016: Sunday Scaries: How to optimize your time in 3 steps

 Now you enter the week seeing, okay, this is exactly how I can spend my time. Now I have a lot clearer around what I'm gonna be doing, who's kind of driving what piece, and the work blocks that I can have. And this is gonna give you so much more ease entering the week. 

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Welcome back to the show. Happy Sunday and because it's Sunday. This is our new series called Sunday Scaries, where I am gonna be talking about those things that often creep in either for some of us, I think around 1:00 PM on a Sunday after we've kind of gone through the weekend and we start thinking.

For me it was like 4:00 AM Saturday morning. So like very, very shortly after the regular week ended when I started thinking about all the stuff I have to do the next week. So whatever time your Sunday scaries begins, you're not alone. And we are every week gonna talk about one thing that you can do to take some of that pressure off your week, the following week.

And if you wanna get my manager tip of the week and be the first to know about any new content I have coming your way, or to get special offers just for my community, send me the text managers to (415)234-5716. This goes right to me, so it's a great place to ask any questions if you're getting stuck or to submit your questions for my Ask Me Anything episodes.

Again, that was text managers to (415)234-5716. 


The first Sunday scary that I wanna dive into is this feeling of, oh my God, I have so much to do. Next week. I got my meetings and my approvals and my work and my team's coming to me. And this overwhelm that starts to creep. So my one tip every Sunday night is to take a look at your calendar and start getting a lot more diligent with how you're spending your time.

You're gonna look across all of your meetings and you're gonna break them into three buckets. First bucket is those meetings that you absolutely have to be at. So these are the meetings where you are the approver or decision maker, and they are also your one-on-ones with your team members. Now I, I talk about this in an upcoming interview with the amazing Carrie Jacobs about the importance of keeping your one-on-ones.

And these are not meetings that you wanna be shifting all around because this is the one time your team members get to talk to you. Sometimes this might be the moment they've been waiting for all week and we're diligent with our calendars. It doesn't mean getting rid of those one-on-ones. Bucket. One, keep your one-on-ones with your team members in the meetings where you have to review or approve something.

Okay? That's the. Second bucket, this is the meetings that you can delegate to a team member. These are the opportunities for you to have other people step up as leaders. When you go through this category, you wanna think about how can I distribute these meetings that I'm delegating across my team so that you give a few different people opportunities to step up.

And then as you're delegating, setting the context, it's totally, you know, it's appropriate and necessary to set expectations as you're delegating, saying to a. Hey, I'd like for you to take this one on. Here's how this meeting is run. Here's gonna be your role in it. Here's the expectations. Here's how we need to communicate.

What comes outta that meeting, and whatever you need to do to have confidence that you get what you need and that person is set up for success. You know, I think when we're delegating meetings, we wanna talk about making sure that that person has bandwidth to take that on. And if they're say, you know, I have all these other things and.

You talk about trade-offs to make sure there's space for that, but you really wanna set them up for success, making sure they're clear on what this meeting is about so that they really can step up and be a leader. That's that second bucket. Delegating to team members and delegating across a few different team members.

So you get a few people the opportunity to be leaders. Third bucket is the meetings that never had to be meetings. And we all know there's more of these than we're giving credit for. There are a lot of meetings that we have in our week, in our month, in our year that sort of just to kind of pile on and we go to it and we're like, why are we in this meeting?

But we don't cancel it because we're not the meeting owner. Or sometimes there's something interesting that comes up. These are the meetings that we wanna be reducing for ourselves and for our. As you do this audit every week, and it's important to do every week because when we let too much time pass, this thing starts to snowball anyway, and when we find this kind of meeting, it's an opportunity to ask ourselves, is this a weekly thing that could be a monthly thing or quarterly?

Is this a meeting that is just old and kind of like we're just meeting it to get together? Is this something that maybe we can move to a group chat or group text or a slack? Is this a meeting that actually could be resolved through a Google Doc or an email? Or is this actually we're needing people to come together?

Maybe informally. So this could be replaced with maybe like a monthly team lunch or, or team happy hour team breakfast or coffee chat or something like that. Figure out what that last bucket where it feels like, well, there's not really decisions or forward progress, but there was something about this meeting that that had a little bit of value, figuring out what that is and then moving it to the appropriate.

Now when you've done these three steps, paring down to just the meetings that were, you're the approver or just your one-on-one through your team members. Two, what you can delegate in three, what you can actually take off the calendar fully. Now you enter the week seeing, okay, this is exactly how I can spend my time.

Now I have a lot clearer around what I'm gonna be doing, who's kind of driving what piece?  and the work blocks that I can have, and this is gonna give you so much more ease entering the week. Not only that, even if you change nothing, just looking at your calendar before Monday morning goes a long way. I know there's a lot, you know, maybe you don't want to even open your computer on the weekend or look at your work phone on the weekend.

I get it. But I have found this to be so helpful for removing that stress and that Sunday scaries, when I look at, okay, I got a handle on the week. I know it's coming. I know what to. Give it a try. That is our first Sunday scaries. My goal with this series is to start to reduce some of those Sunday scaries.

Again, if you were like me thinking of all the work stuff, really, you know, Saturday, middle of the night, then hopefully that gets you at least till the Sunday at one o'clock crowd and give it a try. So if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling, ugh, like some of this work, some of this doesn't, I, I still feel kind of like I need some more.

Go to my quiz, liagarvin.com/manager quiz and just share where you're getting stuck and I will send you a personalized video with a few recommendations for your team. Again, that's liagarvin.com/manager quiz all one word share where you're getting stuck, and I will send you that personalized video talking through a couple ideas to try on your team.

Hopefully. With that, you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday and start the week strong. See you next time. That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.