Today we focus on planning out one week – preferably, next week!
This is a process I like to do either on Friday for the following week, or on Monday morning, before starting the week’s work. I prefer to do it on Friday, because that means I can sit down on Monday morning and get right to it!
The goal here is to FINALLY get stuff done – hurrah 🙂
This is the end-point of all this planning – actually scheduling and completing tasks that will inch you slowly towards achieving your Top 3 Priorities for the whole year!
Here’s the process I follow.
I have a Trello board for my weekly tasks.
In this board, I have the following Lists:
– This Week’s Priorities
– Doing Today
– Doing This Week
– Doing Next Week
– Ideas
– To Do Sometime
– Daily Tasks
Whenever I add a task to any of the ‘Doing’ boards, I add a day to it. So, a task from this week was ‘TUE – TC Call’. You could instead put deadlines on them (through the edit icon on each card) if you prefer.
You can then drag and drop tasks/cards around to the appropriate lists during the week. And then, when they’re done, just archive them!
The non-Doing lists are a capture device. As is the ‘Doing Next Week’ lists. This allows you to capture any ideas or tasks that pop up, but that you know won’t fit into this current week. You can then rearrange them as time goes on.
The Daily Tasks board might not be necessary – I just use it to capture the jobs I need to do each day to remind me. This is stuff like ‘check convos on Etsy’ etc. that always needs to be done.
The idea is to plan out your whole week at the beginning, so you’re never ‘lost’ as to what you need to get done that week.
Obviously life can sometimes get in the way – that’s why it’s nice that in Trello you can just drag-and-drop things to move them around, and you can easily edit a task to move it to another day.
At the end of each day I drag across the next day’s tasks from the ‘Doing This Week’ to the ‘Doing Today’ board – and I put them in order of priority – so as the day goes on I work through them in order.
The nice thing about having the ‘Doing Next Week’ board, also, is that if you get overwhelmed, you can quickly move things off to the following week, OR if you get all your stuff done early, you can drag tasks forward. It also helps you keep in mind what’s coming up.
Remember – the main goal here is to achieve the little tasks that when added together, will allow you to archive one of your 3 Priorities for that week!
The ideal is that you’ll reach the end of the week, and all of your cards – including your Priorities – will be finished and archived, leaving you a nice clean slate for the following week.
If you’re not using Trello, you can use a similar system in a weekly planner/diary – I just recommend you use pencil so you can erase and move stuff around if necessary! And make sure to have easy access to your monthly plan so you can see what’s coming up.
Action Steps
1. Plan next week using this method!
