Party Planning Made Easy: Try A Work-Back Schedule
So much to do. So little time. Treat Christmas like a business and use a work-back schedule—you could find the season more enjoyable.
SAVE ON STRESS | Time to Hall out ye-old workback schedule If you’re like me, one month from now, December 12 to be exact, you will start to panic and pour on the holiday steam. You’ll shop madly, bake badly, decorate like a maniac and begin, finally, to think about the design for your custom Christmas card, kicking yourself as you do every year for not having jumped on it earlier. So much to be done in so little time and all of it accomplished in the evenings.
Christmas will never be as carefree for adults as it is for kids—we have too much work to do behind the scenes—but this year I’m going corporate and using a simplified version of a “work-back schedule” to get everything done in an unhurried, orderly and more enjoyable manner.
What Is A Work-Back Schedule?
Anyone who has planned a wedding or other major event has used a work-back schedule. Unlike a To Do list, which typically notes what needs to be accomplished but not the steps required to do it, a work-back schedule is tied to a specific endeavour and involves thinking backwards along a timeline to determine what specific activities will be required to pull it off without a hitch. In other words, you begin at the end and work your way back to the beginning so you can start there and finish on time and stress free.
3 Steps To Work-Back Success
Do the following to make sure your work-back schedule works:
1. Name your project and pick a completion date. A project can be as simple as a single meal, Christmas dinner for example, or as complex as the Christmas season itself, which would have multiple tasks, one of which is Christmas dinner.
2. Determine the major tasks required to complete the project and assign each its own completion date.
3. Identify the sequence of steps necessary to complete each task, putting them in chronological order and assigning them a completion date and someone to do the work. A project with multiple tasks may have any or all of them at various stages of completion at any one time. When all the tasks are finished, the project is complete.
A Frugalbits Free Offer
A work-back schedule may sound confusing in theory, but it is actually simple in practice. If you would like a copy of an easy to use work-back schedule with blank spaces you can fill in, email editors@frugalbits.com and we’ll be happy to send you one—for free, of course. —C. Rule
Photo: iStock
I would be most pleased to receive this schedule.
Anything to get me on the right track to an enjoyable holiday season.
Thanx
MB
Please send me a work-back schedule. Loving your site!
Thank you!
Sent. Hope you find it useful.—eds
If it is still available, I would so much appreciate a copy of a work-back schedule. It sounds like something which might help lessen the stress of the next few weeks.
Thank you so much.
Done! —eds
Plese send a copy of your easy to use work-back schedule
Thanks a lot