It’s Time For A “Think Week”
For five years I’ve been taking a “Think Week” once a year. This usually happens between the time of Christmas and New Years when most people are already off work and it was easy for me to shut down distractions, reflect on the past year and plan for the year ahead. More recently though I have started to take a think week on a quarterly basis and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.
A “Think Week” is a week of work where you cancel all meetings, put an “Out of Office” on your email and take the time to reflect, reset, and refocus. This is not a week of vacation, although in today’s back to back video conferencing world, it can feel like a vacation.
This is a week of work and it’s the most important work you will do because it’s deep thinking, focused work on you and your business.
We all know the importance of focusing on one task at a time, blocking off time on our calendar to complete those tasks, but all too often that focus time still gets interrupted by pings, emails, calls, and crying children. The power of a “Think Week” is just that, it’s a week long with little to no distractions. So what are you going to do for a week? Here are my steps for getting started.
The Prep:
Plan ahead of time so you can cancel all meetings and let your team know you are only available for emergencies
Add an OOO on your email and Teams/Slack account.
Bring sticky notes, pen, paper, and max two books.
If you can, get out of town and stay in a secluded space, this will help get your mindset right and will limit distractions, but not 100% necessary. It is still possible to do a Think Week without going to a new location, just make sure you hold fast to the three points above.
Day 1 & 2: Reflect:
You are going to be doing a lot of writing and reviewing past performance metrics. Here are some writing prompts to get you started:
Check-in, how are you feeling right now, personally and professionally.
In the past few months what has brought you the most joy and where did you find the biggest success?
Where do you feel things could be improved?
Now that you have written out your thoughts about where you stand, it’s time to look at the data! I use this time to review all current performance metrics, and leading source indicators for my business. Here are some ideas of what I look at:
How are we tracking to meet our KPI’s and strategy and what are the leading indicators causing this?
All financial metrics as detailed as possible (you’ve got time, don’t worry about diving in)
All marketing channels and performance
Any other business function KPIs and measurements
Company impact - the key measure that is aligned with your mission
Try not to solutionize in this phase, as it’s all about getting a true state of the business and most importantly yourself.
Day 3 & 4: Reset
Once you’ve done your proper due diligence on your current state, it’s time to move on to modifying the approach to get the results you want.
In this phase I often go back over my notes and highlight key things that went well and key things that didn’t. From there I ask myself the following questions:
Do I keep doing what I’m doing, modify it, or is it no longer a priority?
If I could do one thing everyday that would provide value what would it be?
Where are my weak points, and points of failure, and how do I mitigate this risk?
Is the overall strategy still the right approach? If not, what needs to change?
Where do I need to grow?
Day 5: Refous
This phase is all about prioritizing your next steps. You just had four days of deep thinking (yay!) and I know a lot of stuff probably came out, the good, the bad and the ugly. So now it’s time to take the re-adjustments you made in the reset phase and prioritize them. Here’s how I would group them.
Three changes you want to make immediately
Three changes you want to make in the next 3-6 months
Three changes you want to make in the next year
Integration
A few helpful notes, as you get back to your regularly scheduled programming after a think week: You most likely are going to come away with a lot of new ideas and be super refreshed which is great! But remember your colleagues have not been on the same journey, be sure to set up some time with them individually or as a team to review your learnings, and get feedback on the adjustments you want to make.
Happy thinking!