Planning your week effectively can have huge benefits to your productivity and mental health. By taking some time to prepare, reflect, and celebrate, you can set yourself up for a successful week where you tackle top priorities, avoid burnout, and feel a sense of achievement each day.
Table of Contents
Take Inventory of Tasks
Before diving into scheduling your week, it’s helpful to first take a full inventory of the tasks and projects you’d like to accomplish.
Make a Comprehensive List
On Friday evening or over the weekend before the coming week, create a master list of absolutely everything you want to get done in the week ahead. Don’t filter or edit the list at this stage – the goal is to fully download all of the tasks occupying your mental space so you can then evaluate them more objectively. Writing it all out is like clearing space in your mind to focus.
Evaluate Importance
Once the full list is made, go through each item and honestly evaluate how important or necessary that task or project really is for the coming week. Cross non-vital items off the list to focus only on meaningful priorities. This also reduces decision fatigue from an overwhelmingly long list of choices for how to spend your time.
Use week Time Blocking
For particularly large, complex, or intimidating tasks, time blocking is an effective way to break them into focused chunks of effort.
Schedule Focused Time
Rather than a general to-do list, assign set blocks of time devoted specifically to key tasks so you can give them undivided attention for bursts of real progress. This adds both structure and urgency. For example, spend 10-11 AM only working on a big report, with no emails or meetings allowed to interrupt you during that block.
Add Structure and Urgency
Time boxing provides structured boundaries around tasks that may feel vague or infinitely put-offable otherwise. Giving a task designated focus time on the calendar also adds positive stress in terms of urgency to use the allotted time wisely. This can greatly increase motivation and discipline to actually make progress on “stretch” goals.
Reflect Each Morning
Once your pared-down weekly plan is set, spend 5-15 minutes each morning reviewing it:
Review Plans and Motivations
Look over your priorities and visualize what success on each task will look and feel like. Connect with your motivation underlying each one.
Visualize Completing Tasks
Mentally picture yourself steadily working through and completing each task on schedule. Envision how satisfied you’ll feel enjoying the benefits of finishing each item. This mental priming helps prompt behaviors aligned with your goals for the day and injects them with deeper purpose. It cultivates the right mindset.
Reflect Each Evening
Bookend your day by taking 5 minutes each evening to reflect on and celebrate the day’s accomplishments:
Appreciate Accomplishments
Note which tasks you completed and reconsider why each one was a priority. Appreciate the progress made, energies invested, and benefits created even for small wins.
Prepare for Tomorrow
Process any incomplete tasks to decide whether they should be scheduled for another designated time slot, delegated/collaborated on, or dropped. Then review tomorrow’s plans to be proactively prepared rather than reactive.
Celebrate Progress
Be sure to actively celebrate all forward progress and goal achievements. Our brains release dopamine when we experience success. You can harness and amplify this natural reward response:
Reward Your Brain
Purposefully trigger happy brain chemicals by high fiving yourself, doing a silly dance, treating yourself to something special, or otherwise genuinely cheering on your own accomplishments, no matter how small they seem.
Further Positive Momentum
Condition yourself to recognize and take joy in your hard-earned victories rather than discount them. This fuels ongoing motivation, discipline, confidence, and expanded achievement over time.
Enjoy the Small Things
Celebrating even tiny bits of progress trains your brain to spot more positive moments to appreciate. Focusing on these small bright spots creates a more positive, encouraging frame through which to view your efforts and life overall.
Ensure the System Works for You
Remember, productivity methods are meant to support you, not cause more complexity or stress. Avoid rigidity about “the right way.” Instead, stay flexible to tweak things so your system is optimized for your needs and style.
Adapt Methods as Needed
Don’t hesitate to modify techniques that aren’t working well or adjust timelines if too aggressive. Streamline overly cumbersome elements so your workflow is simplified rather than complicated by productivity plans.
Reduce Friction and Stress
If tracking systems start to require more effort than they save or induce more angst than relief, step back to pare them down and capture only the most essential pieces that serve you best. Don’t force methods that backfire with added friction, resentment, or being counterproductive. Protect your time, energy, and morale.
The right productivity system looks different for everyone. But hopefully incorporating elements like preparing with task clarity, time blocking intensity, reflecting on purpose, and celebrating intentionally can help boost your motivation and effectiveness. Design your system foremost around what makes you feel empowered.
5 Unique FAQs
Here are 5 unique frequently asked questions related to planning your week effectively:
What’s the 80/20 rule and how does it relate to planning your week?
The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, says that 80% of your outcomes are due to just 20% of your efforts. Use this principle when planning to identify and focus on the vital 20% tasks that will generate the majority of your desired results each week.
Is it better to schedule my hardest tasks for mornings or afternoons?
Because willpower and focus tend to be highest early in the day for most people, it can be beneficial to tackle bigger priorities first thing when you’re freshest. But know your own natural rhythm – if you struggle more in mornings, schedule key items later.
What’s the simplest yet effective weekly planning system?
For those seeking an uncomplicated system, the “Ivy Lee Method” has just one step: each day, write down your top 6 priority tasks to focus on, and work singlemindedly through only this list, rewriting any leftovers the next day.
How long should it reasonably take to plan out an entire week?
To avoid spending more time planning than doing, keep your weekly planning tightly limited to just 20-60 minutes per week. Be as consistent and brief as possible with planning activities to keep them from becoming burdensome.
Is it better to schedule fixed routines or leave flexibility each day?
Generally it’s most effective to anchor core routines like exercise, commutes, and key meetings as fixed items on your calendar to schedule other tasks around. But also leave some open, unscheduled time each day for spontaneity and breathing room.
