How do you uncover the secrets behind success stories? One way is to break down people’s daily routines. Project managers’ days are action-packed — full of problems to solve and people to meet. So how do they effectively bring order to such chaos?

They prioritize ruthlessly. They follow strict timelines. And they love a well-maintained Gantt chart.

Whether you want to become a project manager or are looking to climb the ladder, it’s important to know the best ways to prioritize multiple tasks of different scales, manage your days effectively and maintain work-life balance, especially in this role. And what better way to find out than diving into the lives of successful project managers?

We delve deep into the daily routines of successful project managers and distill what we learned from them. There’s insight on how to block time, prepare for meetings, and communicate with stakeholders.

Daily Routines For Becoming A Successful Project Manager

Let’s go over how successful project managers spend their days, and how to build a good routine to get your tasks done. This routine shouldn’t be taken as the gospel truth rather go ahead and tweak this routine to suit your needs.

1. Get an Update on the Status of All the Tasks

The scope of project management is huge because it involves multiple functions and stakeholders–from engineering to product management to UI/UX designing to human resources–which means there are dependencies from different departments. So keeping track of each and every task is crucial to meet deadlines. Usually, a project will be divided into multiple phases and each phase will be broken down further into major tasks which will be broken down again into smaller tasks. So there are hundreds of tasks and multiple, long timelines, and each timeline may be dependent on the completion of the other. Most project managers use project management software like Jira or ProofHub to track the progress of these sprints, manage resolutions, and prioritize tasks or groups of tasks or multiple tasks simultaneously.

So when you start your workday, getting an update on the different tasks happening that week should be number 1 on your to-do list.

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2. Create a To-Do List

Nobody puts it better than psychologist Dr. David Cohen who explains that to-do lists are great because of three reasons, “they dampen anxiety about the chaos of life; they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to; and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month.”

It’s crucial for project managers to stay on top of their own tasks. By own tasks we mean the different meetings with stakeholders, documents to review, conflicts to resolve, etc. Since there is a lot of catching up to do with the stakeholders–both internal and external, creating your list of to-dos will be helpful in keeping track of your activities, meetings, and reviews.

3. Block Time for Deep Work

Studies from multiple sources show that we are hit by distractions at least 50–60 times a day. These distractions–emails, unnecessary meetings, and the loss of focus are some of the biggest culprits. We spend a whopping 2 hours reeling our focus back. As a project manager, you cannot afford to lose a couple of hours like that. So if you’re on a mission to boost productivity, block a couple of hours in your calendar every day to focus on deep work. You might need time to review data, or run project analysis or revisit timelines.

You could use this time for:

Conflict Resolution: One of the most important aspects of project management is people management. That is helping out people in need, acting as a peacemaker between stakeholders, conveying a change in timelines, etc. Blocking particular time periods in a day and letting others know about the time is effective in avoiding ad hoc tasks as well.

Budgeting: Yes, budgeting is something you’d do right at the beginning of the project but that’s not the end of it. It is important to constantly keep evaluating it as the project progresses. Why? Because projects are unpredictable; bugs, issues, and delays cannot be foreseen. What we can foresee, however, is its impact on the project timeline and budget which project managers are always on top of, always revisiting and verifying.

Time management: Projects are usually split into a multitude of tasks encompassing smaller tasks, and sprints. If it’s an engineering project, there will be designing architecture, code development, testing, and deployment. Irrespective of the project type, you’ll have to add milestones in between groups of tasks to mark different phases or parts of the project being complete. But the thing is delays may be inevitable–even a day’s extension for a particular task can leave a domino effect on the timeline. So project managers should always maintain an eagle eye on the timeline.

4. Check In With Your Team

One of the first things you should do in a day is check in with team members to get an update on the current progress of tasks. Regularly checking in with your team members not just about work but also about how they’re doing, will improve their trust in you as a leader. The trust that you’ll have their back, and that you’re here to help them out. Such free-flowing communication is key to pushing progress. The sooner you identify roadblocks, the faster you can solve them and meet timelines.

You can set up daily or weekly standups, progress meetings, and team huddles with different departments involved in the project–whatever opens the flow of communication from the teams. In these meetings, you have set clear deliverables, expectations, goals, and ways to attain them for the people working on the project.

Make sure you have conveyed when they can reach you for any discussion and keep communication channels open so they know they can approach you when necessary. While it’s not recommended to be buried in slack/emails throughout the day, keep an eye on your slack or email to be on top of your communication.

Don’t Forget to Prepare for Meetings:

Unproductive meetings cost up to USD 37 billion to U.S. businesses. Elon Musk’s Tesla actually encourages its employees to “walk out” of time-wasting meetings. Being a project manager, the onus of having productive meetings falls on you. So how can you run meetings that provide value to its participants?

Preparation, obviously, but not the one you’d type out on your notes app highlighting key points you need to cover. To start, there are different kinds of meetings. Project management expert Jeannette Collazo writes in Forbes the following types:

• Project kickoff meeting
• Project status meeting
• Stakeholders meeting
• Contingency meeting
• Project review meeting

Depending on what kind of meeting it is you can prepare a deck with relevant details about the meeting.

To ensure you’re running a productive meeting, director of projectmanager.com Jennifer Witt, outlines four key areas to focus on:

• prepare (Purpose, people, and props),
• communicate (Agenda, action items),
• facilitate (On time and staying on topic),
• and wrap up (Action items and next steps).

This way, you can ensure that every meeting adds value to you and the team.

Feedback Loop Matters in Projects of Any Scale:

Your main job when running meetings is to ensure that you and the person you’re speaking with are on the same page about tasks. If you’re speaking to an engineer, ensure that they are well aware of their deliverables. Or if you need to give feedback, make sure that it’s practical and constructive. If you’re getting feedback from leadership, well, make sure both sides understand the expectations. Feedback is crucial for the growth–of the project and of individuals. Everyone’s learning and providing feedback for your team is instrumental in bridging the gap between what’s required and what’s available. Also, feedback goes both ways. Your team is the group of people who fight with you on the trenches so don’t be afraid to ask them for feedback.

5. Plan Ahead for the Week

Always keep a bird’s eye view of your project. It is important for a project manager to not be tied down by the details and forget the bigger picture.

Today, the focus may be the task at hand but project managers have to focus on the tasks coming tomorrow, the next week, and the month, and ensure that the daily activities or tasks are completed on track to meet those milestones.

Remember we mentioned Marie Kondo-level organization? Well, with multiple to-dos to cross off in a day, it’s easy to be stressed about deadlines or work. That’s why you need to continuously tweak deadlines or sprint timelines or plan ahead for the week so that you don’t fall behind on targets, and paint a clearer picture of where the project will be a week from now or two months from now. So prepare a list of tasks that should be completed in the next 1 week or 1 month, and include the stakeholders and dependencies involved in those tasks.

6. Wind up for The Day By Responding To Emails

On average we spend up to two and a half hours checking emails every weekday, adobe reports. That’s two and a half unproductive hours if you’re not taking action after checking those emails. To ensure that they don’t waste time on emails, project managers, check their email first thing in the morning. But they use Gretchen Rubin’s One Minute Rule, wherein you’d reply only if it takes less than a minute or emails that are a top priority. The rest of the emails can be pushed to the end of the day. The rule states if a task takes less than a minute to complete, do it. So reply to that slack message, or wash that dish, or ping your manager, so that these tiny little tasks that have the potential to pile on throughout the day don’t keep nagging you and stressing you out.

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What does a Project Manager do?

Northeastern University defines project managers (PMs) as people who are responsible for planning, organizing, and directing the completion of specific projects for an organization while ensuring these projects are on time, on budget, and within scope.

Project managers have a unique set of technical and soft skills that enable the collaboration of multiple departments. To know in detail about what project managers do, we broke down the project lifecycle by Adrienne Watt and explained at each stage how a project manager contributes.

Initiation Phase:

In the initial stages of the project, stakeholders come together to discuss the scope, the timelines, the risk, the financials, and the resources required for the completion of the project.

• At this stage, it is important to communicate with each one of the stakeholders to get a clear understanding of the problem and the outcome of the project. Now, this is vital because this is where the goal of the project gets decided.
• Next comes assessing the project scope, envisioning the project and understanding the nuances of it, gathering the requirements, and foreseeing issues, timelines, and budgets.
• Finally comes testing the feasibility of the project. Not all projects are feasible and so it becomes important to test the goal, the plan to achieve it, and the possibility of completing it within the stipulated time and budget.

Once these are done, the project begins.

Planning Phase:

Here, you’d plan out the project. Discuss the timelines, allocate the resources, and create the project plan.

• The project is broken down to phases. Each phase will have its own goals or milestones.
• Each goal will have the necessary resources allocated to it.
• After discussions with the different teams involved in the execution of the task, timelines will be set, even for the smallest goals.
• Meet up with the different internal and external stakeholders to understand precisely how each task in the project would be handled.
• This would help you understand the budget and the exact timeline. In this phase, contingencies will also be planned to meet delays and or unprecedented issues.

Execution Phase:

This is where all the efforts put into the planning would pay off.

• As part of execution, you’d need to work on prioritizing tasks and ensure that your team has everything they need to get the tasks done.
• Your clients need to be informed of the progress of the project at every step. Your team needs to be aware of delays and any issues with their tasks.
• There will be meetings daily to catch up with leadership or clients or employees.
• Tracking progress becomes paramount. Your Project Management Tool would ensure that you’re always on top of things, and every delay and bug is accounted for and rooted out.

How to Stay Productive as a Project Manager?

• Having a morning routine in place: Not a lot of people really understand the importance of this but having a set routine like physical activity or meditation helps you focus and be mentally prepared to handle the load of tasks for the day. Having a structure for your morning routine can improve your productivity, and that’s especially important for a project manager because your productivity has direct ties to how your team will perform. CEO and founder of a fundraising company, Wayne Elsey, writes in Forbes, that having a routine or structure when you wake up improves your productivity. He adds, “If you rise every morning and you have to make a mountain of decisions, you’ll feel weighted. However, if you wake and know what happens next, your brain can focus on what needs to get done.”
• Stop switching between tasks: As a project manager, you may be sitting on a lot of number-crunching tasks, which means you must, absolutely, at all costs, refrain from switching between windows. Burnout is not just the result of having poor work-life balance or not investing in out-of-work activities, Michael Mankin notes in Harvard Business Review that “burnout is also driven by the always-on digital workplace, too many priorities, and the expectation that employees can use their digital tools to multitask and power through their workloads. Multitasking turns out to be exhausting and counterproductive as we switch back and forth between tasks.”
• Take frequent breaks: Taking regular breaks at work? Science approves. Studies show that taking regular breaks helps reduce stress and helps you maintain your productivity streak. The key point that is highlighted through research is detaching yourself from work. If you are jumping between meetings and reviews, you should definitely take breaks.
• Gaining knowledge: Project managers are like a jack of all trades so it’s important to focus on constantly upskilling yourself about different fields or technology or other business verticals. To do it every day, just read. It’s that simple. Warren Buffet reads for 80% of the day. Business Insider’s Michael Simmons calls it the five-hour rule. The likes of Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, read for an hour a day, which adds up to 5 hours of reading per week.
• Work-life balance: As we all know and will probably never practice: stop taking work home. That’s not just taking unfinished work home, it’s also taking calls from home, taking meetings or interviews, whatever is part of your work at the office, don’t take it home. Set clear boundaries with your work, with your manager, and with your colleagues. You need time to live your life outside of work. Employee burnout is real, and if you don’t stop working all the time, you might be next.

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Conclusion

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to becoming a successful project manager. But having a routine is a good way to keep track of improving the way you work, tracking your progress, and finding out how much better you can become.

Routines take time to build. Remember how hard it was to break out of your college routine?

Start adding or replacing one activity a day to your existing routine to build a sustainable routine.

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What does the daily routine of a successful project manager look like? was originally published in ProofHub Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.