In this module you will develop the skills and knowledge required to plan and prioritise your own work tasks. It also addresses the skills and knowledge to monitor and obtain feedback on personal work performance.
A personal work schedule is a document that contains a list of work tasks assigned to you and the resources that you need to complete these tasks. The work tasks are scheduled according to the sequence of work tasks, and level of priority and timeframes allocated for each task. This personal work schedule is essential in making sure that tasks are thoughtfully planned out, completed on time, and adjusted when necessary.
The development of a personal work schedule involves three phases:
- Planning a personal work schedule
- Implementing the personal work schedule
- Review, evaluation, and updating of personal work schedule
Before the actual creation of a personal work schedule, planning should be done. A well-planned work schedule allows you to get a better view of all work tasks assigned to you and organise them in the most efficient way possible.
In order to properly plan a personal work schedule, you must prepare a list of task requirements, your personal accountabilities, and identify any barriers to performance. This information will greatly aid in determining the requirements to successfully completing the work tasks assigned to you.
When planning for your personal work schedule, a work plan must be prepared. A work plan is a document that provides a framework for work tasks; it contains a breakdown of task requirements to complete the work task. Task requirements refer to needs that should be identified in order to accomplish a work task.
Task Requirements
Generally, task requirements include the following.
Stakeholder needs
People or groups directly or indirectly involved in the work task, or those who have an interest in the outcome of the work task, are the stakeholders involved. Relevant stakeholders of a work task are typically those who are managing the overall task, those who are completing what is needed in the work task, and those who are affected by the results of the work task.
You need to address the needs of such stakeholders for an accurate preparation of your work plan and implementation of the work schedule. These needs also help you address the next task requirement needed in preparing a work plan. These include information to be provided and any outputs or deliverables to be submitted at each stage of a work task.
Resource requirements
Resources are an important consideration when you prepare your work plan. They are identified needs to ensure the successful completion of a work task. The types of resources that you should consider include the following:
This includes all types of materials and physical space that will be needed to achieve your goals. They may come in the form of raw materials which you transform or materials which you purchase in order to undertake certain tasks. Physical resources also include all the machinery that you will need in order to achieve your goals. You need to consider whether you have all the machinery and technology you require; is the equipment, machinery or technology available when you need it, and what will happen if it breaks down? What will you do then?
Money makes the world go round! Money is a key requirement of any operational plan. You need to carefully consider the cost of the activities that you and the rest of your team will undertake in order to achieve your goals. This will generally require you to develop a budget and analyse it on a regular basis to ensure that you are wisely spending the financial resources you have been allocated
.Last, but by no means least, you need to fully consider the human resources. This includes all the people that you will use to carry out the various tasks that will allow you to meet your goals. Those involved should have identified skills to contribute to the work tasks. Aside from that, you may ask yourself: will they be available? Do they have appropriate training? Will you have enough staff? The time and date of resource availability should alsobe considered.
Workgroup targets
A workgroup refers to a set of people in an organisation that complete work tasks together. Since these people work together, they have a collective set of goals that they are aiming to reach; this refers to a workgroup target.
Think about the people you work with in your organisation: what are your workgroup’s goals? If you are to achieve your goals as a team you need to be aware of what those goals are, you need to be able to manage your resources in such a way that you are able to meet those goals.
Workplace targets vary among different workgroups or teams, but they typically include the following:
- Timeframes for goal completion
- Budgetary targets
- Production targets
- Reporting deadlines
- Sales targets
- Team and individual learning goals
- Participation requirements for each member
Techniques to Prepare Personal Work Plans
Each work plan has a different set of task requirements corresponding to the work task being addressed. Preparing a personal work plan requires accurate planning and identification of task requirements. Your work plans should be prepared with the following in mind:
What is your work plan for? You have to be able to identify the work task you have in mind when preparing a work plan. Including an outline of actual work task assigned to you and any related work tasks will help give context on the breakdown of requirements needs for the work task in mind.
What will the completion of this task contribute to your workgroup? Every accomplished work task should help further the workgroup targets. By identifying which workgroup targets are relevant to the task at hand, you are able to create a clearer picture on the level of priority the task has in comparison to other tasks.
You may also consider referencing an overall project plan or one of the organisation's business plans to create a link between your personal work plan with the workgroup targets.
Who will be involved in the task? Identifying relevant stakeholders will help you recognise a number of things. Some stakeholders are directly affected by your task because the results of your task are needed to accomplish theirs, or vice versa. The needs of some stakeholders also affect the quality of your results and performance, and should be considered during preparation.
What will you need to accomplish this task? Resources come in variety of types and each resource has an equivalent influence on the completion of a work task at hand. These resources and relevant information, such as their accessibility of use, will affect planning and coordination involved in the work task.
The skills you have are also a part of the resources you need to accomplish the task. Identifying these skills as part of your role's responsibilities and addressing them will be further discussed in the next sections.
What will you use in preparing and developing your work plan? In this digital age, technology has grown increasingly helpful in the workplace. The rise of various types of technology also gives an array of choices in terms of features that can be most appropriate to the task at hand. A proper selection of business technology according to the identified requirements of a work task will allow you to prepare and create your work plan with ease.
Material obtained from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Australia website is attributed to the Commonwealth of Australia.
Business Technology Used in Preparing Work Plans
Technology has provided an opportunity for easier and more efficient planning in the workplace. While there is a number of technologies available in the market, you can refer to the following three tools that may prove useful when preparing your work plans:
Intranet
An intranet is similar to any external website, except an intranet services employees internally. It can provide a means of communication among people in the workgroup or those involved in your work task. Depending on your choice of intranet provider, it may also include features such as creation of work task lists, assignment of individual work tasks, and scheduling of times frames and due dates.
Spreadsheets
These are documents created with the use of a computer program or application. Data found in these documents is in the form of an array (i.e., rows and columns), and can be organised at your discretion. The information that you provide in a spreadsheet, such as task requirements, can be ordered and filtered in multiple ways with just the press of a single button.
Online communication or collaboration tools or applications
The internet has provided users such as yourself with a mode of communication and collaboration to most everyone found on the planet, as long as they have a data connection. Many users have developed independent applications that specifically cater to workplace planning, as a response to the needs of every workplace. Communication-specific tools such as Slack and Skype offer ways of speaking with those involved in your work tasks in order to properly coordinate tasks steps and incorporate their needs if they relevant stakeholders.
There are also applications developed for collaboration in the workplace. These have features embedded that allow users to organise their work tasks and include information specific to each work task to allow for a smoother workflow. Applications such as Asana, Zoho Projects, and Trello offer these features. Specific applications have also been developed for tracking accounts in the workplace, such as Xero and Quickbooks.
As you prepare for the development of your work schedule, you will soon realise that the tasks you are working on will mostly require one stakeholder involved: yourself. Since you hold most, if not all, of the responsibility in your assigned work tasks, it would be wise to identify the scope and limitations of your role.
Accountability refers to your responsibility in your assigned work tasks. In the previous section, you were able to get a feel of task requirements that are likely involved in each work task and work plan. Part of your role is understanding what you can be held accountable for in each work task to ensure the task’s successful completion.
To identify your own accountabilities in the context of the work task assigned to you, you have to consider looking through the following:
- Job description
When you are hired into a role, you are usually presented with a list of responsibilities as an employee of an organisation. This helps you understand your personal accountabilities when you enter a specific workplace.
Case Study
Suppose you are a general manager of the human resources department of Bounce Fitness. Bounce Fitness is a business that aims to provide fitness and wellness in and throughout Australia.
With the role General Manager Human Resources, you are provided with an overview of your job description. This overview states that you are to guide and manage the overall provision of Human Resources services, policies, and programmes for the entire organisation. The major areas of your direction include the following:
- Recruiting and staffing
- Organisational and space planning
- Performance management and improvement systems
- Organisation development
- Employment and compliance to regulatory concerns
- Employee orientation, development, and training
- Policy development and documentation
- Employee relations
- Organisation-wide committee facilitation
- Organisation employee and community communication
- Compensation and benefits administration
- Employee safety, welfare, wellness and health
- Employee services and counselling
- Directs administration, including reception
- Security and upkeep and space planning
Take note that not all of your roles and responsibilities according to the job description will be needed when undertaking a specific work task. You should be able to sift through and determine which roles and responsibilities are relevant to the work task assigned to you.
- Organisational documents
Generally, organisations have a set of responsibilities that should be upheld by any member of the organisation, despite differences in roles or departments. These can be found in the staff handbook or other documents typically handed out by the human resources department during onboarding. These contain your overall accountabilities when you become a member of a new workplace. - Project or Work Plans
With you being the main stakeholder in your personal work plan, you will likely find yourself jotting down a list of responsibilities that are specific to the work task at hand. For work tasks that are part of a broader project, the project plans should also contain a description that will lead to a better understanding of your role and its extent in the project.
Determining Skills Required for Work Tasks
During the development of your own work plan, you need to be able to identify the skills needed to ensure the successful completion of the work task involved. Skills needed to complete certain work tasks may be specific to the nature of the task, but there are also skills that are more general and can apply to multiple types of work tasks. It is important to ask yourself the following questions to visualise the skills required for specific work tasks:
- How is this task related to my role in the organisation?
- What do I need to know to be able to complete the work task successfully?
- Is there any other person with a similar role or assigned work task?
Read the case study below that illustrates how to determine required skills for specific work tasks.
Case Study
As general manager of the human resource department at Bounce Fitness, you are tasked to allocate specific roles to your team members in order to properly onboard new trainers from each centre.
Consider that part of role allocation falls under your general role of managing employee orientation, development, and training.
Before proceeding to the development of your personal work schedule, you have to assess for any barriers that may hinder your performance when going about the work task assigned to you. While there are a variety of potential barriers, they can likely be classified into one of three categories:
Hill barriers
These generally refer to a limitation when it comes to resources that may arise from mistakes in identifying task requirements during the creation of a work plan. Such barriers can be avoided with proper planning at the beginning of each work task.
Case Study
As a general manager for the human resources department at Bounce Fitness, you have been tasked with the allocation of roles to your team. You identified that the main goal of this task is to make onboarding of new trainers from different centres more streamlined.
A limitation that you may encounter is an imbalance between the number of team members that are a part of this task and the number of that you need to assign. Consider reassessment of the roles needed to onboard new trainers. You may also reassess the team members who are part of the task; it might be wise to adjust the number of people involved according to the number of roles to be delegated.
Skill barriers
In line with the skills identified as essential to the work task at hand, you should also be able to assess if you have these required skills. One of the most effective ways of determining if you have the skills required is to conduct a skills audit. Depending on your organisation, you may also find that this is referred to as a training needs analysis. A skills audit can assist you in identifying the gaps that exist between the skills that you currently have and the skills that you need to undertake your roles in the assigned work tasks to meet the required performance standards.
You can determine from the results of the skills audit if you have any skills that should be addressed prior to beginning a work task. This can be done in the form of training, coaching, or mentoring from those in your workgroup.
Case Study
Suppose that Bounce Fitness is moving to be more technology-oriented and that task allocation should be done using any of the organisation’s collaboration tools. A recent skills audit revealed that you are not as proficient in navigating the designated collaboration tool used for allocation of roles.
Consider undertaking a form of training before proceeding with the allocation of roles to eliminate this form of barrier.
Will barriers
These involve a lack of motivation. While the causes may be different from person to person, the most common ones involve a shortage, or even complete absence, of support from the workgroup.
Since the causes of such barriers are varied, there is no single solution to address these. Associating the success of a work task with further the workgroup targets can be a source of motivation for some employees.
Based on Overcoming Performance Barriers. Change Factory
It is important to address these barriers before proceeding to the actual development of your work schedule. Once a work schedule is created and set into motion, any changes will affect other tasks, schedules, and timeframes. These effects will lower workgroup productivity and throw the workgroup and projects in disarray.
After creating your work plan and resolving any issues that might hinder you from completing the work tasks assigned to, you are now ready to develop your personal work schedule. The main piece of content in a work schedule are the timeframes. A timeframe is a specified period of time when a work task is set to take place. The end of a timeframe signals the completion of a work task.
When developing your personal work schedule, you need to consider both the information that you have identified in the previous topic, and the following additional information:
Available time refers to the amount of time that you are given to accomplish your work. This is a set amount of time wherein you will be able to schedule your tasks. The timeframes for your tasks should fit into your available time.
A priority is something that is considered more important compared to other things. In the workplace, different levels of priority are used to determine whether a work task should be urgently accomplished or can be completed last. These determine the order of your work tasks as your schedule progresses.
Making it your own
A personal work schedule is your own. Although it should establish assigned work tasks and the allocated times for each one, the overall look can be customised to your needs. Your work schedule can be organised in a number of ways, but it is recommended to arrange it according to the priority level of your tasks or according to the projected due dates that you have for each assigned work task.
A variety of templates can be found online or with the use of dedicated scheduling applications, which will be discussed later on. These templates can be modified to suit your specific needs.
To begin development of your personal work plan, consider the following steps:
Step 1: Identify all assigned work tasks
As a precautionary measure, you should list down all work tasks assigned to you. This ensures that you will not miss out on anything as you develop your personal work schedule.
It is advisable to keep a list of your assigned work tasks. Keeping this list updated with any additional work assigned to you allows you to track your workload.
Step 2: Collect information relevant to timeframes
This part of the process involves reviewing the work plans that you have developed regarding your work tasks. The most important information to consider are timeframes and deadlines. Deadlines keep track of when each task needs to be completed, and what are the expected deliverables or outcomes for each task. Common information you can find in the deadline section include:
- Specific start or end dates for each task
- Prioritisation of tasks
- Expected outcomes/deliverables
List the steps needed to complete each task
A work task can be broken down into smaller, more manageable steps. For each work task assigned to you, identify the steps that you need to accomplish to move towards your goal of completing the work task as a whole. Organise the steps according to the sequence they must be completed in. You may also list down relevant information about resources required, or personnel or stakeholders that you need to communicate with during the course of the work task.
Allocate time for each step
Allocate time according to your previous experience doing the task. If you were not able to track how much time you spent on the task or if the task is a new one, estimate how long it would take you to complete. It is best to give yourself lots of time and adjust it once you accurately know how much time you will spend on the task. You should also allow buffer times in between tasks, as well as time for breaks and interruptions.
Step 3: Prioritise work tasks
Typically, work tasks are not required to be completed at the same time. Work tasks are given to you in advance, so you have ample time to prepare for them. However, consider that some work tasks assigned later on are more urgent or require more time from your work schedule. This is where work task prioritisation comes in. Prioritising tasks provides you with a clear direction on how you will be proceeding with your work tasks. There are multiple methods of prioritisation.
Step 4: Arrange and schedule work tasks
Now that you have collected the necessary information about your work tasks and the steps involved in accomplishing each one, you may arrange them according to the priority level that you established in the previous step.
Generally, work tasks should be accomplished from highest to lowest priority. However, you should note that, since work tasks can be broken down into smaller steps, it is not necessary to finish one work task before proceeding to the next. Your work tasks may also have similar steps, wherein it would be more efficient if you would accomplish these together despite being part of different overall work tasks. The arrangement of your work tasks and task steps should take these into consideration.
After you have managed to arrange your work tasks accordingly, it is time to create a schedule. Your personal work schedule should integrate the information on the allocated times, timeframes, and deadlines with the arrangement of work tasks and task steps. In order to avoid being overwhelmed with the information, you may opt to use business technology tools or applications to aid in your scheduling.
Step 5: Communicate personal work schedule
Before considering your work schedule as complete, you have to be able to ensure that you are communicating with your workgroup during the development. It is important to consider that your work tasks could impact the work tasks of your peers and other relevant stakeholders. Open your communication lines so you can give opportunities to coordinate your work tasks with people in your workgroup.
Further Reading
The following articles contain additional tips on how to manage your time in preparation for developing a personal work schedule, including sample templates of different work schedules that you can use.
At times, the tasks assigned to you can have similar requirements. There may also be times when work tasks pile up and it is difficult to identify which ones should be completed first and how they affect the other assigned work tasks. In these cases, you have to learn how to establish priorities.
Technique Tips
While priorities can be overwhelming to identify, especially if you have a lot of work tasks to go through, you may find the following techniques to be helpful:
Tasks will seem less overwhelming if you see them all in one place. Creating a list allows you to have a quick overview of all the work tasks assigned to you. This will give you a better chance to avoid missing out on anything.
Take a step back and look at the items assigned to you. Do some tasks need to be completed before starting on the others? Sometimes, the tasks are related in that the processes or products of one task are needed before beginning another. These are important considerations when organising work assigned to you.
Risk is a chance that the work task does not go according to what is planned. These things should be evident with a proper work plan. Work tasks that have many associated risks should be given more priority, as they need more time and opportunities for adjustment.
Part of the risks that you need to consider are those that involve your own accountabilities, such as skills required to complete the task. Review your accountabilities based on the barriers that you have identified to establish the priority level of related work tasks.
Using all the information that you have gathered about your tasks, you may opt to classify them whether they are low, medium, high, or urgent priority. By doing this, you are able to gauge the amount of time needed for each task at a glance.
Priority matrices
Priority matrices are also used to identify the priority level of the work tasks assigned to you. They are tools to compare the levels of priority in terms of specific and objective criteria. While there are many types of priority matrices, you may find some of the following matrices useful.
Eisenhower Matrix
Categorises tasks according to their importance and urgency.
Action Priority Matrix
Categorises tasks according to their impact and effort needed.
Value and Complexity Matrix
Categorises tasks according to their value and how complex they are.
MoSCoW Priority Matrix
Categorises tasks according to project requirements.
Digital technology is not limited to specific areas in the workplace. You may also find that digital tools or software has been developed for scheduling tasks. While there are many tools available, here is a brief list of what you can use to schedule tasks more efficiently:
While these are useful in planning, they can also be utilised in work task scheduling. Although it is not specifically designed for this activity, the array format can help with making the timeframes more organised and specific using a Gantt chart format. This format allows you to view any overlapping or related tasks in your schedule.
Email clients such as Gmail and Outlook can serve as a means of communication and coordination when it comes to scheduling tasks. These email clients can provide you with an avenue to coordinate with others in your workgroup to consolidate work schedules in case of any related tasks among your team.
Calendar software on the computer can be useful to schedule related tasks among members of your workgroup. By sending invites, you can set up meetings or schedule consultations with regard to the work tasks that have been assigned to you. This type of software can send emails on scheduled tasks on your behalf to inform those involved of plans and activities you have lined up.
Similar to those used in planning work, these tools and applications were developed for a specific task: scheduling work. Because they were created with that purpose in mind, the process of scheduling is more streamlined, as long as you have the necessary information prepared. Some applications also include a way to communicate schedules instantly for ease of updating. Examples of scheduling tools and applications include Calendly, Float, and Acuity, among others.
You may have noticed that some work planning applications and task scheduling application overlap. In today’s digital age, software developers would often create tools and applications that can perform multiple functions. Multi-functional products are efficient and less overwhelming since there will only be one interface to work with. It is important to note that, while the applications are the same, there are specific features that cater to either work planning or task scheduling.
Key Points
- The development of a personal work schedule involves three phases: planning a personal work schedule, implementing the personal work schedule, and review, evaluation and updating of personal work schedule.
- Task requirements, personal accountabilities, and barriers to performance should all be considered in the planning of a personal work schedule. They should also be in the context of the assigned work task.
- Task requirements include resources required, needs of the stakeholders involved, and workgroup targets.
- Personal accountabilities can be found as part of job descriptions, organisational documents, and project or work plans.
- Barriers for performance in the context of personal accountabilities must be assessed and addressed before beginning the development of a personal work plan. Such barriers may fall under one of three categories: hill barriers, skill barriers, and will barriers.
- When developing a personal work schedule, available time and task priority level should be considered.
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