What are programs for planning your day, time, tasks and goals?
Planning programs are special applications that help you organize your time properly. These applications can store a list of all the tasks that need to be completed. The program will sort them by importance and/or due date, which will help you correctly allocate resources and meet deadlines.
The applications also send notifications about deadlines, which will help you not to forget about the deadlines for any project. In planners you can see statistics or a report on completed tasks, and in some you can even track the time spent on them.
All this allows you to analyze your daily routine, and, if necessary, completely change or adjust it. Such applications are very useful for people who work a lot and have many responsibilities, as well as for companies that need to keep track of a large number of processes and employees.
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Important tips for creating the perfect plan to get everything done
It seems that we already know everything about the ideal plan. Not really. There are several important details that will help make everything even better and more productive:
- Plan your day the night before or in the morning. This is the most optimal time, when ideas are still relevant and, if possible, it will be easier to make adjustments.
- Don’t forget to mark each completed task with a tick or marker, and also summarize the results.
- Every evening, analyze the past day, what caused difficulties, why you couldn’t do one thing and why another didn’t cause such problems.
- Remember to separate important tasks from unimportant ones, urgent from non-urgent ones. This can be done with special symbols directly in the diary.
- Distribute your tasks evenly throughout the week.
- If you couldn’t complete one of the tasks, don’t worry. Reschedule it to another day convenient for you.
Automation of daily and weekly plans
The most popular question: “In what form should subordinates make plans?”
Ideally, you need to make plans in the form of tasks in the system, where in the future the execution time will be kept track of them and reports will be generated. In my opinion, today the Bitrix24 system is most suitable for this.
What if your company has a different system for setting tasks? Think about how to organize planning with its help based on the requirements for plans that I formulated. And even if you don’t have a system for setting and accounting for tasks at all, it doesn’t matter. In my company, for a long time, plans for the day and week were made in separate text files in GoogleDocs format (very convenient to edit and discuss). And only after some time we switched completely to working in Bitrix24.
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Basic criteria to consider when choosing a glider
- Price . The planning programs presented below come in different price categories, some are even free. You need to select an organizer in accordance with your own budget and understand whether this or that purchase will be justified.
- Platform . Not every application is supported on a specific platform or operating system. You should check this item before installation.
- Functionality . You need to identify your application requirements and look for one that will meet all the necessary criteria.
- Interface . This point does not affect the use of the program so much, but it is also very important. The design of an application for daily routine should always be convenient and pleasant for the user.
- Flaws . You definitely need to pay attention to the shortcomings of these time planners. They may be minor, or they may greatly interfere with comfortable use.
Key benefits of weekly scheduling:
- longer planning horizon compared to one day
- Saving employee time and significant savings of manager time
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Weekly work plan
- How to make a plan?
- Go through all monthly project plans, take from them a list of tasks with a deadline by the end of the week + 5 days.
- Open your monthly work plan and write out some of the work from there.
- Include operational tasks (previously known or set by the manager) into the weekly plan.
- Tasks must be planned for the entire work week, taking into account the time reserve for introductory tasks (determined for each position individually).
- after all, that’s why the tasks and “unforeseen” ones may or may NOT exist.
- if the plan was not completed due to the fact that newly received tasks were being completed, then some of the tasks from the plan can be transferred to the next week.
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Daily plan and report - a continuous test of professional suitability for employees
But how do you understand: which of the employees chats on social networks, and which continuously produces results? Constantly stand behind your back? Impossible! This is where daily plans and progress reports that are mandatory for every employee come to the rescue.
To put it very briefly, the meaning of daily plans and reports is as follows: an employee draws up a work plan for each day based on an 8-hour day and reports at the end of the working day for each completed task (time spent, result, etc.).
Any good technology has benefits for both parties. Let's talk about it.
For employees to earn more and be more effective, they need both motivation and coercion.
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Benefits of a daily plan for a company
- Problems are solved by employees according to accepted priorities (taking into account the company’s business requirements), and not according to the principle of “wants”, “easier” and “more interesting”.
- The probability of employee “downtime” tends to zero. There are always tasks in stock. If “downtime” does occur, it will be visible in advance.
- Having looked at the plans, you can immediately remove the “failed” tasks and replace them with useful, topical and relevant ones.
- When a person plans things based on 8 working hours and knows that during this time there will be demand, the likelihood of “wasting time” is noticeably reduced.
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Benefits of a daily plan for an employee
- Major Personal and Professional Upgrade: Planning skills are essential in all areas, and life outside of work is no exception.
- The manager will be pleased with you, because... all high-priority technology tasks are included in your daily plan. And “being in good standing” opens up additional opportunities in a vertical career.
- Abolition of “slavery”, when a person sits at work until “night” (now 8 hours are allocated to complete tasks, therefore, the manager will no longer plan them for twelve hours).
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Agenda
In the future, we will only talk about the principles of daily and weekly planning and requirements for plans. Separate articles are devoted to:
- The technology for a manager to review the daily and weekly plans of his subordinates is an article in development.
- Requirements for working reports, methods for creating them - article in development.
- Technology for the manager to analyze daily and weekly reports of subordinates. See the article “How to evaluate the performance of employees based on the results of the working day using daily reports: the “analysis and comments” method.”
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