Have you booked your own Weekly Review into your Calendar?
Does your week fly by, being busy, doing lots of stuff. Then you get to the end of the week to come up for air, and say "I'm a human, get me out of here!". Then trying to blank work out of your mind the best you can over the weekend. Knowing you have to pick up the pieces again on Monday, putting on your battle armour ready to survive another week.
If you do, you may not have heard of a useful exercise you can do once per week, to help your head. It's called the Weekly Review. And it does what it says on the tin. You review where you are up to, check nothings fallen through the cracks, check you are on course, and then plan ahead.
Book it in to free your head
People who start to do this regularly (and yes I'm one of them), eventually find that they can't live without it. It raises your head up from the day-to-day actions you are working though, to a higher perspective. Gathering yourself, your tasks, and your projects, to make sure your ship is steering in the right direction, and minimising any future stressful surprises.
When I teach people this idea, the first thing they ask is, When am I best doing it, and where on earth do I fit it in to my jam packed week? David Allen, author of Getting Things Done suggests a 1-2 hour duration early on a Friday afternoon. This allows you to clear the mental decks by the end of the week, so you feel relaxed heading in to the weekend. It also gives you a window in the afternoon to then catch people before the end of the work week.
Start small and build a checklist
So how do you implement it. Well I always suggest to start small and experiment. Book an hour slot once a week for the next 4 weeks. Get it in your Calendar now to commit yourself to it, and to stop someone booking a meeting in there with you. Begin to build up a checklist of things to do, check, review, update. You could start with just one thing, maybe getting your email inbox in shape, and ensure you've captured (or even completed) all the actions that needed doing. Or looking at the biggest projects you are working on and ensuring you have at least one next step in place for each.
I could spend all day trying to encourage you to try a weekly review, but you won't fully see the benefits until you start to build one in. Many people don't see the benefit of doing it at first as they think It's not "work". I would disagree, as thinking about and "defining" the work that you do IS still work. What time you feel you may lose in immediate efficiency, you will gain multiple times in effectiveness in your work and life.
Want to know more about the weekly review and to get on top of things? Take a look at my Get Stuff Done (and make it fun!) workshop. I come to your site to help you and your colleagues be more productive and less stressed.