The Four Day Work Week
You’re in one of the golden weeks of the year where you only have to clock in for four days. This is exciting, yes, because you’re that much closer to the weekend where you get to see your friends and family or stay in your pajamas all day watching Stranger Things on Netflix. The short week is daunting too though, because you still have a full week’s worth of work - your boss is expecting you to finish a presentation, build that spreadsheet, and catch up on emails from the prior week.
Maybe you don’t have these specific tasks, and maybe your boss isn’t breathing down your neck to work 40 hours in a 32 hour week. Regardless, you take pride in your work, but you’re looking for a few pointers to ensure you can get it all done AND leave for Happy Hour on Friday promptly at 5PM.
Here is how to dominate this week – it’s called “prioritize and execute,” and it’s what we use here at Merchology to make sure we get our products decorated and delivered to our customers on short weeks.
How to Prioritize and Execute
Stop what you are doing right now and pull out a blank piece of paper, a pen, a highlighter, and a black Sharpie. Start listing out all of the things you MUST accomplish before the weekend. Now, once that list is done (hopefully on only one page), find the most important task - the one you absolutely need to finish otherwise the week is a failure - and put a #1 next to that task.
Next up, go down the list and number the remaining top tasks, but stop after #6. (Why six? I’ll tell you why shortly, keep reading).
Now that you have prioritized your tasks, find a highlighter (our favorite here at Merchology is orange, but you can choose whatever color you’d like). Strike your highlighter through the tasks that MUST be completed TODAY. Most likely, you will have highlighted #1, but it’s possible that you didn’t, and that’s OK. Find the week’s highest ranking task on your list that is also highlighted as urgent for today, and get to work (remember, 1 is the highest ranking, where six is the lowest). Finish each highlighted task today.
When you complete a task, use the black sharpie to draw a thick mark over the task, erasing it from time and space, because, well - you’re done with it. That feels good! Moving on.
When you arrive to work tomorrow, repeat the process: find the tasks you must complete today, highlight, and cross out. Once Friday rolls around, you should only have a few (or none, because you rock) of your “ranked” tasks remaining. Knock them out, and breathe a sigh of relief. If there’s still time left in the day, find someone at the water cooler to be nice to, or buckle down with your pen and highlighter to prioritize for next week.
NOTE: We recommend only numbering six tasks. Important tasks take time, and most likely you will not finish 27 important tasks this week, but you can be sure to complete six. Stick to six, stay focused, and renumber them if or when you finish the first six. Back to last week's post - always know what the top three items are that you need to get done, but realistically, you'll be able to accomplish more than that.
Congratulations, you crushed it this week. Now onto the weekend, where you can choose to prioritize and execute there as well… Or, you can eat chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in your PJs all day. The world is your oyster! See you Monday.