My favorite productivity hack of the year?

That’s easy: theme days.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it means to compartmentalize your schedule by day (or segment of the day) to allow for more “deep work” and fewer task-switching distraction and reboot time.

It’s a suggestion I picked up from Mike Vardy at Productivityist.com.

My Theme Days

Here’s what it looks like in practice for me:

Mondays are set aside for content creation and writing. This is the day I normally work on finalizing the podcast episode for the week or the following week (trying to build a bigger content queue). In the afternoon, I’m drafting or formatting blog posts, or editing guest articles that have come across my desk.

Tuesday is meeting day, and is often stacked up with calls and recordings from 8:30am to 5pm. It’s a marathon of a day and sometimes I’m losing my voice by the end of it, but what this has done is freed up much longer blocks of time the rest of the week.

No longer do I run into the situation of, “Well, I’ve only got 15 minutes before my next call, so I can’t really get anything done. I’ll just go on Facebook.”

Before implementing this I had a rule called “no meetings Fridays,” which worked so well I figured I’d try “no meetings Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays” too. How it works is in my calendar booking tool (Schedule Once) I’ve just blocked off all the other days.

Of course it doesn’t work 100% of the time and I will take more urgent calls on other days, but this has provided a great framework and structure to the week.

On Wednesdays, I work on this site and my other side projects, and try and clear up and nagging administrative issues. Those could include accounting and insurance tasks, housekeeping items, or travel planning.

And finally on Thursdays, I have almost the whole day dedicated to longer-term growth projects for my main business. This year, that’s been working on a redesign of the website, setting up a new email system, taking courses, and mapping out future projects.

In the past, those types of projects were the easiest to procrastinate on because there was rarely a big enough block of time to get started and feel like I could make meaningful progress.

I try and take most Fridays off, but will jump online during our son’s nap time to catch up on email before the weekend.

Why It Works

Each time you switch gears and jump from task to task, there’s a ramp up cost in terms of your productivity. The theme day system allows you to stay on one type of task for longer periods of time, AND feel good about the work because that’s what you’re “supposed to” be doing that day.

It also gives you a dedicated time block on your calendar to knock out the essential components of your business and your work, where otherwise they can tend to get pushed aside by more urgent-seeming tasks.

Creating a Theme Day System That Works For You

If you’ve never tried something like this in your own work week schedule, you can start small the way I did with “no meetings Fridays.”

When I started back in the spring, I positioned it in my head as a productivity experiment I’d test out for a month to see if I liked it. Turned out, I loved it!

Instead of putting out fires as they arose or working on what seemed to be the most urgent, I now had a dedicated time on the calendar for all of the most important aspects of my work.

Your schedule will probably look much different than mine, but one thing to keep in mind is to front-load your week with your most important tasks.

For me, my business runs on content; it’s the primary growth driver and monetization method so that had to come first. Next up is the recording and meeting marathon on Tuesday, which I chalk up partly under content and partly under marketing.

Wednesday and Thursday are important but less mission-critical in the near-term. If they don’t happen for a week or two, it’s not going to be the end of the world.

Your Turn

Have you ever tried a theme day set-up? What was your experience with it?

If you give it a shot, definitely let me know how it goes in the comments below!

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Deena Anreise, the Marketing Manager for Prialto, contributed this post.

Take it away, Deena!

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Teamwork is the cornerstone of every successful business, but achieving team cohesiveness can be a challenge. Leaders, managers, and business founders often struggle to understand what they can do to ensure their teams work together in the most effective way.

By definition, teamwork is bigger than one person. But there is one important action that any leader can do to promote teamwork: delegation.

Delegation has many qualities in its favor.

To speed along a time-sensitive project, specific duties can be assigned to team members who excel in those specific areas. Conversely, if a project has a lot of lead time, it can be beneficial to assign certain tasks to members of your team who are less skilled in that area, with the goal of strengthening their skillset.

More often than not, leaders choose to delegate to an assistant who can manage all repeatable tasks. By delegating these tasks, leaders gain back time to accomplish more high value tasks.

Nick’s Notes: This is the first type of outsourcing, and is far easier to set both yourself and your assistant up for success.

Delegating is a great way for leaders to test the strengths and weaknesses of their team members. Delegating also provides a proactive way for leaders to give team members a feeling of ownership and a continued sense of advancement while freeing up their own time to focus on more higher level, pressing issues that only they can tackle.

Delegation is obviously fantastic on many levels, but is sometimes easier said than done.

Here are 3 of the most common pitfalls that leaders fall into when delegating — and how to avoid them.

PITFALL #1: Inhibiting

Don’t stifle creativity by assigning jobs and requiring each team member to focus solely and individually on that task alone.

Solution: Reward your team by stoking their sense of continued advancement.

Providing your team members with opportunities to grow and acquire new skills can go a long way. A team member’s sense of achievement and worthiness will inspire them to push themselves harder next time, to not give up, and to give their best.

Show them you see how hard they are working. When they nail it, let them know they’ve done a good job.

PITFALL #2: Micromanaging

Micromanaging is an undesirable behavior for two reasons.

First, it shows a lack of trust in your workers to do their job, and second, it bogs you down with minutia when you should strive to have a clean plate so you are able to focus on bigger issues.

Provide a clear vision and expected outcome for the work, and be available to answer questions, but let your team actually do the work without meddling.

Nick’s Notes: For more in-depth tasks, I try to explain the project as best I can, and then ask for a progress report check-in at maybe 10% of completion to make sure my assistant is on the right track.

Solution: Trust your team.

You gave them their job for a reason; give them some breathing room. If someone is struggling to complete what they’re assigned, offer help or advice or suggest they collaborate with a team member.

Even a worker who has failed at a task in the past should be given another opportunity, since they likely learned from their mistakes and will appreciate your show of faith.

Nick’s Notes: In my case, I was really frustrated when my first VA couldn’t seem to get it right. I totally took for granted that I’d been doing the task I’d assigned for years and it was second nature to me. There’s always going to be a learning curve.

Remember the 10/80/10 rule of outsourcing.

PITFALL #3: Over-Assigning

All this talk of delegation and its benefits may make you want to over-delegate by assigning all the work to the members of your team so you can sit back and relax.

Don’t fall for this temptation, because doing so can harm your business.

Solution: As a leader, you are naturally responsible for the big picture and general project management.

A lack of participation on behalf of a business’s leader means a lack of supervision and accountability on behalf of the team members. Delegating should never be the act of giving over work you should be doing.

Rather, view delegating as removing tasks from your agenda that you shouldn’t be doing.

Nick’s Notes: I usually fall in the opposite camp of having a hard time letting go of tasks!

Conclusion

Team cohesiveness should be a goal, and delegation is one of the most powerful ways to ensure you reach it. Avoiding these three common pitfalls of delegation is the key to managing a united team and maintaining a thriving business!

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