Winning Your Week: How to Plan Your Week in 30 Minutes Flat
Planning the week is the number 1 productivity tool that top executives and entrepreneurs use to get more things done while reducing their stress. Here we explain why it is so important and how best to plan your week in 30 minutes flat.
If you want to have a life of awesome success, you do need to accomplish your big goals. But these big goals can only be accomplished when you get the small things done every week.
That is why when 5.000 top professionals and entrepreneurs were interviewed about their top productivity tools, over 90% mentioned a weekly plan. However, less than 10% of professionals plan their week on a regular basis. This is thus the single most important tool by which professionals can not only increase their productivity but also reduce stress and increase fun at work.
1. Working in Focus Cycles
Making a weekly plan is part of working in focus cycles. Focus cycles are periods of time of intense work, preceded by a work planning session and ended by a work review session and a recovery period before the new cycle starts.
Thus focus cycles have the following elements:
● Planning
● Focused Work
● Review
● Recovery
We show the benefits of working in focus cycles here:
“How Working in Focus Cycles Helped Me Be Less Stressed and Get More Work Done”
Focus Cycles can be:
● Daily → a daily task list
● Weekly → a weekly plan or weekly sprint
● Monthly → a monthly plan or monthly sprint
● Yearly → a yearly plan
We believe that the most important one to get right is the weekly one, which is why it is so important to plan your week.
2. No Reason Not to Do a Weekly Plan
Even though we have seen the power of a weekly plan to increase productivity and reduce stress, we know that some people have the following arguments against it:
● Weekly planning takes time
● Weekly planning is uncomfortable
● We should Just do things as they come up
2.1. Weekly planning takes time
While it is true that planning does take some time, you are not wasting time, as you would have to plan your work anyway. If you do not do it at the beginning of the week you will constantly have to do some planning during the week.
Also, if you do the weekly plan the way we describe below, you will be able to complete it within only 30 minutes flat.
2.2. Weekly planning is uncomfortable
You might experience planning as uncomfortable. This is because during the planning process, you will become aware of the sheer avalanche of tasks that you are responsible for. However, as soon as you are done with your weekly plan you free your subconscious mind of this avalanche of tasks. This is because writing them down on paper makes your brain let go of them.
2.3. Just do things as they come up
You also might be under so much pressure to execute tasks and meet deadlines that you just want to get the most urgent tasks done as they come up. However, this way of working has many disadvantages: It will likely lead you to avoid the most important things in preference of the most urgent ones and it will lead to a lot of stress.
Therefore, you have no reason not to do a weekly plan.
3. Why You Absolutely Need to Do a Weekly Plan
There are many benefits of doing a weekly plan:
● More clarity
● Less stress
● More focus & less distraction
● Easy prioritization
● Get more done
● Become free
Below we will explain each of these advantages.
3.1. More clarity
Most importantly, a weekly plan will give you an amazing clarity. This clarity is what most professionals in today’s hectic business world are missing. They somehow know that they have to accomplish a lot of things as soon as possible but they are missing the clarity on exactly what and exactly when.
Making a weekly plan, according to our method, is able to give you this clarity.
3.2. Less stress
Not having clarity leads to a lot of stress. This is because you know you have to urgently work on important tasks. Even if you are not thinking about them they remain in your subconscious mind and cause you to be stressed.
Also, planning a week in advance means that you know what tasks you will be able to accomplish and what tasks you just do not have time for. That way you do not make any commitments that are hard to keep and therefore stressful.
3.3. More focus & less distraction
Once you have clarity on what to do and when to do it, you no longer have to think what to do next, instead you just focus on the execution of your tasks.
But if you have uncertainty on what to do next, you allow yourself to get sucked into unimportant work that just keeps you busy or even worse you get distracted with other things that have nothing to do with your work. This is much less likely to happen in case you know exactly what you should be working on next.
3.4. Easy prioritization
During the weekly planning you already prioritize, by only putting the most important tasks into your week and keeping the other tasks for the future.
Furthermore, knowing exactly the tasks you have to accomplish during the week as well as what you have already completed, means that it is easier to prioritize the remaining tasks.
3.5. Get more done
Having a weekly plan will give you more clarity, focus, less stress and better prioritization. This together will make you much more productive and therefore you will get more done.
Also, having made a plan at the beginning of the week means that you have to do less planning during the week, which means you can spend more time on the actual execution.
In fact, according to studies by Asana project management system, US office workers spent almost 60% of their time on work planning and work coordination and only around 30% of their time on work execution.
By having a weekly plan you and your team will be able to reduce the work planning and coordination part from 60% to less than 20% and therefore spend far more time on actual execution.
3.6. Become free
With freedom we mean that you get to spend time off work and also that during this off-time you are able to not constantly think about work.
Unfortunately, most office workers in today’s busy business world are:
- Constantly putting in extra hours, and therefore have less free time off work
- Are constantly connected to work via email and social media as well as by their thoughts.
Having a weekly plan, and therefore having less stress and more productivity leads you to be able to accomplish more and therefore get more free time.
Moreover, it helps you to not constantly think about work. Why is that?
The reason you are not able to completely disconnect from work, is that you constantly at least subconsciously fear that there is some task or responsibility that you forgot about. By making a weekly plan, you know that if you have completed your tasks there is nothing else to worry about. So you get a new feeling of freedom!
Above we have shown you that there is no reason not to plan your week and a lot of great reasons to do so. We hope that if you are not already doing it, you will start with it soon.
Now, let’s see how best to plan your week in a way that you are able to have a concise, achievable and motivational plan in only 30 minutes flat!
4. Step 1: Create a Relaxed Environment
Before you start with your weekly planning, we recommend that you get into a relaxed state of mind. This is because planning the week is not busy work that should be done as quickly as possible, but instead is work that requires some reflection.
Therefore, you should not do your weekly planning on Monday morning, because this is the busiest time of the week. Instead, you should do it on Sunday, before the week has even started. Ideally, you can sit down in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea and a nice musical background so as to be able to be in a relaxed environment while planning your week.
5. Step 2: Create a Goal Pyramid
Some tasks should actually be done before you plan your week. These tasks are:
● Creating a task backlog
● Structuring the backlog into a goal pyramid
● Estimating work effort
In planning your week you are determining which tasks to work on during the coming week. This is much easier to do if you already have a list of all the goals, projects and tasks that you have to work on in the future. This kind of list that includes every potential future task, is called a “backlog”.
If you have read the famous book by David Allen, “Getting Things Done” then you know of this concept as a “mind sweep” or “brain dump”, whereby you write down every single project and task that is on your mind on paper in order to clean your mind.
After you have written all your tasks down into a backlog, you need to order this backlog by establishing a goal pyramid. A goal pyramid is a structure that links your top goals to projects and projects to tasks and tasks to subtasks.
So for example, a list of 500 items consisting of top level goals, projects, tasks and subtasks could be split into:
● 4 top level goals, that each have
● 2–4 projects, which each have around
● 10 tasks, which each have
● 0–10 subtasks.
This could look something like this:
The yellow lines represent projects, the orange lines tasks and the red lines subtasks. In the above diagram we thus have two projects that relate to 4 tasks that each have between 2 and 3 subtasks.
6. Step 3: Estimate Work Effort
After you have a backlog of all your tasks, and you have structured it according to a goal pyramid, you then should estimate at least in a rough way the work effort and time required for each task.
You do not have to spend a lot of time on this. For example, if you have 500 items in your list you should be able to estimate these within only 10 minutes, putting only very rough estimates at each task.
You can read more about the benefits of estimating your work effort in this article:
“Why You Absolutely Have to Estimate Your Work Effort and How to Do It”
7. Step 4: Selecting Tasks Bottom-Up
In step 4 and 5 you will select the tasks to work on in the upcoming week. The first time you do this, all of the tasks should come from the backlog. However, already in the second week of sprint planning you no longer want to look at the backlog first, but instead look first at the calendar and the last week’s sprint to pull tasks for the coming week.
This kind of planning we call bottom-up. Bottom-up means that instead of first looking at the big goals and long term projects, we look first at the tasks that are already on our mind, and that we know we have to do during the coming week.
We recommend the following sequence:
● Tasks from your calendar
● Recurring tasks
● Tasks from last week
● Tasks related to last week’s tasks
7.1. Tasks from calendar
First, open your calendar and see what events you have already scheduled for the coming week. These should be transferred into the weekly plan.
For example, every meeting I have booked in the calendar I will also book into my weekly plan. Also, for every birthday that I have noted in my calendar, I will create a task of “congratulate person X” in my weekly plan.
7.2. Recurring tasks
Next, look at your past week’s completed tasks. Some of the tasks of your last week will be recurring tasks, meaning that they will be part of your weekly plan every week. These tasks you should copy to your coming week’s plan.
7.3. Tasks from last week
Then you should look at all the tasks that you have not been able to complete yet; tasks that still display in your last week’s plan uncompleted or only partially completed. These tasks should either be put into the backlog, in case you do not want to work on them during the coming week, or most likely you should transfer them into the coming week.
7.4. Tasks related to last week’s tasks
Besides looking at the incomplete tasks also look at the completed tasks from last week and think about if there is any follow-up task related to them. For example, if you submitted a report, is there any task for you to follow-up on it or respond to emails relating to that report?
By using the bottom up approach described above, you will already have filled your plan for the next week with many tasks; tasks that are either in your calendar, or recurring tasks, or tasks from last week or related tasks. Sometimes just these tasks will result in a workload of over 30 hours. In that case you can stop here, as there is no more space for you to take on more responsibilities. If however, the total workload is less than 30 hours, you can take on additional tasks, by doing the next step, selecting tasks top-down.
8. Step 5: Selecting Tasks Top-Down
Top down selection means that you do not look at the low level, the task level, but you look at the high level, the mission and project level, to identify your top level goals. From these you then come up with tasks that need to be done in order to achieve these top level goals.
For example, you want to start a coaching business and have already been attending a workshop on how to become a coach during the last week. What else can you do this week to advance that project?
● Can you work on a website?
● Can you do online marketing?
● Can you contact potential clients?
● Can you update your LinkedIn profile?
If you decide you want to first launch your coaching website, what are the tasks you have to do?
● Write website specifications?
● Find sample websites of other coaches?
● Write website content?
So in fact what you do is to split your high level goals into lower level tasks and then decide which of these tasks should go into the coming week.
9. Step 6: Matching of Supply and Demand of Time
Most people that plan their week, will only get a small part of their weekly tasklist done. This is because they either do not estimate how much time those tasks will take or they underestimate that time.
Constantly not meeting your weekly objectives can be frustrating and it can lead you to only get the urgent things done, instead of the most important things.
To avoid this you have to estimate the amount of time for each task and then only assign your week an amount of tasks that you are able to complete.
Some productivity gurus actually recommend using your calendar to plan out your week. However, we strongly advise against this; mainly because while you do want to have clarity on what to work on during the week, you do not have to determine the exact timing of each task.
You can read more about an alternative way of using calendar planning in this article:
“Planning with a Calendar? This Advice Will Skyrocket your Productivity!”
When adding tasks to your week you should try not to go over 70% of the time that you have available. So if you have 40 work hours then you should not add more than 28 hours of tasks to your week. This is because there will always be urgent incoming tasks you did not plan for. Also, tasks will rarely take much less time than planned but often take considerably more time.
Once you have determined all the tasks to work on in the weekly sprint you are effectively done with your weekly plan.
Let us summarize the steps:
- Create a relaxed work environment
- Create a goal pyramid
- Estimate work effort
- Selecting tasks bottom-up
- Selecting tasks top-down
- Matching of supply and demand of time
10. Work Management Software
A weekly planning is best done using an online work management software, rather than only using pen and paper. The reasons for this are several:
● Keeping a backlog organized means you have to delete and add items constantly, which gets very messy with pen and paper.
● Moreover, if you are organizing your backlog into a goal pyramid you will find it hard to put additional subtasks without rewriting the task categories.
● Moreover, you would have to manually create weekly lists and manually transfer tasks between backlog and weekly lists.
For all these reasons we strongly recommend using a task list manager or a project management system.
Unfortunately, even using a task list manager or project management systems you will still face many challenges:
● There is no easy way to structure a goal pyramid, with goals, projects, tasks and subtasks.
● There is no easy way to transfer your tasks from the backlog into a weekly plan and then transfer out of the weekly plan back into the backlog or into the next weekly plan.
● Even if you can create separate weekly lists there is no synchronization between them and the backlog.
● There is seldom an easy way to estimate and track time.
Thus, doing a structured backlog and then doing weekly sprints and transferring tasks into them is actually quite complicated. For that reason we decided to develop our own work management system that could do all of the above, called Workiamo. Workiamo is thus the perfect tool for anyone who wants to create a structured backlog and create weekly plans.
Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
11. Productivity Coach
When you have completed your weekly plan your actual work starts. Now your goal is to follow through on your weekly objectives in order to accomplish your long term goals. However, following through on your weekly plan is harder than it seems for these reasons:
● Unforeseen urgent tasks that make you lose focus on your original plan
● Distractions from social media
● New projects coming up that take all your attention
● Tasks you hate doing and you constantly put off
In order to limit the above problems you should have an accountability buddy, who goes with you over the weekly objectives at the end of each week. However, in order for this partner to really bring accountability he needs to have access to your written weekly plan and he needs to be able to follow this plan over the week. Unfortunately, few accountability buddies are able to do this.
For that reason we recommend you to have a productivity coach, who tracks your weekly plan, follows it over the time of the week and analyzes with you your weekly accomplishments at the end of the week.
You can read more about the benefits of productivity coaching in this article:
“The Amazing Benefits of Having a Personal Productivity Coach”
If you are interested in having your own productivity coach to help you plan and follow through with your weekly plan and thus become less stressed and more productive, you should get in touch with Focus Cycles Productivity Coaching.
Focus Cycles is a productivity consulting company offering online productivity courses, productivity software and productivity coaching. As you are reading this, we let you register for a trial of the productivity coaching! In order to do so, you have to register at www.focuscycles.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
