The "Fortress Balance Sheet" Approach to Planning Your Week
The crisis-proof method that keeps your week intact when everything goes wrong
There’s only so much you can plan for when you plan the week.
The dynamic nature of our work means we cannot anticipate everything that will come our way. The customer emergencies, a colleague off sick or a change in a project’s deadline are all beyond our control.
One of the reasons it’s essential to have a weekly planning session is so you can slow down, review what you have on your plate, anticipate what may go wrong and take action to mitigate these potential problems.
Starting your weekly planning session on paper is more effective than beginning on a screen. Your brain is better at anticipating what might go wrong than staring at a list of things that you think need to be done in the future. Let your brain do what it’s best at—finding danger.
Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix. →
To help prevent your whole week from being derailed by an emergency on a Monday morning, there are two things you can do.
The first is to plan for emergencies and the unknowns. While you may not know what these problems will be, you do know one thing: whatever they are, they will require time to resolve.
This means ensuring you have enough time for all these unknowns when planning the week. For instance, you could keep either side of your lunch break free. This gives you an hour or so each day free for anything requiring more time than expected.
The second is to go into “CEO Mode” during your weekly planning. A CEO’s role is to look ahead and ask what could go wrong and what is happening in the world around the business, as well as to develop strategies to avoid falling into any traps that the market may have hidden.
Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase Bank is an excellent example of a CEO who excels at this. A quote from an article about how JP Morgan Chase avoided the credit crunch crisis in 2008 by operating what is termed its “Fortress Balance Sheet”:
“Dimon relies on a trusted team of talented lieutenants who share his zeal for sifting piles of data to spot trouble before it happens and vigilantly control risk.”
When you look at your current active projects, what could go wrong with any of those? Are you being a little ambitious with your expected timeline? Once you know the answers, you can put some backup plans in place to reduce the risk of things going wrong.
Helpful resources
My video on starting your weekly plan on paper will show you how to best use the Weekly Planning Matrix. (This is the “CEO Mode” in action.)
And my video on calendar management here will explain why clearing any conflicts before the week begins is essential—you don’t have time to sort out that mess once the week starts.
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