Why Weekly Planning is so important
If you have any goals at all, anything you want (or need) to accomplish in your personal or professional life, then you can make a massive difference in your results by installing one simple, 15-minute/week habit: Weekly Planning.
Stop and think for a moment: How would it feel to start each week confident that you’re prepared for everything coming up and you know exactly what you should do this week to make the most progress toward your big goals? Do you feel that way now? Let’s solve that.
The Weekly Planning session is one of the two absolutely critical routines necessary to make you proactive and productive (the other is Daily Planning). It takes less than 15 minutes, and gives you the clarity and focus you need to ensure you spend the next week working on the most important actions to achieve your goals. In Happiful’s Design Your Ideal Life course, I use the analogy of a person on a raft in the ocean, just drifting along, pushed by the wind and the current. If you don’t do your Weekly Planning each week, you are stuck on that raft instead of making steady progress towards your destination (your Ideal Future Life).
In our course, The Ultimate Planning System, we provide the full planning protocol: Your Vision of your Ideal Future Life → 5-Year Goals → 1-Year Goals → Quarterly Rocks → Weekly Plan → Daily Plan. We also go into more detail on Weekly Planning, but the most important part is really quite simple.
Here’s the Weekly Planning process:
Every Saturday or Sunday:
Begin by reviewing your upcoming week's calendar. Note all of your meetings, appointments, and deadlines.
Next, identify your Most Vital Priorities (MVPs) for the week. Take the time to carefully select the 3-7 actions you can take next week that will most help you achieve your 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 goals. Your MVPs, by definition, are only about forward progress towards achieving your goals.
Write down these 3-7 MVPs. (In The Ultimate Planning System course, we give you a Weekly Plan template that you edit and print each week, but writing down your MVPs by hand is fine, too. As long as it is written and physically visible in front of you all week long, it will work.)
Of course you’ll have to do other things next week besides your MVPs. But identifying your MVPs in advance ensures that 1) You have actually taken time to identify the most important things you can do (most people never do this); and 2) You are far more likely to actually do the most important things instead of only doing trivial things all week long.
This 15-minute process takes you from drifting on that raft in the ocean and turns you into a jet pilot, making rapid progress toward your destination (your goals).
To learn more, please join me at the free Quarterly Planning Workshop on March 25th at 3:00 EDT. In that 60 minute Zoom Workshop, you’ll be introduced to the full Happiful Planning System (including Weekly Planning) and actually create part of your Quarterly Plan. Register here.
