Starting a new year can be, for some, the perfect timing to plan changes. A new year is coming, time to turn over a new leaf and determine what we are going to do to reach that next level in our role. As a manager, one of the challenges that you’ll often face is how to keep productive and manage better all the tasks that are on your plate. Here are 5 things you should consider when working on your improvement plan:
- List all the things that may be preventing you from being more productive
Finding the root causes should always be the first step. Reflect on the past year and try to find what is really impacting your productivity. Is there a specific period of the day when you’re usually feeling less productive? Why? Why did certain meetings that you had were not efficient? Was your motivation always at the same level? Why not? Challenge yourself to really find what is impacting your productivity. And do not limit yourself: a lot of these causes can be things you do in your personal life. And then, depending on the causes, you can already start planning what you are going to change.
- Set clear action points for you and do not forget to set deadlines
After identifying the causes, you are already able to check what is in your power to change and set specific actions for you to perform. They can be one-time tasks like “change the time for these recurring meetings” or “schedule time for me every week to analyze this data” or they can be actions that you will always need to do like “waking up 1 hour earlier” or “do exercise 3 times a week”. A tip to better set what actions you need to plan is to group the root-causes that are related and then set the actions for each group. Groups can be “meetings” or “personal habits” or “organization” or “people”, depending on what you have as causes.
- Define how you are going to track success
One important part of your plan is to define how you will track your own progress. Are you going to review your progress each month, each quarter? What will you do if you do not meet your goals? What will you do if you meet them? It is also important to think about how to celebrate your success and not only how to punish yourself because you didn’t do well.
- Share your plan with your manager and include them
We all know that, as humans, we tend to plan a lot and then we follow some of the things we planned, but then, with time, we kind of forget to check and the plan loses its purpose. Including your manager in the plan will, first of all, make you more accountable for that plan. You will feel that it is not only yours after that and that you will also have a responsibility towards someone to report on progress. Second of all, including your manager also means setting specific actions for your manager. Your manager also wants you to succeed. So don’t hesitate to give them some work to do. Think about what exactly your manager could be doing to help you with the goals that you set. And then, define specific actions for them and discuss them with your manager.
- Question your plan during the year
It is not just important to set the plan and follow the action points that we set at the beginning of the year. It is also important to understand if they are producing the results we wanted. Changing that meeting time actually helped with my productivity? Doing quarter reviews was enough for me to stay on track? Setting a plan does not mean that you can’t change it from time to time, as long as you’re working to achieve the goals that you initially wanted.
Defining a plan can take time, but without it, I guarantee you that you’ll be less focused on what would really help you improve. Setting a plan will help you be more efficient, feel more rewarded and also motivated. We don’t all need to use the same method when planning, but it is important that we do plan and focus on what we need to be successful.
André Vidal 