Planning a Productive Week

We've gotten SO many questions about the different things that we do or tools that we use to ensure we have a productive week. In episode 14 of the Big Plan Podcast, we share what we do to efficiently manage our work week, including how we are able to manage batching for our business, social media, Youtube, and podcasts!

How To Plan For A Productive Week

1. Forest/Tree Meetings

Forest meetings are your big picture meetings. We do this quarterly where we talk about our main goals and sales for the quarter, important deadlines, and planning for the whole year. Tree meetings are detailed more frequent meetings, so for us these are weekly meetings where we discuss upcoming sales, new releases, and our batching schedule. Tree meetings are also a great opportunity for us to have a brain dump. We use a Google doc to document our meetings which is helpful to refer back to later on.

2. Asana

Asana is a project management tool that we use to keep track of our designs and releases. We prefer to use the Kanban method of tracking in Asana, but it also has different views to see your to-do lists and projects. Asana is a great tool to use if you have more than one person on your team because you can assign tasks and deadlines.

3. Time Management

We manage our time by batching tasks and splitting them into different days. We keep track of this in our meeting notes and write down what we are each doing that day. 

An example of our Batching Schedule - 

• Sun: PR responsibilities (Lucy), Design New Releases (Lisa)
• Mon: Printing and Prep $2 Tues (Lisa), Prep $2 Tues + new kits (Lucy)
• Tues: $2 Tues and Cutting (Lisa), Video editing (Lucy)
• Wed: Cut $2 Tues collection (Lisa), Design kits/find art for upcoming kits (Lucy)
• Thur: Fulfill Orders (Lisa)
• Fri: Edit podcasts (Lucy)

4. Our Weekly/Daily To-Do’s

We plan our weekly to-do’s based on our weekly meeting and brain dump. We will split up big tasks between the two of us. Our daily to-do’s are up to our own schedule, though we sometimes have very informal meetings in the mornings to check in on what we’re working on.

5. Efficiency Techniques

Batching for the entire week for all aspects of our business and platforms is our best time-saving advice. It’s also important to stay consistent so your whole schedule isn’t thrown off if you miss a day. We recommend having one focus for the day when you are batching, as well as knowing how long it takes you to do certain tasks so you know how to plan out your batching schedule. It’s worth tracking your time so that you are aware of how you’re spending your time and use that information to schedule out your week. When you do batching you will naturally come up with more efficient systems.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE:

How do you plan for social media posts and podcasting?

Planning for social media posts:

To be honest, this is something we’ve struggled with doing consistently. We tried having a calendar on Asana where we would schedule out a post/reels/live/IGTV for each weekday for the month. This didn’t work though because if we missed a day, then our schedule was thrown off, and it was too ambitious. We didn’t have anyone to enforce the deadlines so we fell off track really easily. We also had a system for a while where we alternated every day posting reels, but that was also really hard and missing one day would throw us off and then it was hard to get back on track.

We should have batched our content - i.e. recording several posts/reels in advance, take product photos for several releases instead of one release at a time. 

We’re best when we have someone holding us accountable which is why we now have a Social Media Manager.

Planning for podcasts:

First of all, thank you to everyone who mentioned that they listen to our podcast. It seriously means so much to us! 

We have a running list of ideas for our podcast on Google docs, so we’re never struggling with what to talk about each week. We’ve also planned out topics a few weeks in advance and include an outline of talking points and any questions we’ve received. We like to incorporate the questions we receive through emails and DM’s to provide helpful advice from what we've learned along the way, so please continue to submit your questions!

We generally always record on Fridays. We like to have a consistent day that we plan to record the podcast which keeps us accountable. It’s also helpful when we are able to batch record and edit several episodes - which takes us back to the batching tip!

Listen to the full podcast episode for all the details!