3 Practices to Mindfully Manage a Busy Week

Take control of your schedule, master your tasks, and find your power zones

by Mark VanDellen | October 2024

In today’s fast-paced world, the demands on our time and attention are relentless. We often find ourselves drowning in a sea of tasks, deadlines, and distractions, leaving us overwhelmed and wondering if there’s a better way to manage it all. Have you ever thought:

• • • • “Is it supposed to be this hard?”
      • “I am sooooo busy!”
      • “I’ll get to it next week.”
      • “I don’t really have time for that right now.”
      • “Where did the day go?”
      • “How is it 4pm already? I’ve gotten nothing done.”
      • “I’m just going to put in a few hours over the weekend.”

Whether we like it or not, this is the new normal. Many of us live in chaos, and we aren’t that good at sorting or managing through it. This is our attempt at helping you sort and manage the four million things you have to do each day.

Before we get to the nuts and bolts of some practical tips for better managing chaos, we have to shift our mindset. First, we want to admit that it’s harder than ever to manage chaos because there are infinitely more inputs, interruptions, devices, subscriptions, and apps to manage. But we aren’t going to let you off the hook so easily. The truth is we have more control over our chaos than we think.

Enter “Mindfulness”. Mindfulness = the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something. If we are more aware of the chaos, we can manage it by limiting the inputs and controlling what we can control. Typically, the biggest culprits contributing to our chaos are:

1. Our schedules & calendars

2. Our email inboxes

3. The seemingly endless meetings we attend

Below, you will find three research backed practices that will help you to be more mindful with your schedule and calendar.

3 Practices to Manage Your Week

Unfortunately, there is no way for us to get more than 24 hours in a day or more than 7 days in a week, but we can do better with what we have. There are 3 key things you can focus on when it comes to mindfully managing your schedule and calendar.

Practice 1: The 30/10 Principle

Franklin Covey teaches what they call the 30/10 principle for planning. They recommend setting aside 30 minutes per week to plan your week and 10 minutes per day to plan each day. Do the math…that’s 80 minutes per 5 day work week. You may be thinking, “I don’t have time for that!” And to that I would say, “EXACTLY!” I promise if you commit to applying the 30/10 principle to your life, you will gain more than 80 minutes of accomplishment.

Some people prefer to put the 30 minutes at the beginning of the week, either the night before you start your week or the first morning of your week, while others prefer to end their week with a little planning for the next week. I tend to wrap my week up with a good plan for the following week so that I can enjoy my weekend and avoid ruining my final day of relaxation with the Sunday Scaries. Try it out and do what works best for you.

As for the 10 minutes per day of planning, it helps to either start your day with a plan or finish the day with a plan for tomorrow. On this one, I spend 10 minutes in the morning and then a few minutes here and there throughout a day to be sure I can accommodate any new chaos that comes my way and ensure I am still on track with what I need to accomplish.

Practice 2: The Master Task List

Franklin Covey also teaches to have a Master Task List to capture ALL THE THINGS so that you can get all that chaos out of your head. If you have a long list of things that need to get done on paper or some other digital tool, you free up a ton of space and energy for focusing on what matters the most right now rather than trying to remember to buy oat milk on the way home, send that thank you card to Aunt Jennie, remember to cancel the online training subscription on how to better manage your time, and prep for the meeting you’re 5 minutes late to joining because it’s Tuesday and Microsoft Teams ran an update this morning.

The secret to the master task list is really in what you do with it after creating it. The master task list’s job is to free your mind and energy, but it is your job to pull priority items off that task list for each day during your 10 minutes of planning.

I take the master task list concept one step further and create a separate daily task list each day with 3-5 main things that I need to get done each day. The hard truth is…if I go beyond 5 things on my daily list, I accomplish less than 3-5 things. This doesn’t mean I only do 3-5 things per day; but I know that among the many meetings I attend, the 100+ emails I receive, and any other interruptions I encounter, I have to focus on 3-5 MAIN things.

There are two big benefits to the master task list…

1. You get more important things done and typically experience momentum and energy from doing so.

2. You are choosing what doesn’t get done. I no longer feel guilty or beat myself up for something remaining on my master task list for too long because every day I evaluate what’s important and choose what I will get done. Anything that remains wasn’t important enough to get my energy or attention.

Practice 3: Time Blocking & Power Zones

My argument for time blocking is simple, start by answering the question “Do you ever miss a scheduled meeting?” The answer for most people is “No.” I ask this question because the reality of never skipping scheduled meetings is the hack that most leaders need in order to find the time to work on important tasks.

Time blocking: is essentially scheduling tasks as meetings in your calendar so you don’t skip them. If someone catches you on the way to a scheduled meeting, you typically don’t find it rude to tell them you’re unavailable. Do the same thing with an hour time block you have scheduled to work on important tasks. It’s not rude…it’s respectful and contagious. If you start scheduling time to accomplish tasks, you’ll get more done and so will your team. If you start time blocking and slowly fade in your commitment to your time blocks, try scheduling the time with another person to work on separate things to create natural accountability. Or even easier, consider adding the name of the person who that task or project matters most to because you know you wouldn’t skip a meeting with that person so don’t skip a meeting with a task that directly impacts that person (example: “1st draft of budget for Kim by Friday”).

Power Zones: If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love me some time blocking. In fact, I am successfully in the middle of a scheduled 1 hour “meeting” to write this blog for Abigail and Becca as I type! But even as much as I love time blocking, I love Power Zones EVEN MORE. Power Zones invite you to find the time of day where you are most energized and productive. These are different for each person and can take some tweaking to figure out. For example, I am not a morning person so I schedule meetings in the morning to get me up and going. The hours between 8-11 are not a power zone for me. But I do get energy from people so I typically come out of a meeting or coaching conversation with renewed energy so 11-1 and 2-4 are my best power zones for accomplishing tasks.

Admittedly, I can’t protect 11-4 every day, but I can be sure that I get a minimum of 5 hours in my power zone each week by limiting the number of meetings between 11-4. The most frustrating day for me is having nothing scheduled in the morning and 2 meetings between 12-3. Every time I do this to myself, I feel like I get nothing done in the morning and have no energy left at the end of the day to catch up. And to make things worse, I typically try to power through to get something on my important tasks list done and end up working until 7pm because it takes me 3 times as long to do a simple task outside my power zone.

Start with One Thing

As I wrap up, I want to first take time to thank you for reading these thoughts…I know you don’t have time for it. But I am grateful that you used what little time you had to procrastinate on the things you need to do to learn how to stop doing that and schedule time to read any of our future blogs that truly move the needle for you and your leadership journey. I also want to tell you that I believe in you! And I am not just saying that as one of those things you’re supposed to say to people but that you don’t really mean. I am saying that because I figured some of this stuff out for myself, and I am not an organized person. I am not all that disciplined. I love a good idea and very much dislike actually doing the work. And I most certainly do not wake up each day looking to crush the day.

Let me leave you with permission to choose just one thing. If your chaos feels so unruly that three things has you feeling defeated before you even start, then just choose one of the above things to dip your toe in a little less turbulent water. In my experience one thing will lead to another, and before you know it, you’ll be kicking butt and taking names in as little as a month.

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