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Is My Week Practical with High Volume Work?

  • 14 June 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 131 views

As my firm tries to transition from using the Todo to using My Week we’ve run into a pitfall: members with the most tasks/work items due are struggling to find a practical way to keep up with their work in the My Week format. 

It seems as though we’d have to go and change all of our Work Items to unique Work Types in order to somewhat minimize the clutter, but other than that we are at a loss.

What is some advice on a seamless transition to My Week? 

2 replies

max
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Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hi @Danielle Clark! That’s a great question. I personally think there’s a lot of noise in My Week when trying to schedule out my time.

We have adopted time blocking so that everything that I plan to do this week is on the calendar. If it doesn’t fit on the calendar, it needs to go to next week (or later). Once something is on my calendar, I put it in “Working on Now” in chronological order, so I know that it’s on the calendar and my brain can relax.

Putting everything on the calendar and then pushing everything else to future weeks really helps reduce the amount of noise and helps me and my team take a practical approach to planning our work.

Does that help at all?

P.S. - There’s a feature in development where you can drag items from My Week onto a calendar in My Week and it’ll add a time block to your outlook or google calendar, which makes the process I described a little easier to manager.

respect humans // continually improve
Rebecca Williams
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Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @Danielle Clark - We’re starting the rollout process of My Week with our wider team today (beginning with training and cleaning up To Plan in June, then starting to use it day to day in July), and I am anticipating we will have some teething problems for this same reason. Definitely following along this thread with interest to see what others things!

 

Here’s the process to manage work I’ve come up with so far to guide our team. This is yet to be tested, but I’m thinking they would do this two or three times a day (start, maybe middle, end).

  1. Clear your Triage, using the Inbox Zero methodology
    Tag everything! Then one of the following:
    1. Delete - clear from Triage
    2. Do - action if less than 2-3 mins, then clear from Triage
    3. Delegate - assign to colleague, then clear from Triage
    4. Defer - add to My Week, then clear from Triage
  2. Review your Work Views
    As part of this we are also implementing a few standard dashboards that each person will monitor for themselves:
    1. Work currently with them (for us, ownership is based on the Status of work, and client team roles)
      1. Review the My Week column and ensure everything is planned for This Week
    2. Work pipeline
      1. Review the My Week column and ensure everything is planned for the Next Week (or maybe week after)
  3. Review My Week
    1. Review To Plan and move anything else into the appropriate bucket
    2. Review This Week and move immediate priorities into Working on Now

 

There are a couple of things that I think may factor in to how cluttered My Week gets:

  • When repeating work flows into My Week
    • We had started setting it to populate into the week based on the start date of the work, but for work that spans a few weeks (e.g. month end), our final reviewers may not have any involvement in the work until week 3 so I’m starting to lean towards not auto planning anything EXCEPT maybe work that definitely only spans a week
    • If repeat settings populated based on task date and task assignee, I think that would be more helpful, but I don’t believe this is currently the case
  • Emails/Notes only able to go immediately into This Week and not a future week (hoping for that feature request to get into development!)

@max I’m looking forward to when calendar integration with My Week is fully released - hopefully future versions will have some smartness built in where it will know a person’s role and the budget for that work/role and suggested a related-size time block!

Continuous Improvement

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