21. How to Plan Your Ideal Week (Weekly Planning Tips)
Episode 21
This episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast is practical, tactical and strategic. We cover the topic of weekly planning, which is a critical practice for both working professionals and students who have things to do.
Why does weekly planning matter? Because when we have a method for structuring our week, we ensure that we do the right things on the right days with as little panic as possible.
And I’m going to let you in on a little secret of the most productive people: They’re not just working on the urgent things, but they’re also working on the important things. In this episode, I teach you exactly how.
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned:
→ Episode 5: Secrets of a Good Task Management System
→ Episode 9: The 3 Most Important Areas to Organize
→Episode 12: Are Your Productivity Systems Broken?
✏️Free Resources + Downloads
Weekly Planning Template (pdf download) → Download template here
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21 How to Plan Your Ideal Week: Tips for Weekly Planning
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
21 How to Plan Your Ideal Week (Weekly Planning Tips)
[00:00:00] In my private coaching sessions, whether I'm coaching working professionals or students, we almost always cover the topic of planning.
Now, obviously planning as a student looks different than planning as a working professional, but the fundamental principles of planning out your week are the same.
Now in many of these coaching sessions, I'm honestly usually met with one of two responses.
In other words, there seems to be two different camps or schools of thought uh, in terms of planning or weekly planning.
Now on the one hand, I'll get a positive response and open-mindedness to learn open-mindedness to learn and plan better. And then on the other hand, I'll sometimes get extreme resistance.
These clients are the ones who say that you know, planning doesn't work for me or it's too strict or I like freedom or I'm too creative for planning or even just flat out it doesn't work.
Now, obviously the first group is easier to reach, and these are the ones who are quicker to create a planning [00:01:00] practice process that works. Okay? Obviously.
But the second group- that always takes a little more coaching and mindset work.
Now at the end of the day, what I'm always reminding that second group is that there is freedom in structure.
Now, I'm going to say that again, because it is really important.
There is freedom. Instructure. Now I am absolutely not here to sell the idea that we need to plan every single minute of our day.
Like no way. But the more structure and frameworks and boundaries that we set for ourselves in our days and our week, the more creative we can actually be because we are not spending all of our cognitive resources trying to figure out what to do and when to do it.
You plan it once.
And then we spend all of our time doing the thing, on the action. Okay.
Does that make sense?
So in this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, we [00:02:00] are going to talk about how to plan one week at a time.
Now there are different levels of planning. There's semester planning, monthly planning, quarterly planning.
But we're going to talk about weekly planning, which trickles down into daily planning.
No matter what camp you find yourself in, I want you to stick around and listen to this episode all the way through.
So if that means that you were in the group of people who resist the idea of planning out your week, you owe yourself another opportunity to at least try.
Okay, and the first step of trying is to listen to what I have to stay say here. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Is that a deal? Let's begin..
[00:03:00]
Now I'm going to start with what the overall concept of planning your week looks like, and then how that impacts what you do each day of that week.
And again, these strategies apply to both students and working professionals. So whether you are planning out your schoolwork and you're um, studying or you're planning out your work projects, it's all the same okay?.
And that means that planning out your week involves getting control of two different things.
Number one, your tasks and number two, your time.
Now I have talked a lot about task management in this podcast, especially in episodes five, nine, and 12.
So if you don't have a grip on your tasks and you don't yet have a solid task management system, then you're going to want to listen to those episodes, starting with episode five, which is secrets of a good task management system.
I will [00:04:00] leave those links in the show notes and in the description box, if you are watching this on YouTube.
And then the second thing is time.
You've got to have a sense of what time you have available to do your work for the upcoming week.
And I'm always saying this, it means making time visible.
So if you're the type of person who's like, okay, Katie, like, I want to do this, but I need the nitty gritty strategies. Okay. If that's you, you just want to be shown how to do this. Here you go. This is what we do.
On a Sunday evening, I want you to sit down with your calendar.
You can do this digitally, or you can do it on paper.
In the show notes, which you can get just by scrolling up on your podcast app, and then also in the description box if you are listening on YouTube, I'm leaving a link to a free download for a weekly planner. Hey, if this is your first time doing something like something like this, I want you to start there. It's a PDF that you can use digitally.
Um, if you can print it out, if you want. But it's [00:05:00] going to help you do exactly what we talk about in this episode. All right. So as I was saying on a Sunday night, I want you to sit down with your calendar or the PDF template that I'm giving you, and I want you to identify what days and what times you have available to do your work on the upcoming week.
So if you work a nine-to-five job, And I'm not talking about saying, oh, I'm available Monday through Friday from nine to five to do my work, because that is not accurate.
Because at some points, many points during your nine to five job, right, much of that time is spent on meetings and emails and other obligations, things other than sitting down and doing you know, the, the actual work.
If you're a college student, then this is mapping out on what days you have classes and chunks of time you have available before, during, and after your classes to do your homework and to study. All right?
So what we're doing here is we're getting a more accurate sense, not even a sense, an accurate picture of where your chunks of time [00:06:00] exist in your week.
These are the building blocks for planning your week.
So the process of making time visible includes knowing what you're doing each day, how much time you have each day in reality. Right.
Time is not a feeling. You don't want to say something like, oh, I, I feel like Wednesday would be a good day to work on this. I don't feel like Thursday's going to be, it's busy.
It's not. The time, isn't a feeling, all right, we need to quantify this. And that's why I want you to write every obligation down that you have that's gonna take up time-
this is going to be done on a, on a Sunday- that's going to take up time on your calendar. Okay?
Not the things that you have to do, but the places that you have to be, and you're sort of like appointment-like obligations. A meeting a practice - soccer practice you have, to take somebody to, an appointment, a doctor's office visit stuff like that.
Okay, so to recap, and to clarify in case I kind of just talked in circles there. [00:07:00]
I want you to sit down on a Sunday night and look ahead at the upcoming week, Monday through Friday and in your calendar or on a digital planner or on the paper template that I'm leaving you, block out your preexisting obligations like meetings, classes, appointments, and then don't forget to add commute time to these things okay if that's relevant.
Now, the space that remains is the true time that you have available to work on your work.
Okay, so doing this is step one.
And then step two, involves planning what you're gonna do in those blocks of time that you've identified as being available for school and for work.
Now of course you have got blocks of time outside you know, school and work hours, and you're welcome to plan those, you know, with social activities and non-school, or work-related things, that's certainly part of what it looks like to plan your week.
But for this episode, I'm focusing on planning a week in advance in terms of school and work.
[00:08:00] Okay. So let's talk about these things, those, those tasks that you're going to put into the time slots that you've identified as being available. I'm using air quotes. If you're not watching this on, on YouTube, because that's where the real work gets done.
Now, there are different degrees of planning here, and you might want to get, you know, nitty-gritty on one end of the spectrum, or you might zoom out a bit and being less granular at the other end of the spectrum.
But that is something that you're going to have to figure out for yourself.
And you may not figure out how nitty gritty you want to do weekly planning until after you try weekly planning for a bit. And you say, well, this is too way too intense. Or like this was too loosey goosey. Okay. You got to play around with it.
For the sake of teaching you how to plan your ideal week in this episode, I'm going to provide strategies for somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. All right. I think that makes sense.
So think about this. Over the course of a week, there are certain work [00:09:00] and school tasks that have due dates and deadlines attached to them.
These obviously need to be prioritized and put somewhere in your weekly plan so that they happen. All right.
So if you have a report due on Thursday, it has to be submitted on Thursday, which means you need to work on it prior to Thursday. Okay? So on Monday, Tuesday and, or I don't know how big the report is, right? This hypothetical report and on Wednesday, can you find time to work on that report?
The answer is obviously yes.
If you're a student and you have a test on Friday, that means you need to find time to prepare for the test ideally on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, leading up to the test, right?
These need to go on your weekly plan.
These are the things that have to be completed by a certain time or else there's, you know, some kind of external consequence.
And these are the things that you are probably already used to handling.
These are the things that [00:10:00] if you have some experience with weekly planning, you're already thinking about.
You're probably already used to looking at a calendar or your syllabus and saying, okay, What's due this week?
And that is all well and good, but there is something missing from this common approach.
And that is the tasks that are non-urgent but important.
Now, if you've never heard of the Eisenhower matrix, it's an interesting and helpful framework that can help you identify urgent from important tasks.
You can easily Google the Eisenhower matrix. But really quickly, it's a two-by-two grid.
Okay. In the top left, you have urgent and important.
In the top, right, you have not urgent but still important.
On the bottom left there's not important, but urgent. And honestly, these are the things that we try to delegate to other people if we can.
And [00:11:00] then on the bottom right there is not important and not urgent. Don't do those things. Okay.
So the Eisenhower matrix can be a helpful sort of visual way to help people who have trouble prioritizing all of the things that need to get done.
But as I was saying before, most people are decently experienced with handling the urgent and important -that's the top left- because there was some kind of external consequences.
If these things don't happen then you get a, a bad grade or you fail a test. Or maybe you get a poor performance review, right if you don't do something, you're supposed to do something of that nature.
But it's non-urgent but still important tasks that also need a place on your weekly plan.
These are often the tasks or the micro-steps of longterm projects that are due at some point in the future, but not necessarily this week.
And I get it. I really do. I really get it. If [00:12:00] there's only so much time right in the day, and you have something that you have to turn into somebody like it's due, there's a deadline, or you have a task that would be good to work on, but it's not due for a while, I know that it's super easy to just do the urgent task and push off the other one.
But then we work in a constant state of whack-a-mole. It's kind of like the professional or academic version of living paycheck to paycheck.
And that is not a state that we can be in for a long period of time without experiencing burnout. All right. I know, you know, that.
So, what do we do?
When you're sitting down on a Sunday evening, looking at the time blocks that you have made visible, and you're looking at your task management system or your project management system, the goal is to include both urgent and important tasks in your weekly plan.
I am thoroughly convinced that this is the secret sauce to success.
Yes, I am fully aware that the secret sauce to success has many [00:13:00] ingredients. Okay.
But the really, really fundamental one is that successful people who seem to have more time in their day than everyone else who seem to produce better quality work than other people with less drama around it are the ones who are slowly and steadily making constant progress on non-urgent things that are still important.
That's the stuff in the top right hand corner of the Eisenhower matrix.
Let me give you an example of what this might look like in a professional context.
And then I'm going to give you an academic context after that.
So, for example, if you're a professional planning out your ideal week, and we're assuming that you've already made your time visible in some way, right? Then you're going to play a game of Tetris with your schedule to fit both urgent deadline-based things and non-immediate deadline-based things into the next five days of your work week. Okay?
That's the goal. So how much time should you spend on, on urgent and how much time should [00:14:00] be spent on non-urgent but still important.
That is up to you. I do not know. And that might also vary from week to week.
That might seem like an unhelpful answer, but honestly, that's the reality.
If it's a week where your company is, I don't know, like launching a new product and it's all hands on deck for every day that week, then maybe you do need to fill your week with 90% of urgent time-based tasks, because that's just the flavor of the week.
That's what's happening in your company.
But the point is you would still schedule 10% of your time to make at least some kind of progress toward those other things,
those things that are maybe due in the next few weeks.
Or that maybe they're not even due to anybody and nobody is barking down your neck about them.
But, you know, it's something that it's important to you in your career, or personally, or your professional development.
The whole point here is that even during your busy weeks, I do not want you to abandon the [00:15:00] important, but non-urgent things.
Because that is where the magic is. Okay.
Or, or let's just say it's, you know, a regular week at work and there's no new product launch, then maybe it's more of a 70, 30 split between deadline-based tasks and important work that we just want to make progress on. All right.
And that's great. And you would front load those tasks in your weekly plan so you don't go back on your word and forget to do them, or somehow end up negotiating with yourself that you could always do them next week.
That's not what we do.
I mean, that might be what you've done.
And that might be what honestly feels easiest to us, but that is not what we do.
Right now let's take a look at what this might look like if you are a student.
So imagine yourself in the library on a Sunday night and you're taking out, you know, that awesome weekly planning template. He, because you're a diehard and you are looking at your syllabus for each class and you're playing Tetris with, you know, your, [00:16:00] your tasks and your time slots.
Okay. You have a test here, you have a paper due here, a lab report due there, and you obviously need to find space to work on and complete all of those things that have deadlines.
Yes. We know this, and it's likely that you're already doing this.
But what about the projects and the assignments and things that aren't due immediately? What are those? And when are you going to work on that? Right.
So that involves probably looking ahead on your syllabus and seeing that, all right, you have a research paper due in three weeks that the teacher has only brought up a few times at this point. I hate to break it to you: that paper isn't going to write itself and you are certainly not doing yourself any favors by writing it in a frenzy just a couple of days before it's due.
So what are some actionable steps that you can take right now on this research paper, or at least, you know, over the next five days?
Can you do some [00:17:00] preliminary like database research? Can you maybe set aside an hour on one day to find and print resources that you might need for your, your paper? Then you can start reading and annotating during another hour on another day that you add to weekly plan. What about the unit tests that you're having in, let's say two weeks, like you see that on your syllabus that's coming up in two weeks.
Okay. Well, yeah, maybe you have an urgent quiz this week and that's a priority, but what can you do to prepare for the unit tests that's in two weeks from now?
Can you at least start organizing and consolidating your study materials as you study for your quiz? Right. We want to avoid this stressful feeling of living paycheck to paycheck.
And we do this by looking ahead and making baby steps and progress on things that matter even when no one is looking. Especially when no one is looking.
Okay. So if you are following along with [00:18:00] these steps here, this is what we have so far.
You have found time before the week starts ideally on a Sunday, but you could totally do this on a Saturday. Some people actually do it on Fridays.
That's fine.
You have made time visible by identifying all of the things that are going on this week, like appointments and meetings and classes and other like time-based obligations.
And then you have identified chunks of time that remained after that, which we know are the chunks of time that you have available to work on both urgent and non-urgent tasks.
And you've also consulted your task management system or your learning management system, or maybe just your syllabus or I don't know, even just a running to-do list of things that you need to do.
And you have intentionally added both urgent and non-urgent tasks to those spaces.
Now I want to emphasize the word intentionally because I'm not here to tell you that you know, the goal is to fill up every waking second with work and tasks. [00:19:00] Absolutely not.
So if you have a two-and-a-half hour break, between, you know, college courses, I'm not saying that you need to fill that two and a half hours with work. Right.
That's where the intentionality comes in. Which tasks make the most sense to do in that time?
Where on campus will you be at that time and will that inform which tasks then you are going to do during that time. Does that make sense?
What do you want to do? What do you want to work on?
I know there's some things that you have to work on that, you know, we've identified as it's urgent and deadline-based.
But what important things do you want to work on what matters to you. What have you been meaning to get to, but you just haven't found the time yet? Haven't made the time yet.
Right. That's what I'm really saying.
And this is what I mean when I say be intentional. It is not about filling our time with things to do. It's not about working faster so we can do more. It's about being [00:20:00] honest and clear about what time we have and being honest and clear and balanced about the things we have to do. And want to do. This is not a race.
This isn't about winning the productivity game and doing as much as you can and doing more than the next person. This is actually real life. This is your job. It is your career. It is your educational experience. And that means that we have to start planning our weeks with intention.
Now, I know there's been a few times during this episode where I have stopped and done a little recap.
I'm not sure if that's helpful or not, but I think so.
So I'm going to do another. Real quick, top level summary. Of what this process looks like so far.
Okay. So, yes, you are planning your ideal week before the week starts. So you would find yourself, I don't know, 10 minutes, right? If some, if anyone listening to this, it's like, how long is this going to take?
I don't know, 10 minutes. On a Saturday or Sunday, and you do a quick sketch of what the next five days looks like. Okay, mark your appointments, your meetings, your classes, your obligations that require [00:21:00] you to be somewhere. And then you add commute times if those are relevant, right? This is all under the category of making time visible.
The blank spaces that remain are the spaces that you are going to play with as you try to move tasks around to fit into those spaces. And that means you are looking at your task management system or your syllabus or your project management system or your to-do list and you were saying what needs to happen this week?
What day and time am I going to do that? And then once all of your urgent and deadline-based tasks have a place to live in your weekly plan you're going to find some space to work on and make progress on the things that no one is standing over your shoulder about.
All right. What's just one or two or maybe three to five small steps. that you can take toward one of those projects this week? And what day and time will you work on that?
Because remember, you're writing all of this down.
So you can't talk yourself out of [00:22:00] it. Right.
And then finally, this is so important. So if you're like zoning out right now, come back to me. I want you to look at your weekly plan. All right. And I know this might sound a little woo. But bear with me. What does that week feel like before it even begins? Can you imagine it? Does it feel overly packed and stressful.
Okay, well then can you move some tasks around to make it feel better?
Or does it feel too loosey goosey and maybe not even ambitious enough to motivate you because you know, that's a thing. Being underwhelmed by our week can actually completely sap our motivation to do anything at all.
What we're looking for is that Goldilocks feeling, that sort of sweet spot right on the edge of this might be a lot, but it feels doable. Okay.
It's ambitious, but reasonable. I have seen way too many [00:23:00] clients bring me their weekly plans and they look, you know, frigging gorgeous.
I'm telling you every, you know, 15 minutes is time blocked and it's color coded. And there's a new activity, like right down to the minute. Beautiful. But not reasonable. Okay. There's no space. There is no margin, no time for reflection and processing.
So my caution to you is that although you make mathematically be able to fit 1 million things into your day, that is not what we're going for. We are going for ambitious but reasonable.
And that is the sweet spot that usually helps us tap into motivation.
Now I said at the beginning of this episode that your week may also include things that you do outside of work in school. I didn't cover that here, but that's something that you might want to try once in a while if you, if you want to and feel free to work those into your weekly plan.
In fact, honestly, the things you do outside of work and school you can't really ignore [00:24:00] completely because in step one, when you're front-loading all of your obligations and things into your calendar, that does include things like, I don't know, let's say you're going to the gym and you're meeting your friend for movie that you promise, you know, on like a Wednesday night or something.
I only bring that up because obviously knowing that you're meeting a friend for a movie on Wednesday night means that Wednesday night is off the table for planning a study session. Or something of that nature.
Or if you know that your kid has like a swim meet Monday night, then you probably can't stay at work a half an hour later like you sometimes do on Mondays, because you have to get to the swim meet. Does that make sense?
Okay. That's just sort of like a quick caveat.
I know this was a lot. But I tried to fill this episode with a combination of sort of like top level you know, principles and frameworks coupled with practical strategy so that you can understand and implement what we talked about here.
I think frameworks and top level views are important whenever we're learning something.
And then that tactical step-by-step how tos are important for when we want to [00:25:00] apply what we learn.
Cause that right there is true education.
So my friends, I hope this was helpful. I hope you take action. And most importantly, I hope that you never stop learning.
