65. The Sunday Reset: The Secret to a Less Stressful Week
Episode 65
A Sunday Reset is one of the simplest ways to start the week with clarity, focus, and less stress. In this episode, I break down five core elements of a great Sunday Reset — plus ten additional add-ons — so you can create a system that works for you.
You’ll learn how to:
Plan your week so nothing catches you off guard
Inventory your tasks and make sure they actually fit into your schedule
Handle basic email tasks to avoid Monday morning overwhelm
Prep simple things (food, clothes, devices) to reduce decision fatigue
Reset your space so you’re not working in chaos
Even if you only do one or two of these steps, your future self will thank you. Try it out this Sunday and see the difference!
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
🎧 Ep 21: How to Plan Your Ideal Week
🎧 Ep 15: Email Management Tips
🎧 Ep 62: Managing Email Inbox Chaos
🎧 Ep 63: My Personal Productivity System
🎧 Ep 64: How to Do Hard Things
✏️Enroll in SchoolHabits University (Curious? Check it out!)
-
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 😉
65 The Sunday Reset The Secret to a Less Stressful Week===
[00:00:00] Hey there and welcome back to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie, and today we're talking about a potential game changer for students and professionals.
If game changer sounds vague or inflated, then just know that what we're talking about today. Can make our lives a little bit smoother, and to me, that qualifies as a game changer. So what is it that we're talking about? The Sunday reset.
Now, I know that Sundays can be a mixed bag. For some, it's a day to relax and to recharge for other people it's a dreaded reminder that Monday is right around the corner. The Sunday scaries, as we say. We all feel a certain way about Sundays and we are entitled to those feelings.
What if I told you that spending just 45 minutes on a Sunday reset could set us up for a more productive and a less stressful week?
Whether you're a student juggling school things or a professional managing work things, a Sunday reset can be a great way to mentally [00:01:00] and literally prepare for the week ahead.
A good solid Sunday reset can help us feel organized. It can help us feel clearer about our upcoming, upcoming tasks, reduce midweek chaos, and walk into Monday feeling in control.
So grab a notebook and a cup of coffee or focus on the road if you are listening to this while driving. And let's get into it.
So I think a good place to start in this episode is why a Sunday reset matters.
I suspect you think it does 'cause you clicked on this episode, but there are some very real and practical reasons to implement a Sunday reset in our week [00:02:00] that maybe you didn't think of. Let's name three.
Reason number one: it gives us clarity. One of the primary reasons we feel overwhelmed and outta control is because we lack clarity on our time and our tasks.
I say that a lot here.
A Sunday reset gives us clarity into our upcoming time and obligations for the week.
Reason number two a Sunday reset matters, or the second benefit of a Sunday reset, is that it reduces decision fatigue. Throughout the week, we are gonna make a lot of decisions about what to do and when to do it, and what to eat and where to go and what to wear and all the things. And although some of these decisions may seem minor, they do all add up. A Sunday reset allows us to make some of these choices in advance so that we can conserve our mental energy for more important decisions during the week.
And then benefit number three is that we enter the week with a clear slate, which enables us to handle curve balls that come our way throughout the week, which they will.
And we'll talk more about this later [00:03:00] in the episode, but one relatable example, um, is if we walk into Monday morning with a thousand unread emails, we are going to have a pretty stressful Monday. Or if we show up to work on Monday morning and forgetting that we had an early morning meeting that we're not prepared for, or an assignment was due for first period, we're going to have a pretty stressful Monday.
There are things that we can do on Sunday to reduce this rocky start to our week.
So now let's talk about the core components of a Sunday reset. They are definitely gonna look different for everybody depending on whether you're a student or a professional or what your job is, or all of the factors that make us unique.
So I'm gonna list out five core components of a Sunday reset and then 10 additional options to add to the mix, but it's up to you to take what works and leave the rest. More important than the specifics I'm sharing today are the ideas behind the components. Okay.
Another important note I wanna make before we start, and I wanna make this very clear.
A Sunday reset is not about [00:04:00] making our Sunday just an additional workday. It's about getting intentional so our future self has an easier time handling the upcoming work week.
if you want to work on Sundays, that's up to you and that's a completely different topic that I'm not talking about here. I love a good cozy brief work session on Sundays, but that's because the work that I sometimes choose to do on Sundays fills me up, and that may not be your situation. That's fine.
So let's start with the five core elements of a Sunday reset. All right.
Core element number one is to plan out the week. You probably could have seen this one coming, right? This is one of the most important steps of a Sunday reset 'cause it gives us a clear view of what's ahead. If this is the only component from this entire list that you choose to incorporate into your Sundays, then I would still call your Sunday reset successful, right?
To be honest, planning the week I personally think can be really fun if you let it, especially if you [00:05:00] romanticize the process. Does that sound weird? I don't know. I don't know. Grab your planner, grab your calendar and your favorite pen and a cup of coffee. Get some music. Get comfortable. Do it with a friend or someone in your household.
Make it something that you enjoy and not dread, and you might find that it's not so bad, right?
Students, you can look at your class schedule, notice which days that you need to be in person, which days are asynchronous. Do you have transportation to where you need to go? Um, have any classes been canceled or postponed or moved or rescheduled?
What's your game or your practice schedule like for the week? What's your work schedule like for the week? We can talk a little bit more about tasks in a moment, but can you do a quick scan to see if you have any exams or project deadlines coming up this week? If you do, Sunday is the time to look at your calendar and figure out when can, you can work in some chunks of time for study sessions or maybe extended work sessions throughout the week.
You figure this stuff out in advance.
Professionals, do a quick review of your calendar. Check for meetings. Do you have to go into the office any days this [00:06:00] week? Do you have any Zoom meetings? Do you have the login details? Do you have to be, um, offsite somewhere? Assess your calendar and make sure that it's accurate, current, and reflects your true commitments for the week.
We're not going into our calendar to like stress ourselves out. It's to prevent the stress of not knowing what's coming down the pipeline, right? Don't forget to add in your personal commitments too. Did you sign up for a yoga class on Wednesday night? Put it in your calendar. Are you grabbing dinner with a friend on Tuesday?
Put it on the calendar. If you're lucky, these will already be on the calendar 'cause you added them when you made the commitments, right? And you're just using the reset time to familiarize yourself with your pre-existing commitments. Now a tip for everyone, if you have family commitments, um, a partner or kids check in with their schedules too.
A weekly reset is not just about our own calendar, it's about coordinating with the people in our lives too. If you signed up for that Wednesday night yoga class, but on Sunday, during your Sunday reset, [00:07:00] you peek at your calendar and you realize that's when you have to drive a kid to an away game. Well, that's a conflict that we'd rather know about on Sunday than on Wednesday night.
Now, I do have two bonus tips to make this first component, plan out your week, run a little bit more smoothly. Bonus tip number one, use time blocking to carve out study or deep work sessions. This could be for students or professionals. If you want a deeper dive into planning your ideal week, check out episode 21, how to Plan Your Ideal Week.
Great title. It's full of strategies to help with the exact things that I'm talking about here.
Bonus tip two, set digital reminders for those upcoming events that you have assessed on your calendar. Obviously in the reminders app or the calendar app on your phone, you can add reminders for each of these time sensitive events for the upcoming week. Front loading this information on a Sunday night can be so helpful. For example, if you have an [00:08:00] online math class that starts at 9 23 on Monday through Friday, then set a reminder to go off 10 minutes prior for all five days.
If you have an early morning meeting on Zoom on Thursday, set a reminder. If you have an in-person meeting on Thursday, set a reminder to get up from your desk at the right time, go to the bathroom, walk to the uh, conference room. Right.
These seemingly minor strategies can prevent chaos from happening, but it can also give us this immediate sense of calm because we are putting in guardrails in place to ensure our peace of mind throughout the week.
We all know the feeling of having a commitment at four o'clock and every minute leading up to four o'clock since like the moment you wake up, we're like, oh, I can't forget that thing at four o'clock. Like, the day feels ruined. Does it just me set a reminder so you can talk? Stop telling yourself not to forget the thing at four o'clock, right?
The second component of a good Sunday reset day is to inventory your tasks. So now that we've mapped out the week, the next thing we need to do is to [00:09:00] take inventory of our tasks. And I, I don't mean just knowing what it is that we need to do. I actually mean laying it all out, seeing it in context, figuring out how it fits into the time that we have available on the upcoming week.
So let's start with students. Pull up your learning management system, your syllabus, wherever you track your assignments, what is coming up. What readings do you have? What's the overall workload for the week look like? Are there any tests or deadlines that need some real focus?
Professionals, same idea, but with your task management system, your email, your project tracker, whatever you use. What deadlines are coming up? What meetings do you need to prepare for, and this is a big one, what tasks have been lingering on your to-do list that you keep pushing off that it's like finally time to address?
Once we have a clear view of everything on your plate, then here's where the real magic happens. You put in your tasks against the calendar and you ask yourself, does the math work? The time [00:10:00] required to complete our tasks has to be less than or equal to the time we actually have available. If the math doesn't math, we need to either remove tasks, reschedule deadlines, or cancel something.
That's the reality. Can this be hard to do? Can be hard to confront, absolutely. But you can do hard things as we covered in last week's episode, how to do hard things.
Now, a bonus tip is that when you're going into your task management system or learning management system, try to identify your top three tasks just for Monday.
So you can hit the ground running without hesitation or procrastination.
So you look at your task management system and of course everything on there is important, obviously, right? But what are the three things that I wanna get done on Monday? Boom. Write them down. You don't have to do this for the entire week looking forward. You can, but there's something so satisfying about going to bed on Monday night knowing, uh, Sunday night, knowing that when you show up to work.
So I guess this tip is more relevant to professionals [00:11:00] versus students, when you show up to work, you know what, you're gonna sit down and do. You know you're gonna have a thousand emails coming at you and urgency and everything, but you have chosen to work on these three priorities.
This step isn't just about logistics and, you know, planning and na na na. It's about reducing stress and bringing peace and clarity to the upcoming week. That's like the whole point of a Sunday reset.
Core element number three, handle some basic email tasks. All right, so email for some of us email can make or break our mental clarity for the week.
If we open our inbox on Monday morning, and it's an absolute disaster, our stress levels are gonna spike before we ev even had our coffee, before we've even done anything, and we can fix that on Sunday. Or at least reduce the impact of it.
So number one, do a quick sweep. Delete anything that's junk or irrelevant.
Don't overthink this, it's a gut response. Just get rid of the noise.
[00:12:00] Next, archiving emails that we don't need to act on, but we might need to reference later. This keeps them accessible in our inbox without cluttering the inbox. For more tips on email management, you can check out episode 16, uh, 15 and 62.
I'm gonna link everything in the show notes and that's also at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/65.
Next scan for emails that actually need attention. Do you have any responses that need to go out on Monday? If so, here's a trick. It's optional, but some people like to do this. You draft the replies now, but schedule them to go out on Monday morning. That way you're not giving off the impression that you're available on Sundays, but you're still clearing the tasks from your own mind, which is what brings the peace.
Now this process should take no more than 10 minutes, right? I'm not suggesting that you go into your email inbox and spend an hour, you know, reading everything and, and responding to people and making this a whole to do. I mean, you can, but that's not the point of a Sunday reset.
That would be more like an admin block during the week where [00:13:00] you set aside some time to handle what is in your inbox. We talk a lot about that in those email management episodes, like I just said. 15 and 62. This is a reset. Okay? It's a clean sweep. It's 10 minutes where you go in and you say, okay, I'm just going in and I'm, I'm deleting the junk.
I see some emails in here that I don't need to respond to, but I don't wanna get rid of them yet. You can archive them, you can keep them in your inbox, but archiving can be a good option. And then if there are any emails that you've received from work that are stressing you out, just the idea of them, you know you better than anybody else does.
You can draft a reply and schedule them to go out on sun on Monday. Okay? But you don't have to do that. If you're good at saying, oh, an email came in. Um, from work. I mean, how dare they email you on a weekend? But if they did, you don't have to reply. You can absolutely wait till Monday, but each of us responds to that sort of incoming stimulation a little bit differently.
The impact of this step can be huge. We walk [00:14:00] into Monday with a clean slate instead of an inbox induced panic attack.
All right, key Sunday reset component number four, prep what you can for the week. There is nothing worse than running out of food in the middle of the week or maybe realizing that you, um, have no ingredients to pack lunch or you have nothing to wear because you didn't do any laundry.
Now this tip not only ensures that you have what you need for the upcoming week, but it also reduces the amount of decision fatigue that we experience Monday through Friday. Remember, reduced decision fatigue is one of the benefits of doing a Sunday reset that we talked about at the top of this episode.
If every day this week, you have to think, what am I going to eat? What am I gonna wear, then times that by multiple times a day, you know, times five days a week, we exhaust ourselves by Tuesday evening. Okay. And what the step looks like is, you know, gonna look different for everybody. It's gonna vary whether you're a student living on a college campus and you don't really have to think about [00:15:00] food 'cause you just show up at the dining hall.
Right? Or maybe you're a working professional with a family. So we all have to figure out what works for our unique situation. But let me give a couple ideas. So for food prep. Can you cook up a batch of rice, maybe grill some chicken, roast some veggies ahead of time, cook some potatoes hard, boil some eggs, and leave them in the refrigerator for quick meals.
You could also prepare many of these things at the exact same time in just one hour on a Sunday afternoon. But the payoff is so much more than an hour saved during the week. Speaking of groceries and food, do you have enough food for the week? If not, Sunday is probably the time to go out and pick up a couple things.
What about clothing? If you're a college student and you play a sport, is your uniform clean? Are your favorite jeans clean? Do you have enough socks and underwear for the week? What are you going to wear this week? Okay. Maybe I shouldn't, hold on. I'm giving myself a pause to think if I'm gonna share this story.
Here I am. Maybe I shouldn't share it here, but I'm gonna tell you what I do. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, [00:16:00] and Thursdays, I essentially wear the exact same outfit I spend all day in my office working with clients on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and I can get by wearing the same pair of jeans. And like a cashmere sweater that you're not gonna walk every wear, uh, wash every day and then a different tank top underneath.
And I know that on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I don't have to think at all about my outfit. Right? Speaking of clothing, do you need to do laundry? There are sort of these life administration tasks that we often let build up dur during the week and it can cause a disruption in our day and throw us off and then end up dismantling our entire week when the simplest solution is to just do some of this stuff low key on Sunday, okay? Not during the week when it's already wild.
Some other ideas for prep could be charging your devices, packing your bag for work or school. It could be packing your gym bag the night before if you're going to the gym on Monday. Again, the specifics of this step are going to look different for every [00:17:00] person, but my point is I want you to start thinking about what can I do on Sunday to prep for the week?
What do I do almost every day of the week, eating, getting dressed right, maybe maybe exercising, that I can reduce friction on by prepping just a little bit on Sunday.
All right, core element number five, cleaning and organization. So let's talk about your space, the working environment, the place where you are trying to get things done all week. Because, let's be honest, when our space is a disaster, our brain feels like a disaster too.
We cannot deny that our inner environment is often influenced by our outer environment. That's just in our nature as human beings, and I'm not making the claim that one particular kind of environment is more suitable to working and thinking, as that's more of a personal preference, but it is true that we often deny that certain things in our environment are stimulators and distractions.
We might like working at the kitchen counter or in a coffee shop, but does [00:18:00] our output reflect that decision? Or are we just having a good time? You know? You might claim that the four dirty coffee cups on your desk don't bother you, but subconsciously those coffee cups represent unsatisfied tasks, and that is not a feeling or a thought that supports focus.
This step in your Sunday reset is all about resetting your work or study space so that when Monday rolls around, you're not spending the first 20 minutes of work or the first 20 minutes of your study session, just trying to clear a spot to think and bringing coffee cups to the sink. All right, so let's start with the workspace.
If you're a student, that is likely going to be your desk. Um, your backpack, your study nook. If you're a professional, that's your home office, your actual office, maybe wherever you get stuff done. Look around. Are there random papers everywhere? Other sticky notes with cryptic messages that you can't even decipher now 'cause you wrote them in such a hurry, a pile of pens that may or may not work.
Take a few minutes to clear the [00:19:00] clutter, toss the junk, file the important stuff, wipe down the surfaces, and then move to your bag. Whether it's your backpack, a work bag, your purse, maybe a gym bag, clean it out. Dump out the crumpled receipts. Remove last week's snack wrapper. I'm not judging. Restock what you need: pens, notebooks, charger. Whatever you need on a daily basis, make sure it's in there and ready to go.
Next, let's wipe down our devices, our laptops, our phones, our tablets, our keyboards- they get really disgusting. Okay? And while you're at it, check your battery levels of all your electric things. Charge what needs to be charged so you're not hunting for an outlet or facing a dead computer two minutes before a Zoom meeting on a Monday morning.
If you bring lunch or snacks with you during the week, check your lunch bag. Did you not, you know, remember to clean out Friday's lunch? Now's the time. Give it a wipe. Restock. Any reusable containers or utensils that you [00:20:00] use, set yourself up so that packing food for the week is easier. If you did some food prep in the previous step, I think it was a previous step, you can put that food into the containers now, if that would make your life easier.
And let's not forget one of the biggest sources of clutter, random papers. This could be lecture notes, work docs, mail, whatever, stuff that just accumulates in random places throughout the week. We don't even know where it comes from. Sort it. Trash what you don't need. File the important things, put things in the right folders, scan anything that you, you know, need a record of, but you don't need the paper copy.
The whole point here isn't to deep clean the entire house or dorm or workspace. I mean, you certainly could, and that could totally be part of a more extensive Sunday reset. But the idea here for this episode is to reset your environment just enough so that when you sit down to work or study that you're walking into a space that feels fresh and ready and supportive and not chaotic.
All right, so let's do a [00:21:00] quick recap of the five core elements of a strong Sunday reset before we get into the 10 additional ones. Number one, plan out the week. We get clear on our schedule and commitments and our responsibilities so that we're not caught off guard. Number two, inventory our tasks. We check what assignments, work, tasks, personal obligations are coming up, and make sure that they actually fit into the time that we have available.
Number three, handle basic email tasks. We clean up our inbox, clear the clutter, prepare responses for Monday if we want to so that we're not starting the week with inbox induced stress.
Number four, prep what you can. Take care of food close. Anything else that will make our weekdays run smoother so that we're not making unnecessary decisions.
Number five, clean and reset our space. We tidy up our workspace, clean out our clutter, clean out our bags, create a fresh environment that supports focus instead of distraction. [00:22:00] Even if we do just one or two of these, our future Monday self heck, our Wednesday self Thursday, self Friday self for the entire week will thank us.
Now, before we wrap up this episode, remember I do wanna share a couple of optional Sunday, Sunday reset add-ons, I suppose, just to get us thinking about what other kinds of things that you could do on a Sunday to prepare for the week ahead.
The five that I shared already and just recapped are the ones that I would say are the core ideas, but there's definitely more that you can add to the mix.
I wanna list out some in just a second, but just a heads up that some will be more relevant to students and some will be more relevant to professionals. So obviously take what works and leave the rest. That is the name of the game on this show.
So if we wanna take our Sunday reset to the next level, here are some additional things that we might wanna consider adding to the mix.
Number one. Journal or reflect on the past week. Now, not everybody is a journaler, but it can be a helpful habit to [00:23:00] take five minutes to reflect even on just two points. Even if you're not writing anything, you're just thinking it. What went well this week and what do you want to adjust to moving forward?
Okay, it's a great thing to do on Sundays. Number two, reviewing financials. A quick check-in on your budget expenses, upcoming bills.
Number three, setting a personal or work-related goal. What is something you wanna work on this week? Even if it's to drink more water or just study a little bit more, those are great goals.
Do you have any goals? Do you have any goals?
Number four, maybe prepare a workout schedule. If you exercise, we can plan our work days, workout days, and maybe what you wanna do on those days.
Again, that's something that we can do ahead of time if you just plan out your workouts for the week so that you don't show up to the gym saying like, what am I gonna do when you're already tired? And it was hard enough to get there. Reducing decision fatigue with preparation on Sunday makes the rest of the week so much smoother.
I feel like I could just reduce this entire episode [00:24:00] to that statement. All right, number five, plan time for something enjoyable. Maybe scheduling lunch with a friend, a reading break, a hobby so the week isn't all woand in no play.
In episode 63, I share my own personal productivity system. So it's basically a three bucket productivity system, and I try to hit and put one thing in each bucket each day, something I should do, something I have to do and something I want to do, right? The want to do is the things that bring you joy.
Can you either do it on Sunday or plan to do it during the week in your Sunday reset?
Number six, do a tech detox. Can you take most of the day off screens? Maybe do your intentional screen tasks, like handling emails or whatever, and then take the rest of the day off of social media.
Number seven, prep study materials. If you're a student, you can spend 25 minutes making flashcards from your notes so you have materials to study during your upcoming study sessions.
This can be done in a relaxed, romanticized way. Music candle, coffee, coffee [00:25:00] shop, whatever, instead of the frantic night before the test, which is what most people are used to.
Number eight, check in with family and friends. A quick call or text with someone that we don't get to talk to during the week. 'cause maybe their work schedules or school schedules are different. That can be a great addition to a Sunday reset. Number nine, wash your sheets. No explanation needed.
Number 10, set a timer for 10 minutes and do a quick cleanup of your digital downloads folder, your desktop and your digital storage.
Give untitled files a name. Maybe delete things that you don't need. Doing this once a week can prevent total digital disorganization. Again, these are all optional, but they can make a Sunday reset feel even more complete and intentional. All right, so there we have it. A complete breakdown of a Sunday reset, whether you follow all five core steps and all 10 additional suggestions. Or maybe just pick a couple, or even if you follow none of them, but they inspired you to come up with your own, that's awesome.
The goal is simple. Set yourself up for a smoother, less [00:26:00] stressful week.
And here's my challenge for anyone listening or watching. Try a Sunday reset this week. This episode is being released on a Thursday, but you may be listening or watching to this on any day of the week in the future. But no matter when you see or hear this, look ahead at the approaching Sunday. Can you set aside 45 minutes to an hour to clear the mess and reset things back to zero?
Yes. Yes, you can. Thank you, my friends. If this episode was helpful, please share it with someone you think might enjoy it too. And don't forget to subscribe and follow the show so you never miss an episode in the future. Thank you for listening and as always, never stop learning.
