Time plans

Photos: Sarah Pflug and (insert) Shopify Partners, on Burst

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should USE THIS PAGE INSTEAD.

What does a good time plan look like?

This depends very much on the size of trusts you’re approaching. The following downloads are for:

A portfolio of smaller trusts

A portfolio of very large funders

The big problem with good time planning for large trusts is accuracy, which means the investment of time. The minimum you need is a set of deadlines together, so you can see issues coming up. 

However, it’s useful to have a plan that shows both what’s coming up and how long it takes. Over time, I’ve used the following:

• A year or 18-month plan, with allocations of time. When you add in the time, it makes it much more realistic and avoids some of the crunches you otherwise face, but it’s a lot of work to maintain, especially if your work is a bit more fragmented.
• A Gannt chart-type monthly plan on Excel, with tasks broken down into major sub-tasks. You can look at it and see whether you’ve got too much work on particular days. It feels very rewarding to run, as it both enables you to allocate your time strategically and if you’re  ticking stuff off you feel very in control. You can put time consuming tasks in a dark colour, to give them more weight when you look at the thing visually. Again, though, it’s time consuming to do. It can also get a bit long to keep track of easily – you need a big screen or an ability to see small text, at minimum.
• A work plan in a Word table, broken down into fortnightly chunks, with the big items highlighted (e.g., in bold) and the most important ones in red. I put “½” in front of something where there’s progress and “x” in front of something that’s finished. Every fortnight, I delete a column and add a new one. There’s one in the past (keeping some sense of what’s achievable, for my planning) and one for the present and one for the future. In combination with a year planner, this can give you a good amount of control. However, it doesn’t pick up well the days where you’ll be overloaded well and is a bit hit-and-miss as to whether you’ve got too much work in place or whether you’re keeping up.
• A day’s to do list (ideally, with timings – it doesn’t take long to add). People recommend you do these at the end of the previous day, which makes sense unless, like me, you’re likely to stay on if you suddenly find you’ve missed something! I like doing these in Microsoft Notes, because I can add tick boxes and tick things off every day.

Estimating how long things take

Quite a lot of trust fundraisers don’t have that clear a sense of where their time goes and I’ve seen a lot who over estimate what they can achieve in the time available. This is one of the things I’ve struggled with the most. Here are some ideas that have helped me:

• Keep a breakdown of how you spend your time, for a couple of months. In my experience, people substantially under-estimate the time spent on:

• • • Admin
    • Internal requirements (reforecasts and reconciliations; requests from management; and so on)
    • Budgeting/rebudgeting and strategy, as it only happens a couple of times in the year

• Go back through your achievements versus KPIs and use them as the basis for the new work

• With very big applications:
  • It’s useful to rough out a GANTT chart, in the following way:
  • Work hard to get all the elements of the task out on paper: rough out a work breakdown structure, using a drill-down where necessary, to really get the task out on paper. If there are significant new parts to the work, a business requirements analysis and maybe a gap analysis will help. (These are all standard project management terms, look them up online if any are new.)
  • Assign times, trying to base them on actual examples
  • There are two different ways to look at this: how long the actual timings take; and how they fit into the overall timeline of the development of the project. (You’ll need to give the other people working on the project time that’s both reasonable and realistic to do their bits.)
  • Check with the key people if they are going to be on holiday or completely snowed under with work during that time. This can significantly impact your timeline.
  • “Reality check” your timeline by comparing it with previous large project applications made.
  • Look at the funding deadlines (internal and external)