This week's Weekly Planning Hack is about Time Tracking. Where does your time really go? On a Personal and Professional level, time tracking can be a significant issue. One study noted in the Harvard Business Review found that "not filling out time sheets properly costs the U.S. economy $7.4 billion a day in productivity".
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One of the first Weekly Planning Hacks here was around the Pomdoro Technique, a time management function where you use alarms and focus in on 25-50 minute bursts of work.
Last week we explored different apps for time management. Note what you have available to you through your phone and dedicated apps to track your time through bursts of focus.

This week, consider focusing in on tracking your time. In the 19 Productivity Tips course I share a time tracking template so you can note on a 15-30 minute basis throughout the day where your time is actually being spent. This can be very instructive over the course of a week or month to note where your time is actually going.  Create your own time tracker using a blank page of paper, segmenting it into 15 minute blocks, or refer to the lecture in the 19 Productivity Course I released earlier this year.

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

In this week’s Weekly Planning Hack, I’m exploring some of the varied apps that are available to support you in time management. Many of us have periods where everything is digital. This may be your daily practice OR it may be the way you do things while traveling or on the road for work.

Apps around time management can support many functions including:

• Project Management
• Time Tracking – where your time is going
• Calendaring
• Scheduling
• Contents
• Invoicing
• Learning

Let’s take a look at some of the options under these umbrellas:

Project Management – Two of my favorite project management apps are Trello and Asana. While a little different in focus and look, they are both mobile and desk top friendly. I find I use Trello more for writing and creative projects like program design, while turning to Asana for projects that require collaboration.

Time Tracking – One of the first Weekly Planning Hacks here was around the Pomdoro Technique, a time management function where you use alarms and burst of work. Note what you have available to you through your phone and dedicated apps to track your time through bursts of focus.
There is also an opportunity to track your time through a multitude of apps such as Toggl, Timeline, Tsheets and many others. What do you use? Let us know in the comments below what you use and what you like about it?
 
Learning Apps – As an educator in both formal and informal contexts for many years, there are so many great ways to take “learning with you”. From podcasts to on-demand video-based courses. 

One of the applications I use with my clients is Teachable. You’ll note the Teams365 series of programming continues to grow in scope. The Teams365 Teamwork Foundations course has been joined this year by the 19 Productivity Tips and Time Management program. Having been involved in creating both corporate and public programming for many years I know how valuable it is for students to be able to learn in this flexible format. While it’s not for everyone, when there ‘s an urgent need, nothing beats taking a quick on-demand program.

Invoicing – for those involved in running a business, invoicing and financial apps are critical to keeping a business running and doors open. From PayPal to Quick books, along with other tracking systems, it makes it easy to receive and send money at the press of a button.
 
As you may have noticed, I did not touch on all of these and will be covering some of them in future posts. Stay tuned next week for Time Tracking and Time Tracker Apps.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Check out the Weekly Planning Hack Facebook Live each Wednesday  here.
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019), Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Just announced - July's Facilitator Training for PlanDoTrack and the Coaching Business Builder. Are you interested incorporating these resources into your own work. Help me bring the resource out to 20,000 virtual entrepreneurs, remote workers and team leaders by 2020! Early bird rate on to June 21st.

Taking time to stop and pause is critical for success.
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"Big thinking precedes great achievement."— Wilferd Peterson

As I wrote in the 19 for 2019, review is critical for success.
Part of productivity is about building in pause points to reflect and think about what’s working and what’s not.
Building in time for regular review helps to:

• Identify where we are getting our results
• Observe the patterns that are occurring
• Think about where we want to go
• Identify what is important to be able to move forward

What are the blocks of time you want to set aside for review?

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

​“What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done” – Tom Peters

Tracking is an often-overlooked component of success. A common saying is that what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done OR what does get measured, does get done.
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What are the metrics you are tracking in your business?
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For virtual businesses this might include:

• Sales
• Revenue
• Time spent marketing
• Service delivery time
• Content Creation Time

 
For virtual or remote employees this might include:

• Commute times/travel time
• Time spent on social media (you can now use your iPhone to immediately see your usage on different sites)
• At work
• In meetings

 
What are the things you are aiming to adjust or impact?

Have a great day!
​Jennifer

​For many of us, our work revolves around projects – some which last weeks, others which may last months or years.
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Throughout the Planners in the Coaching Business Builder and Plan Do Track, I invite you to consider the Projects, Tasks and Activities you are focusing on this month.
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As it relates to projects, these might include projects which are focused in on creating new processes or procedures or designing and running a program. Projects are usually the larger umbrella which houses discrete tasks and activities.

Tasks and activities are discrete steps. They might be as small as reviewing a report, or as complex as creating an e-book. You’ll want to consider what level of granularity supports you as a professional. Personally, I find that I may include larger projects first as a task, until I figure out how to break it down into smaller, more discrete pieces.

As you consider projects, tasks and activities, you might note every month what you want to:

• START
• Complete/Wrap up
• Continue

For projects that are completing and getting wrapped up, consider these questions:

• What do you want to note in terms of learning – what worked, what didn’t?
• What helped to facilitate and what derailed things?

Spending time on a monthly basis reviewing these elements can ensure that our ideas get carried forward. Seeing them in one place helps us to be more methodical, as well as be able to communicate what needs to get done when, how, and by/with whom. Projects also benefit from time estimation – estimating how much time it really takes to get something done.

What’s important to consider around projects you are managing right now?

Check out recent posts on the topic of Project Management from:
The Teams365 blog for Leaders
Coaching Business Builder blog for Coaches

​Best wishes,
​Jennifer

​Week 14 Focus – Automation
Focus Question: What can you automate in your business?

Description
There are many tasks in a small business which can be automated. Automation brings the benefits of scaling, supplication maximizing your resources.  Think about these items:

• Invoicing (particularly installment payments and other)
• Subscriptions
• Newsletter distribution
• Content creation and distribution
• Video production

What else can get automated in your business?

Research/Story
As much as AI (Artificial Intelligence) is feared, it’s also something which can be leveraged to further level the playing field for small business.

Here’s a quick story. Flashback to 2014 and the introduction of offering on-demand video-based programs. Filming, voice over, selecting the graphics could take hours. In 2017, I found Lumen5, a video program which harnesses AI to provide quick creation and rendering of short videos. That platform now enables me to import content I’ve already created (think blog posts and articles) and then have the system convert it to a short video. Total timesaver and a creative tool!

Check out the Fall 2018 quarterly planning video here.
Check out the Vision video here.  (3 minutes)

Activity
Consider some of the tasks that could be automated in service to your work and business

• Who can help you do this?
• What will it take them to set it up?
• What will automation look like?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Include any automation tasks in your workbook. Consider the systems you might want to automate (Refer to Section 3 - Pages 70 - 75 of Coaching Business Builder, or pages 73 to 80 of PlanDoTrack).

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

For many years in my global career I faced multiple complexities which would get in the way of a regular work day. From regular periods of no electricity, to political and natural disasters which pulled work off course. I learned early in my career the value of two things which continue to help me flourish today –

#1 – Focus – Focus when you can, even if it is for a short while. Productivity is not always about the long haul, it can also be about the short burst of focused effort. This is especially true in my world where I am regularly juggling roles, hats, responsibilities and clients. As much as I would love to have huge swaths of time to undertake my work, it’s unlikely. Therefore, focused burst of work, coupled with #2, help me (and the business) keep moving!

#2 – Be clear on the top 3 – 5 goals for the day, week and month. My world was the world of contingency planning on steroids, so being clear on what top 3 or 4 to-dos were for the day, or the week, or the month, created a powerful anchor to planning, and also feeling satisfied when EVERYTHING on the list did not get done (which was almost every day).
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What are your top 3-5 goals TODAY? This week? This quarter? Do you review these regularly throughout the week/month/quarter and adjust accordingly?

Best,
​Jennifer

Welcome to Q2! What are your top 3-5 priorities this quarter? Where do you have them enshrined or written down? Have you completed your Quarterly Planning Pages? (found on pages 139-148 of PlanDoTrack)
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As we step into a new month, it is time for a new focus. On Mondays here at the PlanDoTrack blog I will be shifting my focus for the next two months to more of a focus on virtual teams. Whether you are an entrepreneur working with an extended team, or a corporate employee leading a remote team, you’ll find these next 2 months of posts useful.

This month also marks the start of our 15th Year Celebrations. It is hard to believe but it was 15 years ago that I founded Potentials Realized. I returned back to Canada on April 1st, 2004, after having spent most of the 90s and early 2000s working across Central and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. An eye infection “gone bad” led to permanent vision impairment in one of my eyes, a significant factor in bringing me “back home to Canada”. While it’s easy to say now that everything turned out well, one of the reasons I’ve shaped such a virtual business has been in part to circumvent my limitations, as much as possible! I am thankful that technology has made the team support even easier today than it was 15 years ago, turning this into a very viable business model.

I hope that you will join us throughout the next 12 months for monthly celebrations. I’ll be sharing different case studies of the work accomplished, and each month will have a different spotlight. You can download the 15th anniversary calendar here. And stay tuned at the PlanDoTrack Facebook page for announcements!
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Now onward to our April Focus…..
The focus in April will be around virtual teams and on-boarding new members. In the virtual space, investing time in welcoming and on-boarding new team members is a very important function.

This month I’ll be sharing a variety of posts to support virtual teams with the on-boarding process.  It’s likely that you may not have a formalized process, or there may be one that is more geared to in-person work.

I’ll be referring back to a number of Teams365 posts I have offered in the past, so if you have not yet found that resource, be sure to check out this sibling blog geared for leaders, team members and others over at my main site – Potentials Realized.

Best,
Jennifer

Week 12 Focus – Systems
Focus Question: What are the tasks and activities which need to appear seamless in your work, like the same person is doing it, whether the task is completed in Toronto, Las Vegas, London, Auckland, or Shanghai?

Description
Systems help us scale a business, reducing the time to do things, ensuring tasks are done consistently, and enabling us to accrue information so we can learn, and pass on to others as our team grows.

In growing a virtual or coaching business there are five key areas which can be important to focus on. This is an area we continue exploring at both the Teams365 Leadership Lab (for virtual and remote professionals) the Coaching Biz Growth Lab (an annual group focused on coaching business development).

If you are a remote or virtual worker, as the team context becomes more fluid with people becoming part of matrix teams where things may be one differently, systems create clarity and efficiency. They also help to capture key institutional learning as organizations grow, making it easier for people to step into roles that others once held.

As a business, systems help us automate and scale, reducing the time to complete tasks that may not require as much effort.
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Common areas which entrepreneurial businesses or virtual workers may find a focus on are:

• Sales and Marketing – Promotion
• Customer and Client Supports
• Registration and Onboarding
• Financial – Budgeting
• Communication 

Activity
Review the systems you have available to you in your business or work. What helps streamline? Ensure consistency? Allow you to scale?
What are the areas you want to focus more around?
Who can help you build your toolkit in these areas?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Refer to Section 3 in the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack for more on systems.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.” – Francis Bacon
 
Making things more visible is key to productivity for some in today’s digitally distracted world. Our brains can only hold a certain amount of information   - usually said to be 5 + or – 2.
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Think about how well you remember what you thought about doing yesterday at lunch.

Research is also pointing to the fact that we also remember things differently when we grab a pen and paper and write things down, rather than put it in our device.
 
How much energy have you spent this week trying to keep ideas in your head?
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Dedicating a small notebook to ideas, plans, and resources can be a great memory jogger, and creates a great capsule to reflect back on periods of your life on. I just came across a very small notebook (think smaller than the size of an index card) that accompanied me over 3 months of travel and work in Central America when I was 21. Just seeing it, unlocked a series of memories I had not thought of for years!

What is the practice you want to get into in terms of writing things down?
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For those that like high level bullet-form ideas, be sure to check out the Monthly Daily Planner – One Line a Day in the PlanDoTrack and Coaching Business Builder Planners. It only takes one minute to jot some ideas down!

Enjoy your writing!
​Jennifer