Working as IT professionals, we have a number of things to take care of in a day which are directly or indirectly related to our work. We have emails from different departments like Accounts, HR, Admin or IT teams. There are inter team and intra team meeting invites, Internal communication channels like slack / teams and more. And then have our work it could be in the form of JIRA tickets, workfront or any other tool. In short there is so much to take care of in a day, having a checklist can help you in organizing your day to day work.
It is not that one can’t take care of everything without the checklist but having one helps for sure.
Below is the list of items you can take care at the beginning of your work, before starting the work:
- Checking emails:
- Checking calendar:
- Checking internal communication application:
It’s always a good idea to go through your emails every morning instead of jumping directly to work. Checking emails can help you in checking if there are any updates / surveys / notifications which have deadlines and you don’t want to miss.
You don’t want to miss any deadlines from Accounts, HR or IT department for sure.
There could be some sudden meeting invites in the 1st half of the day from your colleague working from a different time zone which may have arrived while you were sleeping.
Lastly JIRA / Workfront or any other ticketing system you work on. You want to check emails from them every morning to see if there are any new requests for you or any inputs or updates on your work.
Yes, mostly we have a fixed time for daily meetings. But there could be some one time meetings which don’t repeat in an occurrence. Having a clear idea of your meetings is really important in WFH. I don’t know why but there is always a meeting that occurs close to your lunch or tea break. If you check your calendar in the morning you can adjust your brakes accordingly.
There can be a number of channels in your internal communication channels, say Slack for example. It is always good to check if there are any new messages received after you logged out on the previous day. As there is no specific log off time, chances of getting a message after your sign off increases.
Once you go through these three things, you will have a clearer idea of managing your work, brakes and you can adjust the pace of your work.
When your day is about to be done, you can also go through the below checklist to end your day:
- Documenting daily work records:
- Checking emails:
If you have a good habit of documenting daily work records, you can have them added to your checklist to end your day. If you’ve never documented a daily work record, this article will help you in understanding ‘Importance of documenting daily work records’.
Checking emails is a common task to start and end your day. It gives you an idea in advance to manage the next working day’s work.
Above points are listed based on my personal experience. If you think I missed anything in the list, please mention the same in comments.