Deep Dive: Maintenance / Upkeep Tasks

In this Deep Dive series, we’re going to look at a few things we believe need to be in place in any business – regardless of industry and size.

We’ve talked about our weekly Upkeep Tasks before, but we want to dive in a bit more and provide some essential tips on implementing them – and sticking with them.

Upkeep tasks are ones we batch together and schedule to complete them Friday afternoons – sort of a weekly “wrap up”. They don’t necessarily need to be done each week, but we prefer it that way so that we can get them done in 30-60minutes, rather than a larger block every other week, or monthly.

We block this hour as “Focus Time” in our calendar and is a non-negotiable, meaning we aren’t moving it to accommodate another meeting. With that said, we also don’t schedule meetings on Fridays unless absolutely necessary. It’s a day we aim to dedicate mostly to our own business and knock out any required client work first thing in the morning.

So what’s in our Weekly Upkeep Task block?

Weekly Mileage (we use Everlance to track our km’s)
Upload any receipts to Dext
End of Week reports for clients (contract / time / project status updates)
Sort our inboxes: file any emails and follow up on any that are outstanding / require a response from us
Tidy Office

We keep it simple as we don’t want it to include any actual work-related tasks, but rather just a way to close out the week.

Another task we’re adding to the list is looking at the following week and adding our time blocks, and any important tasks that need to get done. Much shouldn’t change over the weekend for our schedule for the following week, so setting the time blocks (while always moveable!) allows us to start Monday with an idea of what the week is going to look like.

If we haven’t convinced you already to add these into your weekly schedule, give it a shot. The worst that will happen is that you don’t do it. The best that can happen is that it’ll give you another level of organization in your business, that doesn’t take a ton of time.

“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.” – Eleanor Roosevelt