Many people have overarching 5-year, 10-year or even retirement plans. To achieve these, you need not only the aspiration but the route plan.

I suggest that you should plan not just your day, but your week and your month. Planning keeps you ahead. It allows you to be proactively moving forward to achieve your goals rather than reactively dealing with the day to day.

Ensuring you have scheduled time in your working week for all you need to achieve. This has the added benefit of freeing up the rest of your week for you. Your to-do list should not take over your leisure time.

I find it is best to get bigger, more time critical or tedious tasks, scheduled earlier in the week to ensure that they are completed as soon as possible. This not only helps keep the week moving forward in a positive manner, it ensures you know early if something is going to be problematic and can mitigate against any negative impact.

How to plan your week is something that we take the time to cover with all new starters at Hive. It may seem obvious, but its importance cannot be underestimated and is always worth reiterating.

We start with setting out 5 Top Tips:

1. Make time for it. Not on Monday morning, you should start your week with a plan in place. Block out time to plan the week to come on the Friday, or over the weekend if that works better for you.

2. Take time to reflect on your week. What went well, what didn’t and what you can learn from it? Write it down and then act on what you have learnt. For example you may find that some tasks are taking longer than anticipated and more time should be allocated to them going forward.

3. Input the things you can’t move. Time in surgery, calls you’ve booked or meetings should be entered as soon as possible to avoid overbooking your time.

4. Refresh your to do list. Look at what got bumped last week and why. Make sure that you prioritise your to do list so that time sensitive items do not get lost. It is important to make sure to schedule in time for the small tasks too or you will find they roll over and over.

5. Set your priorities for the week and each day. A bit of reiteration here but a key point. You should make sure you know what the one thing you need to do this week and each day is. You should consider not only deadlines when setting these but the impact completing or not completing a task will have on tomorrow.

I would urge anyone and everyone to take these tips and start using them immediately.

My favourite part is stopping at the end of each day and taking the time to reflect, to consider what went well and what didn’t. I challenge you all, not only to try and identify something each week that you can improve, but to then implement the change for the next week. Let’s try for the perfect plan. One week at a time.

If you’re struggling to manage your time, or are not sure what tasks should take priority, get in touch for a second opinion. The team at Hive can offer advice on anything from your financial and practice management tasks, to your marketing priorities.