My Week in Karbon provides a quick overview of the Work Items, emails, and notes that require your focus each week. This article offers insights into how My Week functions, the actions you can take, and best practices for effective management, building upon the basic usage of the feature.
Index
Optimizing your Workflow
Mastering Scheduling Options:
Boosting Efficiency
Enhancing Collaboration and Planning
Optimizing Your Workflow
Adding Items to My Week:
Work Items: Automatically added for the work assignee and team members with assigned tasks or budgets, corresponding to the work's start date ("This Week," "Next Week," or "Later"). These items progress through the sections as the start date approaches, following the "Resource Planning" in the Repeating Schedule for recurring work.
Emails or Notes: Add via the information tray ("Plan for This Week"). Remember, they can only be initially planned for the current week. Move them to "Next Week" or "Later" within My Week. You can also add quick notes directly in My Week, which, if assigned to yourself, appear in "This Week."
Please keep in mind, emails and notes can only be planned in the current week that you're in. If you would like to move them into the 'Next Week' or 'Later' buckets you will need to do this in the 'My Week' feature.
You can also add a note to your week straight from My Week. Just click on 'Add a note' and put in a quick note on what needs to be done.
If you add a note and assign it to yourself, the note will automatically be added to the 'This Week' bucket of your My Week.
Prioritizing with Drag & Drop
Easily drag and drop items to prioritize your workload across "This Week," "Next Week," and "Later."
Efficiently Schedule from To Plan
"To Plan" holds items without a set start date. Drag and drop these Work Items to "This Week," "Next Week," or "Later" to schedule them.
Mastering Scheduling Options
Automatically move items to 'This Week'
For Work Items on a repeating schedule, Karbon automatically adds them to the My Week of all associated team members.
The default setting for planning recurring work is 'Week of Work Start Date'. This means:
When a recurring Work Item is created, it initially appears in the 'Later' bucket during the week of its start date.
One week before the start date, it automatically moves to the 'Next Week' bucket.
When the start date arrives and falls within the current week, the Work Item moves to the 'This Week' bucket.
You can customize this planning behavior within the repeat settings of a specific Work Item:
Open the Work Item.
In the header, under 'Repeats', click the repeat schedule.
Click Edit.
Scroll down to the 'Resource Planning' section.
Choose from the following options:
Week of Work Start Date (Default)
Week of Work Due Date:
Work Items appear in 'Later' during the week of their due date.
Move to 'Next Week' one week before the due date.
Move to 'This Week' when the due date is in the current week.
Don't Add Planned Week:
Work Items appear in the 'To Plan' bucket for the Assignee upon creation.
The Assignee must manually move these items to their desired week.
Planning occurs for the Work Assignee upon Work Item creation and for the rest of the Work Team when Tasks and Budget are created.
Best Practice Tip: Select the 'Resource Planning' option that best aligns with your firm's workflow. Consider providing team members with more planning flexibility by using 'Don't Add Planned Week', or opt for greater control by planning based on the start or due date.
Please keep in mind, once Tasks and Budget have been created for an instance in a repeating series, you cannot update the planning settings for that specific instance. Any changes will only apply to future occurrences.
For bulk updates to the 'Resource Planning' settings across multiple Work Items, please contact Karbon Support for assistance.
Boosting Efficiency
Removing items
You can remove an email or note from My Week if you no longer want to see it in My Week. This will not delete or remove the work item, email or note from anywhere but My Week.
To remove an item from My Week, navigate to the item you'd like removed, look to the right of that item and there you will see the options menu (...) and select 'Remove from My Week'
Leveraging Bulk Actions
To efficiently manage multiple items in My Week, utilize the "Select" option for bulk actions. This allows you to quickly move items from 'To Plan' to your desired week, progress items from 'This Week' to 'Next Week' or 'Cleared', and perform other actions on multiple selections simultaneously.
To move items in bulk:
1. Select Items:
Click the checkbox next to a section header (e.g., 'This Week', 'To Plan') to select all items within that section.
Click the checkbox next to 'No Items Selected' to select all items currently visible in My Week.
For a range of items, hold the Shift key, click the first item, and then click the last item in the desired range.
To select individual items, click the checkbox next to each item you wish to include.
2. Choose an Action: Once your items are selected, you'll see options appear above the item list:
Click 'Move to Next Week' to move selected items to the 'Next Week' bucket.
Click 'Move to Cleared' to move selected items to the 'Cleared' bucket.
Click the '...' (more options) button to reveal additional actions, such as moving to a specific week in the 'Later' bucket.
Best Practice Tip: For scenarios with many items, consider using the "Select All" option and then de-selecting the items you don't want to move. This can be faster than individually selecting a large number of items.
Filtering for Focused Work
Quickly pinpoint the Work Items and tasks you need to address by utilizing the smart filters available in My Week. These filters allow you to narrow your view to specific items based on various criteria.
The available filtering options include:
Status
Due Date
Start Date
Work Type
Please keep in mind, when filtering by Work Type, only the top four most frequently used Work Types will be displayed individually. If more than four unique Work Types are present in your My Week, the remaining, less frequent types will be grouped under an 'Other' category. This ensures the filter list remains manageable.
Rules for filters
You can select multiple filters within a single filtering option. For example, within the Due Date filter, selecting both 'Overdue' and 'Due This Week' will display all items that are either overdue or have a due date within the current week.
You can also select multiple filters across different filtering options. For instance, selecting the 'In Progress' status under Status and the 'Month-end close' Work Type will only show Work Items that have both the 'In Progress' status and the 'Month-end close' Work Type.
Please keep in mind, the specific filtering options available for each category will depend on the items currently present in your My Week. For example, if no Work Items have a 'Ready to start' status, that status will not appear as a filter option.
If the list of available filters extends beyond your screen, you can scroll to the right to view all options.
Moving Individual Work Cards
My Week offers two intuitive ways to move a Work Card between different buckets:
Drag and Drop: Simply click and hold the Work Card, then drag it to your desired bucket ('This Week', 'Working on Now', 'Next Week', 'Later', 'To Plan', or 'Cleared') and release.
Using the Actions Menu:
Click the three blue dots located on the right side of the Work Card.
A dropdown menu will appear.
Select the name of the bucket you want to move the Work Card to.
Enhancing Collaboration and Planning
Calendar Integration
Once you have successfully connected your email provider's calendar to Karbon, any existing events in your external calendar will be immediately visible within the My Week calendar view.
Upon accessing the Calendar, you will default to the 'Day' view for the current day. However, My Week offers three distinct ways to visualize your schedule:
Day: Provides an hourly breakdown of your appointments and available time, allowing for detailed planning. You can also drag and drop Work Items, emails, or notes from your My Week buckets onto the 'Day' view to block out specific work periods in your schedule.
Schedule: Presents a chronological list of your calendar events for the selected day, along with a count of the items currently in your My Week list for that same day.
Week: Displays a visual overview of your entire week, highlighting periods where you have no scheduled events. Clicking on a specific date within the 'Week' view will navigate you to the 'Day' view for that day.
Blocking Out Time from My Week
You can directly schedule time for your Karbon tasks on your calendar from within My Week using the drag-and-drop functionality:
Simply drag a Work Item, email, or note from any of your My Week buckets onto your preferred time slot within the Calendar view.
This action will create a corresponding event in your connected email provider's calendar, making your planned work time visible to your team.
By default, dragging an item will create a 30-minute calendar event. You can easily adjust the duration and date of this event by clicking on it within the calendar.
When a calendar event is created from a Work Item, you can access further details by clicking on the event. Within the event details modal, under the Work field, clicking on the Work Item name will open the Work Overlay, providing quick access to begin working on the item or navigate to its full details
Visibility
When you schedule time on your Calendar from My Week, you have control over the visibility of that event on your connected email provider's calendar:
By default, events created from public Work Items, notes, or emails will be set to Visible. This means the event will appear on your email calendar with the same title as the Karbon item.
If you drag a Work Item, note, or email that is marked as private, hidden, or not visible to others in Karbon (e.g., an email not on a public timeline), the corresponding calendar event in Karbon will be set to Hidden.
Hidden calendar events will appear as "Busy" on your colleagues' view of your email provider's calendar, protecting the privacy of the underlying Karbon item.
You can modify the visibility of a calendar event at the time of its creation by using the visibility dropdown menu located within the event details modal.
Communicating with "Working on Now"
Consider a scenario where you are assigned to a Work Item, but its progress depends on a colleague completing their assigned tasks first.
My Week facilitates team collaboration on Work Items through the 'Working on Now' section. You can easily see which of your colleagues are actively engaged in a specific Work Item by viewing that item within your own My Week.
When a team member starts working on a Work Item, they can move it from their 'This Week' bucket into the 'Working on Now' section.
This action provides a clear visual indicator to the rest of the team that the individual is currently prioritizing that specific Work Item. Similarly, when you move a Work Item into your 'Working on Now' section, your colleagues will be able to see that you are actively working on it as well.
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