Why every professional needs a "polish week" once a year
Here’s what I know:
It can feel hard to find time to pause and clean up your work systems.
It’s deeply worth doing anyway.
“Polishing” up your systems will pay dividends every day moving forward.
Read on for what “polishing” looks like and get a free editable checklist you can personalize for your own use.
If you want more support with this idea, I’ve got a whole online course at www.polishweek.com with extra templates, downloads, and how-to videos to support you to implement Polish Week for you and/or a full team you lead.
In the midst of the busy lives we lead, taking time to clean things up, freshen systems, and invest in future ease can be challenging. Every professional should make time to take a week (or even just a few days) every year to “polish” their systems, which will pay major dividends in your productivity for the rest of the year.
What follows is a recommended set of steps during your polish week to set you up for a great year. Jim Collins wrote about an interview he did with Peter Drucker: "That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven," Drucker writes, "But one can always manage oneself." How can you possibly expect others to perform at the highest levels without first expecting that of yourself? Drucker lays out a law of organized performance: the ratio of a leader's performance to those on his or her team remains constant; therefore, if you want the average performance of those around you to go up, you must first improve your own performance.”
Here are the things you can do during your Polish Week/Day:
Design Your Ideal Week
Why this matters: We all have preferences for when we do certain things (meetings, creative work) within a day and within a week. Clarifying your approach to what you’d like your ideal week to be helps you get closer to that ideal week in each real-life week.
How to do it: I recommend creating this in a Google Sheet or Google Doc - just a simple 5-column table with each day representing a weekday. Perhaps you use the rows to represent mornings and afternoons, or you prefer to have each row represent an hour of the day. Some guiding questions:
When, in what location, and on what days do you want to have time to sit down and work alone?
When do you want to build in family, social, or alone time?
When do you do your best planning work?
How will you build in space to keep your systems polished?
When do you want to check-in with others?
When do you want to exercise?
How do you want to approach lunchtime?
When would one-off meetings ideally happen?
Are there entire days you want to block off for specific types of work (“Fundraising Fridays”) to help batch work to the extent possible?
Get to Inbox Zero (or at least Inbox <30)
Why this matters: Inboxes with hundreds or thousands of emails are overwhelming - it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of things when important emails are spread out amongst much less important content.
How to do it:
If you like the idea of a few sections on your view (one for “Needs Reply”, one for “Waiting”, etc.), this is a good approach.
If you want your inbox to look like it has before mostly, try this approach:
Archive all emails that are older than 30 days but still in your inbox. Do a search like this: in:inbox before:2017/06/15, where you set the date to 30 days ago. Then click “Select all messages that match this search” and click “Archive”. If an email from back then truly matters, someone will bring it back to your attention. Free yourself from old emails.
Note how many emails are still in your inbox after this, and set a 25-minute timer to see how many you can process (delete, delegate, do, add to your to-do list) in 25 minutes. Take a break, then repeat until every email in your inbox is viewable on one page (or inbox zero!).
Plan Your Rest
Why this matters: You cannot just be “on” all the time. The planet has seasons, and so do our work and our lives. You need to plan to ensure your rest happens.
How to do it: Schedule your vacations, but also schedule other shorter breaks. Maybe you need a Friday off once a month to be able to function? Maybe once a quarter you have a busy time, and you need to rest for a few days after that? Maybe you always feel less energetic if you’re a menstruating person during a few days each month? Whatever your needs are - plan for them.
Turn off Notifications
Why this matters: The research is significant and clear - notifications are killing our productivity, causing us stress, and making us less present as colleagues, friends, and parents. Take the time to turn off notifications that you do not need, and make sure you can make a really good case for keeping notifications on if you want to choose to leave some of them active. It saves battery, too!
How to do it: You’ll want to do this in a few places - your phone and your browser. Given how many types of phone operating systems and browsers there are, I recommend doing a search for “How to customize notifications in ___” where the last word is the type of phone system or browser you are using.
To-Do List Cleanup and Setup
Why this matters: A to-do list with lots of old content clutters your view every day. Spending a minute to organize your system will pay off every day that you use it. I use Asana as my task manager, but there are many great ones out there.
How to do it:
Cleanup - Remove any old tasks that are no longer relevant. If you might do them someday, create a separate “Someday/Maybe” list.
Setup - Setup the system to work for you. Create a view where you can see everything due this week, or everything due today. Use tags or sections more effectively. Create templates for oft-used processes.
Set up Your Future Self for Success and Sustainability
Why this matters: There are times you can expect things to be busy/compressed - weeks of big events, weeks where a major deliverable will be due, weeks before or during travel, etc. You can set yourself up for those weeks to be a little easier now by planning ahead.
How to do it: Look through your calendar moving forward and build in blocks of work time and personal time before, during, or after big weeks.
Build Recurring Tasks into Your System
Why this matters: There is so much you can plan for - annual, monthly, and weekly recurring events or tasks. Set up systems so that these to-dos can get out of your brain and you can spend that precious mental energy on more important things.
How to do it: All-day calendar events can be helpful, but then you still have to remember each week/ month/ year to create a to-do item on your list for that thing. Given this, I recommend recurring tasks in your task management system (I recommend Asana, and there are many great other options). Setup recurring tasks for these types of things:
Each of your colleagues’ birthdays (day of to remind you to say happy birthday)
Dates one week before each birthday and gift-giving occasion that matters with a reminder to get a gift (including family members)
Submitting and/or approving timesheets, time off, and expense reports (weekly)
Weekly data entry
Personal recurring tasks like paying bills, scheduling fun seasonal things, reviewing your credit report, getting the gutters cleaned, etc.
Clean Up Your Calendar
Why this matters: You use your calendar daily. Get rid of stuff that you don’t need cluttering up your system and your brain.
How to do it:
Remove calendar events that are no longer relevant to you.
Audit each recurring meeting - does it still need to happen? How frequently? Is it in the right part of the week/day? Does it need to be this long of a meeting?
Create Email Filters and Click that Unsubscribe Button a Lot
Why this matters: When I went on maternity leave the first time, I set up filters before I left to make sure that when I came back I could turn my attention to the most important emails first. A full two-thirds of the emails I got on leave were filtered out, saving me lots of time and letting me focus on what matters most (and reminding me how so few of the emails I receive matter very much). These filters help me daily - I read newsletters and other less-important emails in batches instead of throughout each day with my more important emails.
I have filters set up for things like this:
For things like when people accept a calendar invitation from me, I have them set up to skip my inbox and go into a folder called “Calendar”, and when that folder has unread items I can go through them all together as an FYI. I still get calendar declines to come into my inbox, because that sometimes requires me to take action.
For newsletters from organizations, I have them skip my inbox and go into a folder for newsletters. I review these when I am feeling brain dead or otherwise have a few minutes to kill but can’t be productive in other way.
I have Asana notification emails skip my inbox and go to an Asana folder. I review these in a batch once a day or so in case I need to take action.
Other ideas include system notifications (like from an expense reporting system) into a folder, or starring items from specific important senders so that you see them first.
How to do it:
Setup filters in Gmail: Here’s a guide - it’s quick, especially once you’ve done it once.
Unsubscribe from emails that you no longer want to receive.
Create tactical plans/get started on projects
Why this matters: Deadlines creep up. Planning out your actions to get to an outcome helps you avoid pulling fire drills and helps identify quick tasks that can get things moving in the right direction.
How to do it: For each of the things you need to spend time on in the coming quarter, get started by putting together a list of actions you think you’ll need to take to accomplish them. Start moving on some of the quick things (sending emails to request meetings, etc.), but don’t spend too much time doing the work itself. This week is about polishing systems - you deserve to spend time on polishing. When you are ready to plan those projects next week, here’s some advice.
Nagging Tasks - Do or Capture
Why this matters: Have you been meaning to email your doctor about something? Call your credit card for a lower rate? Sell that couch on Craigslist? We all have things like this that we’re keeping in our head. Get them out of your head to leave space for more important things.
How to do it: There are two choices here:
Write it down - put it into your tasks system so that it can live there instead of your head.
Do it - if it’s quick, just get it done and move on!
Setup Your Browser Bookmarks Bar
Why this matters: We use our internet browsers all day long. Easy access to your most-accessed documents and websites saves time daily.
How to do it:
Make sure your browser bar is visible - if it’s not, Google how to do this.
Delete any bookmarks in your browser bar that you don’t need.
Add links to documents you access weekly - things like your goals, your to-do list, and other key systems.
Freshen Up Physical Space
Why this matters: It’s amazing what you can get done in just 20 minutes in refreshing your desk or work space. The chance to rethink where things are and what needs to be within arms reach is a valuable exercise.
How to do it:
Take everything off your desk.
Wipe it down.
Start replacing with your most critical items, like a monitor or computer space. Don’t just put them where they were before automatically - consider what makes most sense for you today.
Aim to not put back 30-50% of what you removed - get rid of those items or store them elsewhere. Keep your physical space clear except for things you use daily or that provide a lot of joy.
Update Your Software
Why this matters: If your computer or phone has been notifying you that you need to update software, or clear up space for storage, that is taking up brain space that you could better use for other things. Remove that distraction.. In addition, software updates and overfull digital folders can put you at risk of losing important work.
How to do it: This varies from device to device. If your device is not available during the updates, take this time to grab lunch, write a handwritten thank-you note, or take a walk.
Prepare to Maintain
Why this matters: Now that you’ve invested in polished systems, how will you maintain them? It’s worth planning your weekly ritual to stay on top of things.
How to do it: David Allen’s weekly review process is a tried-and-true method for staying together. Here’s the checklist he recommends going through weekly. Block time once a week on your calendar and hold it sacred.
Organize Your Files
Why this matters: You access digital files in most hours of your workday. Having them better organized will help you every single day in the coming year.
How to do it: Here’s a list of files to organize and clear out:
Desktop - Clear away all files. If there are files that need to be read or acted upon in some way, move to Dropbox and make a note in your to-do list.
Downloads Folder - Delete everything in this folder. If something should be saved (don’t spend a lot of time reviewing for this - you probably have these files in your email if you needed them later), move to another system.
Google Drive, Dropbox, or other Systems - Archive folders that are no longer in use and setup folders for content that you will be creating moving forward.
Individual Polish Week Checklist
Click here for an editable version you can copy and personalize.
Written version of my ideal week
Inbox Zero - archive emails older than 30 days
Inbox Zero - get down to Inbox Zero or Inbox <30
Turn off phone notifications I don’t need
Turn off browser notifications I don’t need
Clean up and setup my task management system
Setup space (seat time and personal time) around future busy weeks/events
Build recurring tasks into my system (weekly, monthly, annually)
Remove any irrelevant events from my calendar
Audit recurring meetings, make changes as appropriate
Setup email filters
Create project plans and/or first action lists for my quarter goals
20 minutes clearing my head of nagging to-do items/open loops - capture them into a system
Setup my browser bookmarks bar with my most-used sites and documents
Clean off desk, wipe down, and replace only the items you use daily.
Update software on my phone and computer where necessary.
Set a weekly review habit - mark in on your calendar and hold it sacred.
Clear my desktop of files
Clear my downloads folder of files
Clean up and organize my other file systems - Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
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