Just one thing

Over the last couple of months, we’ve looked at daily and weekly planning, the key steps towards achieving increased productivity and balance. This week, we’ll finish the series by outlining the process of weekly planning.

The key benefit of weekly planning is that it gives you the chance to stop and think – to step back from the day-to-day and take a broader view. This can feel difficult when all of those urgent issues and tasks are pressing in on you but the busier you are, the more important weekly planning is. It only takes fifteen minutes or so and you can make it a regular part of your routine – essentially, a habit – by scheduling it into your diary as a weekly meeting with yourself.

The first step is to review your roles. Some of your roles will change as you go through life while other roles will stay with you for longer periods or even last a lifetime. Take a moment to reconnect with those roles, ensure they’re still relevant, and remind yourself of what you’re trying to achieve in these roles.

Secondly, ask yourself, what is the most important thing I could do in this role this week? Not everything you could do; not everything you have to do; not everything you hope to do. Just the most important thing – the one thing that would make all the difference. Of course, you'll do other things in those roles but what you’re looking for at this point is simply the most important thing.

The third step is then to schedule it into your week: if it’s an appointment, put it into your calendar, if it’s a task, put it onto your daily task list for the relevant day. When that day comes, that task is the most important thing you have to do that day – it’s your top priority. This is so important: it means that, whatever else happens that week, no matter what other urgent or unexpected activities come crashing into your schedule, you’ll have done some significant, longer-term, activity – something that takes you one step closer to achieving your goals.

You will have noticed that none of the steps to weekly or daily planning are what you might call rocket science and that’s a good thing. Complexity, in this case, is unnecessary – simple things, done well and repeatedly, will produce much more significant results in the longer term. But don’t take my word for it – try it for yourself and prove it.

What would you do with a 25th hour?

Last week we looked at the first part of weekly planning – establishing your roles in life. This week, I want to think a little more about why that’s important and what weekly planning will give you that you don’t have now.

In his bestselling book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey talks about the Time Matrix – a four-box model allowing tasks to be categorised based on whether they are important and/or urgent. It’s not a new model – the first reference I’ve found to it is as the Eisenhower method, as it was said to be used by the US President, although it’s not clear whether that’s apocryphal or not.

© FranklinCovey

When I run Time Management workshops, I’ll very often ask people what they would do if they had a 25th hour – you can think about this question, too. As I’m psychic, I know you’re thinking that you would spend that hour sleeping so I’ll let you do that for a couple of weeks and then you have to do something else: you can do anything you want. Inevitably, the things people come up with are Quadrant II activities; they say they would spend time with their loved ones, play with their kids, learn a language or a musical instrument, travel, paint or simply sit and read a book. You probably came up with something similar.

Why do they never get round to doing these things; why do they need a 25th hour? Because most people spend most of their time in Quadrants I and III. By definition, Quadrant II activities aren’t urgent and there are always other, urgent things to do which take priority – even when those urgent things aren’t important. The Quadrant II activities are left for those times when you have less to do; when things aren’t so crazy around here; when things calm down a bit.

It doesn’t have to be that way. What weekly planning gives you is the opportunity to schedule in some of those Quadrant II activities. And because the most important things in our lives tend to revolve around relationships – with ourselves and with others - establishing your roles in life is more than just categorising what you do. It also means thinking about how you do it. Decide what kind of bricklayer or musician you want to be and then schedule activities to help you achieve that.

The great benefit of weekly planning is that it changes your focus, lifting you out of the day-to-day grind of the urgent and into the future. We all have dreams, hopes or aspirations – they may be big or small but they are all important and should never be put off while we deal with things that are, fundamentally, unimportant. As Goethe said, “things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”

Planning weekly, not weakly...

When we last talked about time management, we talked about daily planning and while the format, degree or rigour of planning varies, many of you already take time to make some kind of plan for the day. However, very few people also plan on a weekly basis, which is one of those instances where we just make things harder for ourselves. Planning daily but not also weekly inevitably means that our focus will always be on the short term. By definition, we’re only thinking about the things that have to be done today. Weekly planning is a simple way of allowing ourselves the opportunity to schedule in those things that are important but aren’t urgent – they have to be done sometime, but not necessarily today and so inevitably they’re put off. If you’re looking for that elusive work/life balance, you’ll find it in weekly planning

Weekly planning only takes about fifteen to twenty minutes each week – I do mine on a Friday morning at 10 o’clock because I’ve found that’s what works best for me. You can do it whenever you prefer but my advice would be to avoid Monday mornings (it’s too late – the week has started) and Friday afternoons (things mysteriously seem to be sacrificed on Friday afternoons). Ideally, you should do it at the same time every week, so that it becomes a regular appointment with yourself.

Before we get to the step-by-step process, you’ll firstly need to understand what your roles are in life. The easiest way of doing this is to think about all the things you do on a weekly basis and categorise them. If you spend a lot of time laying bricks each week, it’s safe to say you’re a bricklayer for at least part of the time. If you spend time playing a musical instrument, you’re a musician for part of the week. For instance, over the course of the week I’m a facilitator, a parent, a friend and a student, to name just four.

If you want to improve your time management skills, take some time over the next few days to identify no more than seven roles that cover everything you do over the average week. If you come up with nine, merge a couple so that you bring the total down to seven but if you only come up with six roles, don’t make one up. There’s nothing magical about the number seven, it’s just a realistic number of roles on which you can focus. These roles aren’t fixed in concrete – some will change as your circumstances change – but understanding your roles is key to your weekly planning and establishing some balance and control in your life.