Don’t let Monday through Friday come at you every week like a street gang looking to rough you up. It’s a easy reshuffle to make sense of your week at work, to master it time-wise and make that familiar 40+ hour structure work for you. Diving blindly in only creates stress, and not knowing just when your big stressors are going to be dealt with can make the little stressors multiply. So here are seven proven ways to arrange your workload that will allow you to leave the office on Friday feeling like a champ.
1. Figure out your best, most productive time of the day and take advantage of it– Not everyone is a morning person or an afternoon person. Some cycle up to full power in smaller spurts throughout the day, producing the lion’s share of their best work in mad 45-minute blasts. Whatever your workday rhythms may be, only you know them, and it’s up to figure out when you have the right mindset to tackle each task at what point during your day at the office.
2. Focus on something other than emails first – Reading and responding to e-mails can be the wrong can of worms to crack open first thing every morning. It’s an easy way to get overwhelmed early by small, unscheduled fires that need putting out. And it’s also the kind of visually boring activity (looking at little black words on a white screen) that can sap whatever energy reserves you’ve managed to work up by that point in the morning.
3. Use a “single goal per day” theory to motivate– If you really find yourself stuck in the drudgery, see if you can take what’s important in your work day and make it into a single, achievable bit of work that you can accomplish by the end of the day. And you get to decide what this goal is for your day based on how much time and focus you have.
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4. To-do list– Make a big one for the week and a shorter one each morning. We’re pretty sophisticated beings to be so easily pleased, but anyone who has kept a to-do list knows how satisfying just scratching one of those items off is. Feels like taking a cool drink of water or catching a little summer breeze just behind your ear. Each time, it’s like a mini-jolt of confidence.
5. Plan the week before it starts– The less mystery there is to your work week, the less accompanying stress there will be. And while there will always be small tasks or midrange projects that pop up, most of us know going in what is expected of us for the week. So take some autonomy here and micromanage yourself: set yourself on a path to get the big things done that’s the best and most practical one for you.
6. Aim to finish Thursday– Front-load as much of the stuff you know you have to do into the first four days of the week. That leaves Friday for any other tasks that come up, and it also leaves Friday to be a low-key last day of the week if it doesn’t end up getting filled with unforeseen midweek tasks. A low-stress Friday can really get your weekend started early.
7. Get the hardest done stuff first to reserve mental energy– If you put off doing the meatier, more challenging work until the middle or end of the week, you’re bound to waste valuable mental energy worrying about those tasks until you get around to them. If you get them out of the way early in the week, it can be all downhill from there in the best way.
