Weekly Planning
The Weekly Planning Session is one of the two absolutely critical routines necessary to make you proactive and productive (the other one is your Daily Planning Session at the end of every day). It only takes about 15 minutes, and gives you the clarity and focus you need to ensure you spend the next week working on the most important actions that will help you accomplish your quarterly and annual goals, and thus to achieving your vision of your ideal future life. Remember the difference between the person on the raft in the ocean, just drifting along, pushed by the wind and the current, vs. the pilot of the jet airplane with a destination and a plan. Without doing your Weekly Planning each week, you are likely stuck on the life raft, instead of making steady progress towards your destination of your ideal future life.
Commit to investing the 15 minutes in Weekly Planning each weekend and I guarantee you will see a major difference in achieving your goals.
Every Saturday or Sunday:
Begin by reviewing your upcoming week's calendar. Note all of your meetings, appointments, and deadlines. Preparation is vital for success, and by understanding what lies ahead, you can effectively plan and prepare.
Next, identify your Most Vital Priorities (MVPs) for the week. Choose the 3-7 actions that will most help you achieve your quarterly or annual goals. Limiting it to no more than 7 ensures that you are focusing on what are truly the most important actions you can take. Exclude recurring tasks and include only actions that are directly related to your quarterly or annual goals. Your MVPs by definition are only about forward progress towards achieving your goals.
Edit your Weekly Plan by removing the MVPs you completed last week, adding next week’s MVPs. The Weekly Plan is a template form that you should download to your computer and save as a document, and then edit and update each week.
Break down any MVPs exceeding 30 minutes into smaller sub-steps of 30 minutes or less. This ensures they fit into your schedule, preventing procrastination.
Print out your set of weekly forms: your Weekly Plan, your Daily Commitments Checklist, and 7 copies of your Happiful Planner.*
*The above hyperlinks are for the templates; you should have your own customized version of the Weekly Plan and Daily Commitments Checklist.
It is critically important that you print out the set of weekly forms each week. These 9 pieces of paper will make you happy and successful. Looking at them on your computer or phone will not work. You MUST print them out each week and use them each day to get the results you desire in your life.
Each time you prepare your Weekly Plan, you are getting One Step Closer to Happiful. Here’s the Weekly Planning Checklist you should print out now and follow.
Action Steps:
Commit to investing 15 minutes each week for Weekly Planning, and decide that becoming happy and successful is worth printing out 9 pieces of paper a week.
Decide the day and time that you will do your Weekly Planning session each week. Most people like to get it out of the way Saturday morning, but you can adjust to meet your schedule as long as it is done before the end of the day on Sunday.
Go into your calendar and set up a weekly recurring event for Weekly Planning. You may want to include the link to this web page and/or the Weekly Planning Checklist in your calendar event to make it easier for you to execute each week.