Time-boxing: for when you wear too many hats 🧢

This week’s Fridays 4 Fundraising is about a technique I love to use when I’m wearing too many hats.

We may feel like that’s just #NonprofitLife, but we need to really work on getting away from that if we’re ever going to truly get our organizations out of the fast track to burnout.

I practice dividing my role into the various “jobs” that I fill…and I call these “work streams.” Then I look at a typical week and I divide my week into times to dedicate for those different streams.

For example, as a director of marketing and development for an arts organization, I had a number of work streams:

• Weekly and special event marketing

• General marketing/PR/brand building

• Capital campaign

• Annual fund campaign

• Membership operations

At this particular job, I had a day for each of these work streams. On Monday, I focused on general marketing/fundraising. On Tuesday, I would work on our weekly and special event marketing. On Wednesday, I divided the day between membership operations and the capital campaign. Thursday was general fundraising, and Friday was my “leave this day open because something will have blown up at least one of my days this week” day.

In other jobs, I’ve divided my work streams into 2-3 hour blocks because that worked better, and my week was a little less easy to divide into days.

Either way, I took each hat I was wearing off, took a good long look at them, and figured out when I had the right time/energy/information to do each piece each week.

I’ve always done this, with every job I’ve ever had. When I was a more granular role, the hats were more granular (as a development assistant, my work streams were: database management, donor acknowledgement, email and social media prep, event logistics). The more I moved to jobs where I had more responsibility, they become more broad. But you see what I’m getting at.

So here’s your assignment for this Friday for Fundraising:

Step 1:

Take off your hats, and make a list of what they are. Write down your different work streams.

Step 2:

Think about each work stream. How many hours per week do you need to dedicate to that work stream. On what days/times do you have the energy/availability to focus on them? Do you ever wait on something to be able to act (a staff meeting, another staff member to finalize something, etc.)? If so, when is that work usually done.

Step 3:

Use a sheet of paper to map out your week between work streams. This is called time boxing. (Might I humbly suggest that if you are an Executive Director, CEO, or other top leader, that you leave Fridays 4 Fundraising, so you can implement what I send out via this newsletter?)

Step 4:

Program your time boxes into your preferred calendar app. Structure them like meetings. Set your time to BUSY. If you need to have your calendar open so that colleagues can book meetings (or you use something like Calendly), set some times in the week that are specially designated “open for meetings” and sent them as “available.” (I usually set mine to times when I don’t have a lot of energy for solo work, but talking to people perks me right up…3-5 p.m. usually. You might be different, if you want to get the meetings done so you can focus the rest of the day, you can set your meetings block 9-11 am.) Make sure you’re not open for meetings all day every day.

Step 5:

Now plan each week around your time boxes. Take your to-do list, and maybe categorize everything according to your work streams. Then, when you are working on that workstream’s time box, you can pull up the tasks related to that specific time box.

How It Helps:

The reason I do this, the reason it works, is that things that can happen anytime happen no time…and the way we usually prioritize our to do list means we do the thing that FEELS the most urgent. This is how I see my clients (who are usually Executive Directors, CEOs, and other nonprofit leaders that have a lot of diverging work streams) end up getting through a whole month and then saying “woah, I never found the time to work on my individual giving program!” Once I coach them to create time weekly to work on something, anything, related to fundraising, and to treat it as a meeting (you can’t do anything else other than the next priority on your individual giving to do list), they start making a lot more progress.

Give that a go. Here’s a template where you can map out your time boxes.

If this was helpful, please scroll down and sign up for more Fridays 4 Fundraising tips, just like this.