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A Quick and Easy Morning Routine to Jumpstart a Productive Week

How to start your Monday mornings in the right headspace

At the start of my last job, I began taking notes on almost everything. If I had a random thought pop into my head, I wrote it down. If I attended a meeting, I would take the meeting minutes along with action items. Or if I had a review coming up, I would document my work week by week and then summarize it ahead of the meeting. At the end of two years, I had a sizeable digital notebook of words – a variety of information that was a mix of complete sentences that made perfect sense or a few words with no context. The more pages filled with notes, the harder it became to find action items and accomplishments quickly.


Accomplishments

The first thing I take notes on is my accomplishments. Let’s be honest; as data folks, we have so much going on in a week. You may often find yourself switching between understanding your business objectives, developing a technical solution, or deep-diving into a specific topic to solve a problem. With all of that going on, we can get lost in the details and miss our work’s impact, which is why I like to take a pause on Mondays and reflect.

What is it that I accomplished last week? What impact did my work have on the project, business, or colleagues?

Taking this step back and documenting accomplishments allows you to have a nicely curated list when it comes time for quarterly or annual reviews. Another reason this type of reflection can be helpful is for job searching. You now have a list ready to add to your LinkedIn or resume and discuss in your interviews.

Talking about developing a list of accomplishments, though, doesn’t mean one sentence string like "developed a script to run an ETL process." Instead, I use the STAR method to develop my list. As defined in the article by Kat Boogaard, the STAR method is:

"Situation: Set the scene and give the necessary details of your example. Task: Describe what your responsibility was in that situation. Action: Explain exactly what steps you took to address it. Result: Share what outcomes your actions achieved."

Using this method, let’s redefine our accomplishment.

  • Situation – You are given a dataset that needs to be cleaned before developing analytics on it.
  • Task – For this project, your task is to develop a script to run an ETL process on the provided data.
  • Action – To do this, you utilized Python to extract data from the text fields, normalize the information, and upload it to CosmosDB.
  • Results – In the end, your script loads in 1TB of data and stores the results in 8 hours, resulting in a 4X speedup in runtime to process results.

Now that we have thought out our accomplishment, we can rewrite our statement:

❌ Developed a script to run an ETL process.

✅ Designed a Python script to run an ETL process on 1 TB of data that would extract and normalize text data and upload to Cosmos DB. This script resulted in a 4X speedup in runtime to process results before running analytics on the data.

In my opinion, I prefer the second statement for my resume and reviews. This statement gives a brief look at what the task was while also showing results. By writing these types of accomplishments out once a week, your work has already been done for you. When it comes time for reviews, you don’t have to try and recall what you have worked on the past few months. Instead, you can use your list and highlight the accomplishments you are most proud of.

Another reason I like to do this once a week is it allows me to see the progress that I have had. I can look back on what I did the week prior and see what has gone well and what has not. If I need to make some adjustments along the way, I can.


Action Items

Along with tracking accomplishments, I start my week by determining what I need to work on. In my last role, I would do this by consulting the scrum board and backlog. Using that as a digital checklist, I would determine what needed to be done next and what was a priority.

Starting my new role as a Data Science consultant, I decided to continue tracking my action items, but I needed to adapt to the process. Currently, we have a scrum board, but it is not utilized the same. Instead, it focuses on high-level objectives. For me, this was not granular enough to track my week-to-week progress. To solve this, I list all action items on physical To-Do list notecards now. These notecards are just big enough to grab a day or two worth of action items. After a week of tacking down these actions, you can find yourself with 2 or 3 notecards of what you needed to work on that week.

Looking back at the past week’s checklists allows me to figure out what has been completed and what has not in my analyses. As well, I can determine what I need to focus on at the start of the week.

When starting your week, here are some things to consider:

Open Action Items – What tasks did you not complete last week that you need to start or continue? Sometimes I cannot achieve everything I put on my checklist for the week. So at the start of the next, I look over these items. Then, I determine what needs to be started or continued from that list. Sometimes open action items are planned for later based on the feedback I get from the previous week.

Feedback – Once those are planned for later or added to the list, the next thing I look over are action items related to feedback. What feedback did you receive on your work last week that you need to address? Did you get advice on how to improve your model? Were you given a new dataset to look into? If it is a priority, then I add the items to my list. Otherwise, I plan it for a future week.

Planned Actions Items – Lastly, I look over the scheduled items to see what needs to be started based on due dates. What planned tasks need to be started? Planned tasks sometimes feel like an easy one to put on the list, but if I have learned anything about data science, that may not always be the case. Sometimes these tasks need extra time to focus on research, understanding the business objectives, and implementation. Make sure you are giving yourself enough time when you add these planned tasks to your list.

What things do you like to look at and do at the start of your week? Do you have any routines that you find helpful?


Final Thoughts

If you often take many notes like me, you may also find it hard to find action items and accomplishments among them all quickly. At the start of my week, I like to do two things (1) track my accomplishments for the week in one list, and (2) rewrite my week’s checklist.

  • Instead of tracking a list of tasks, create a list of your accomplishments with their associated results. Find a method that works well for you. I use the STAR method to develop my list. This list can be helpful for resumes, LinkedIn, interviews, and quarterly or annual reviews.
  • Start your week with a clean checklist of action items that need to be completed. Organize your thoughts on what you need to work on and finish.

This article contains affiliate links. If you would like to read more, check out some of my other articles below!

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