Nonprofit managers have always struggled with too many commitments vying for their time. The post-pandemic move to remote-first and hybrid workplaces has brought even more meetings to the average manager’s overflowing calendar. The results are a disaster: managers complaining about exhaustion and zoom fatigue, managers mentally checking out from meetings, managers working weekends and nights to attempt to catch up on work, and managers finding it nearly impossible to have deep, uninterrupted work time.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By bringing some thoughtful intentionality to your time management, you can claw back your days and make them feel spacious and productive again.
Here are my top four time management non-negotiables for transforming hectic, chaotic, overbooked schedules into productive, sustainable schedules:
- End every workday and every week with a planning session.
This means blocking off the last half hour of every work day to look through your schedule for the next day and mentally plan out how you’ll use your time effectively. This plan shouldn’t just exist in your brain: write it down in your notebook, a Trello entry, a calendar event, or any other kind of note. The goal is to have a simple, organized list greeting you in the morning when you step into work so you know exactly how you’ll spend your time.
At the end of every single week, do the same thing but at a grander scale: look through your entire coming week and note your biggest priorities, notice the rhythm of your days, and take notes on what you plan to do to get prepared. My personal preferred method of managing this is with Trello boards. I always have a column for “next week” which becomes “This week” on Monday morning, and I always include an entry for “Tomorrow plan” where I take notes on everything pending for the day.
Doing this means you won’t be surprised. You’ll end every day with a clear sense of direction and certainty about tomorrow, and you’ll have a chance every week to reflect on how things went and bring intentionality to the coming week. It’s important to use this moment to ensure that you daily activities still align with your highest goals, and that you aren’t wasting your time on low-priority tasks that aren’t actually an effective use of your time. - Win Mondays.
Whatever your most important tasks are for the week, get a big head start on them on Monday. This is the day to draft your powerpoint presentations, write your grant reports, prepare your materials for the board of directors, write your article, whatever. When I ran an advocacy team and also blogged about digital rights, my goal was to end every single Monday having written a draft of a blog post. You need to find your own version of that: important, high-value work that requires your full attention and engagement. That’s exactly where you need to be focusing your Mondays.
To really win Monday, you also need to minimize meetings on Mondays. That doesn’t mean zero meetings; a few can sneak in there without ruining your productivity. But don’t let them choke up your day. You also can’t lose Monday to administrative tasks and email.
Ideally, you are shipping something on a Monday, as in some sort of project leaves your care and goes for the feedback of someone else. Often that’s just a draft for someone else to review. If you aren’t shipping something, then you should have made substantial, measurable progress on a project that you can then continue to chip away at the rest of the week.
Mondays will always be in high demand, so defending them takes a lot of work. Nonetheless, you should defend them mercilessly. Blocking out a few hours on your calendar is a good tactic.
But why are Mondays so important? There’s something strangely magical about Mondays. When you have a productive Monday, you will find it cascades out to the rest of your week. Not only will you get far more accomplished throughout the entire week, but the rest of the week will also seem surprisingly easier. And (and this is weird but I promise this is true), everyone who works with you will be infected by this productivity bug. When you as a manager bring intentional, focused productivity and energy to your Mondays, those around you will be more productive for the rest of the week, too.
I think of this a little bit like a plane getting to cruising altitude: you’ve got to expend extra energy early on to get to the right altitude. But once you’re there, you can cruise a little bit and still be highly effective. Think of your Mondays as your ascent: you’re breaking free from the quiet weekend and putting in the energy to get back up to cruising altitude.
If you’re a Monday skeptic, then that’s fine. I urge you to try it for a few weeks and see if you can catch that magical transformation that will make your own weeks seem productive and impactful. And you may well find that this energy spreads to everyone around you.
One thing to navigate is that Mondays are also a day that is frequently taken as a federal holiday. Also, some people choose to take Mondays as a vacation day more often than other days. My suggestion is, when possible, try to organize your three day weekends to take off on Fridays rather than Mondays. If you’ve got to get in an appointment at the DMV or go to the doctor’s office or take a few hours off for some other reason, try to make it any day other than Monday.
Because just as winning Monday can set the tone for your week, losing Monday can disrupt an entire week.
There’s a longer post I could write about how to reorganize your weeks to ensure they are impactful when you do have to give up your Monday workday, and there are some specific techniques you can employ around that. But for now, I’ll just say: just try to not let it happen too often.
Finally, I know that it can be hard to jump start a Monday morning, especially if you took a real weekend and actually got to disconnect from work a bit. My biggest piece of advice for this, and the mantra I use for almost all my clients, is: motivation follows movement. You can spend your whole life wishing to get motivated to do whatever big boulder of a project is sitting in your to-do list. And the longer you sit there, the less motivated you will be. You must train yourself to begin without motivation, and then have faith that the momentum will create motivation in the wake of your actions. - Schedule one weekly deep work session (minimum)
You should have a minimum of one deep work session on your calendar every week. Ideally—and this isn’t possible for every manager—but ideally you carve out a day a week without any meetings or distractions. If you can’t jam a whole day into your calendar, shoot for two half-days (say, a Wednesday morning and a Thursday afternoon) with no meetings whatsoever. If you can’t manage that, then you can get started with just a single half-day where you can get deep work done and then work to arrange your calendar to get a full 8 hours into your week.
Can you make your Monday into an all-day deep work session? Yes, if that’s possible then that’s a great option. But for most managers I know, that’s a very difficult thing to swing because Mondays are in high demand.
Organizing your time to make this happen won’t necessarily be easy, especially if you work is very interruption-heavy environment or of your nonprofit has a culture that swings from emergency deadline to emergency deadline. But always remember that as a manager, you set the tone for your team and your vibe helps set the tone for the organization. When you carve out time for deep work for yourself, be transparent both about what you want to do and why you want to do it—and encourage others to do the same.
On the other hand, you might be in the kind of role where you have a lot more flexibility in your schedule and fewer meetings vying for your attention. If that’s the case, then err on the side of grouping your meetings so you can have a maximum amount of deep work time during the week. - Finish your existing project before starting something new, and minimize how many projects you do at once.
This is the simplest concept but it is very difficult for nonprofit managers, who are famously pulled in a thousand directions, to actually implement it. But committing to this approach can massively increase your productivity while eliminating the overwhelm in your schedule.
To do this, you can stack projects one after the other, but try to avoid letting them overlap. If it’s possible to work on just one thing at a time, that’s great. Two also works well. I would not go beyond three or you’ll start to see a nose-dive in your productivity.
The reason this works is that all projects come with administrative overhead costs that can eat up your time and energy: project updates, meetings, coordinating calls, a slew of emails, updates to various stakeholders, plus countless other little bits of admin that are unpredictable. Whenever you take on a project, you’re taking on all the administrative overhead of that project again. And that can destroy your schedule and leave you burnt out and overwhelmed.
Let’s imagine, for the sake of a grossly simplified hypothetical, that every project you take on comes with an hour of daily administration. If you have just one project, then you might theoretically be spending seven hours a day in productive work contributing to ending that project and just one hour in admin. You’ll finish the project swiftly and be ready to take on the next task very soon.
If you have four active projects, your productivity plummets. Suddenly, you’re losing four hours a day to administration and only have four hours left for making progress on those projects. Projects will linger. A project that might have taken you a week could easily blow up into a two month project, with a massive amount of time spent in updates, meetings, emails and check ins.
You can see where this is going: with enough projects on your plate, it’s easy to start treading water where you are making little to no progress on any of your projects and instead just spending hours in administrative maintenance. What a recipe for burn out!
Stacking projects means deferring the administration until you are ready to get started on the project. It means that you don’t start engaging in emails and meetings on something until it’s prepared to move to the top of your queue. And once it is at the top of your queue, you have the capacity to give it your full attention and get it done so that it won’t linger unresolved for months.
Nonprofit managers typically have a few hours every week that are just the work of managing: replying to emails, check ins with their direct reports, reviewing and approving work, sending reports to their own managers, coordinating between teams. This means a nonprofit manager’s time is already at a premium. That’s why nonprofit managers must be even more intentional about how their maximize their impact by being rigorous in their project management.
As with everything, blocking out time on a calendar for various projects is a great way to make sure that you can get the time you need for important work. And for a larger conversation about stacking projects, I’d recommend Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, which really highlights the dangers of overlapping commitments and the power of doing less to do more.
Interested in bringing intentionality to your work weeks? I’m happy to offer time management and intentionality trainings for nonprofits as well as coaching for nonprofit managers. Schedule an initial call today to talk about your goals.
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