates or discussing about risks, issues and delays.
This will help you to get senior management support. - Reserve time on weekly basis to have interviews with candidates, if hiring is going on for any positions.
It is always better to discuss with recruitment team about the cadence in which you can take interviews. Don’t agree for ad-hoc interviews. - Reserve time on a weekly or biweekly basis to meet with customer stakeholders for the project updates.
This will help you to get visibility and support from customer stakeholders as needed. - Reserve time for ad-hoc meetings that would needed for the team members. This will help you to jump on to a necessary meeting where you can provide quick support and to make decisions for your team members.
By having reserve time for such meetings will help you to provide timely decisions for your team.
In conclusion, reserving time for the items that are mentioned in this blog, will help you to plan your daily routine better.
The moment the daily routine is planned ahead of time and it starts becoming a habit, you will start feeling being in control of time.
Being in control of certain aspects of work like number of meetings in a day, number of technical sessions in a week and 1on1s will help you to understand how the team is progressing and improvement areas.
The better you understand what is going on, you will be able to make timely decisions and communicate better with your peers and senior managers.
The moment the communication is following continuously, the number of activities that you have to catch up will gradually reduce. This will ease the pressure on you as a Manager.
Happy management!
Further reading
