Weekly Planner
Sometimes when you are bootstrapping your time can limited and you have a lot of things to do, it can be overwhelming or difficult to focus your attention. For me it helps to list out what I want to achieve for a month or week and prioritise my limited time wisely. In the past I tried to do too much and since my attention was in multiple tasks my output was poor and had progress had slowed down. This is the reason why I created a weekly planner.
Figure 1Month objective
In 1st tab of the Excel sheet you will see the Month objective in your plan (Figure 1). The goal is to list out the key objectives you want to achieve within the month. This could be to finalise a concept for the ADCS system of a small sat or pass PDR with a customer. Keep the month objectives to a minimum.
Figure 2 Weekly planner section
Once you identify the month objectives, it is time to move onto the weekly planner. In the weekly planner section (Figure 2) you can see multiple sections that you can fill out. Each section has estimated hours that you will focus your time on. A weekly budget is added so that you can look at how much time you want to spend in the week vs how much time you have. This could be a 40 hour work week or if you are bootstrapping and only have 12 hours for the week. The aim of an hour budget is to value your time as a currency so that you don’t waste it on tasks that won’t provide you value to your project. If your total hours exceed your budget, it should prompt you to reconsider if what you intend to achieve is attainable and make your redo your plan. Maybe it might be best to delay a task to a later week and have you focus on more pressing issues. Don’t get too caught up on being very accurate in your time allocation as it’s just a guide.
Week Objectives
Identify one or two key objectives you want to achieve for the coming week. This could be to finalise the requirements of a cubesat satellite, submit a funding proposal, close a sale etc.
Top Priorities
These are your top priority tasks you need to complete in the week. Could be invoicing customers, preparing a pitch deck, finishing engineering drawings for a mechanism.
Events
Are you going to a networking, B2B event or conference? Also if you are going on holiday you can list them here.
Meetings
Do you have that PDR meeting, online meeting with a potential customer, interview for a new hire or dental appointment?
Admin Tasks
Creating BOM lists? Invoicing customers? Paying a bill? Tax return? If it’s important but not related to a project or service you can list them here.
Task List
Miscellaneous tasks relevant to a project or low priority can be put on the task list.
Final thoughts
Some may argue whether a weekly plan is worthwhile but for me I find having an overview plan like this can help focus on a select few tasks each week. If you are bootstrapping and lack time you need to figure out where you should focus your time. In the past I had fallen into the mistake of trying to do so much each week with the limited time I have, and I would fail to make much progress. Highlighting the key tasks and splitting days to focus on different tasks would allow me to dedicate time just to resolve an issue. Also, if you try to cram more work or work longer hours and fill your weekend with your side gig or job you will quickly lead to burn out.
I tend to focus 30 minutes on a Sunday evening to come up with the plan for the following week and I suggest you not to spend a lot of time agonising over this planner, it is just a guide to let you focus. If you didn’t achieve everything you aimed to do in the week just add the unfinished tasks to the following week. Plus, don’t try and fill out every section of this planner as you will just divide your time over too many tasks and the quality of your work will diminish.
The weekly planner can be found in the link below: