It’s frustrating to get to the end of a week and feel like you haven’t really gotten anywhere, even though you’ve been working your tail off. All too often, it’s not that we haven’t been working hard — it’s that we’ve been working on things that don’t align with what matters most.
To make sure that this week’s efforts are building a bridge to a better future for yourself, give yourself 30 minutes to work through the following steps:
- Review this month’s goals or priorities. Doing this helps make sure this week’s effort pushes forward higher-level goals or priorities.
- Choose this week’s priorities and projects. At this point, you’re not putting tasks to time — you’re anchoring your priorities and goals.
- Review this week’s schedule. Two common pitfalls with weekly planning are 1) letting your schedule drive your priorities or 2) overcommitting due to a lack of awareness of available time. This step helps prevent (1) and the previous step helps prevent (2).
- Adjust your priorities and projects, as needed, to get to 5 or fewer priority projects. Most of the time, looking at this week’s schedule will prompt additional tasks and actions needed to have a successful week. You may need to do a project cage match.
- Allocate your remaining time to your priority projects and necessary admin. Many people underestimate how much admin time they need and how far a few focus blocks can take them. Time blocking helps with both.
Bonus: as your work changes, update your weekly plan. Often, the most sensible thing to do is to defer/punt projects as you go since the Sunday/Monday versions of ourselves chronically make commitments that the Thursday/Friday versions of ourselves can’t deliver.
This post is the first part of a series of “atomic essays” published on Twitter.
Great quick tips! I really appreciate that having to defer tasks at the end of the week is just a sign of how optimistic I was at the beginning of the week and not some character flaw!
Question: step 4 really needs to happen with step 1, right? Or do I have to re-do the cage match every week rather than once a month? For me, this week’s schedule shouldn’t introduce more tasks except for prepping before and following up after meetings, and that’s what I used admin blocks for. If those meetings don’t fit into the five projects in some ways, then maybe I need to re-think my monthly goals…. Last week, I set up three energizing stakeholder meetings for this week, which is good balance for the lack of connecting I felt up to last week. (Uterus-bearers: ovulatory phase is an ideal time to focus on connecting.)
Hmm, I am investing more than 30 minutes on this as I learn the procedure (got sidetracked with balancing create, consume, connect and how those map for me to the different kinds of time blocks), but it is giving me energy to feel that my peace of mind and organization and success visualization is worth this time investment upfront! Thank you!
Thanks for the comment, V!
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need to recalibrate. In the real world, emergent priorities and changes pop up AND the month-sized priorities for the month may not account for the fact that, this week, something came up.
For instance, it’s unlikely that needing to replace a washer or filling in for a sick coworker this week was on the plan for this month, but them being on deck this week means that we need to recalibrate our priorities for this week. When reality changes, change the plan.
Learning almost always takes more time than applying. I hope it’s faster and smoother for you next week. 🙂