Run Your Week Before It Runs You
A 30–60 Minute Weekly Planning Ritual to Forecast Your Workload, Catch What’s Slipping, and Stop Living in Reactive Mode
Weekly planning is critical if you want to change your life and change your habits. Daily planning is equally important! If your current routine doesn’t include weekly planning, that routine must be broken and reconstructed! Sound familiar? It should. In my last post, I wrote about the importance of 5–minute daily planning. Just as important is weekly planning.
The reality is that very few people engage in a weekly planning deep dive session. It is an essential step for forecasting your workload and getting intimately familiar with your task list. Most people just “show up” to work and are reactive to fires instead of being strategic and on top of everything on their plate. This leads to poor leadership and poor time management, and it fosters an environment of anxiety and stress.
How to Do a Weekly Deep-Dive Planning Session
1. Do your weekly deep-dive planning session on the same day and time each week. That’s right — same time, same place, same channel! Plan 30-60 minutes for this session, one day a week. Performing this ritual at the same day and time each week will make it infinitely easier to develop a habit of engaging in this important planning. Moreover, it is proof to your team and yourself about how important and sacred this practice is to your organization.
2. Think about using the “buddy system.” Learning new healthy time management habits is very much like learning new dietary habits! It can be hard at times. Think about teaming up with a colleague and doing your own weekly deep-dive planning sessions at the same time as each other. Let me be clear: you are not talking to each other or planning with each other. It is admittedly a little awkward at first, but just get on the phone or a web meeting and do your own planning in dead silence. In fact, commit to not disturbing each other. The idea here is something similar to having a workout partner. One study found that 95 percent of those who started an exercise and weight-loss program with a friend completed the program. They also found that they were 42 percent more likely to maintain their weight loss. See https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-you-should-work-out-crowd-ncna798936. In my office, about 10 of us get together every Friday morning at 8:30 and we all do our own weekly planning. Those of us who do this regard this as “sacred” planning time. We schedule around this planning time as much as possible.
3. The Weekly Deep Dive Checklist
Calendar – 2 weeks forward
Calendar – 2 weeks back
Project/case list
Task list and follow-up folder
Email
Loose papers and notes
Time report
Two Weeks Forward. Open your calendar and touch every single appointment on your calendar. Stop – pause on each appointment – think about what you must do to prepare for this appointment. Can you move forward with it? Do you have to do any research? Do you need to time-block (make an appointment with yourself on your calendar) to prepare? If so, block out your preparation time. If you need to look further out than two weeks (or less), adjust your look-forward window. For example, I look two weeks forward at every appointment, and then I look four additional weeks out to find appointments that require travel arrangements, so I book travel arrangements (flights, hotel, rental car) in time.
Two Weeks Back. Open your calendar and touch every single appointment on your calendar going two weeks back. Stop – pause on each appointment – think about whether you did everything that you promised people in those appointments. If not, schedule time to do those things and update your task list.
Case/Matter/Project Review. Whether you work with cases, matters or projects (or all the above), you had better have a list of all your active cases, matters or projects! If you don’t, you absolutely should. Review this list for the following:
· Does your list have all new cases, matters, or projects that landed on your plate this week?
Can you remove any cases, matters, or projects that closed this week?
Ask yourself with each item on that list, “Am I on-track or off-track?” If you are off-track, block off time on your calendar to do a deep dive into that case, matter or project! Do not do a deep dive into it now, or your weekly deep dive will take a half-day!
Review Your Task List(s) and Follow-Up Email Folder. Review each and every item on your task list(s). Stop – Pause – Really think about each item. Just like with the calendar above, you are not skimming. You are thinking about each item. Ask yourself:
Is the task complete? If so, mark it complete.
Is the task still relevant? If not, delete it.
Is the task overdue, urgent or about to become urgent? If so, block off time on your calendar to get it done!
Do you need to provide a status update to anyone?
Do you need to follow up with anyone before you can complete this task (are you waiting on someone else)?
If you maintain a follow-up folder in Outlook or Gmail, check that folder for anything that you are expecting from someone or anything that you delegated to anyone.
Finally, and this is important, remember to check all of your task lists, including any “Someday” or “Bucket” lists. We too often forget to check our strategic planning or quarterly or long-term lists and then these items never get done! It is vital that we have a routine/system in place that makes us review all items on all task lists.
Batch Process Email (only Delete, Delegate & Delay). Process your inbox to Delete any emails that you can. Also, Delegate any emails that you need to delegate. Finally, if you need to Delay acting on an email, be sure to record it on your task list, create an appointment with yourself to do it (time block), and then save the email into the case/matter/project folder so you can delete it from your inbox. Remember, your inbox is a terrible task list. Stop using your inbox as a task list!
Note: If you are familiar with batch processing emails, you will note that I removed the Do from batch processing during the weekly deep dive (you typically Delete, Do, Delegate & Delay). This is intentional. If you do the “Do” during the weekly deep-dive, your session will balloon from 60 minutes to half a day. For the weekly deep dive, focus on just Delete, Delegate & Delay.
Clean Your Desk, Piles, Stickies and Notes. During the week as life happens, it would be ideal to enter all tasks and do all your time blocking on your calendar immediately when the task surfaces. We all know that this doesn’t happen perfectly that way. You may be running out the door when the phone rings and someone asks you to do something. So, you jot it down on a sticky note and slap it on your keyboard. Likewise, maybe someone sent you a pile of paper and that is sitting on your desk as a reminder to do it. All of these are really tasks and appointments, and they belong in your system. Enter them, scan and save the papers or notes, and throw away the sticky notes. The end result is that (1) you have a single place to review and manage your tasks (not 10 or 20 notes, stickies, etc.), and (2) you have a clean desk, which will help you focus.
Weekly Time Report. If you track your time, review your billable timesheets for the week. Learn how to run a report from your time and billing system (or have someone run it for you). Again, stop, pause and think about each time entry, and ask yourself:
Did I do everything that I promised relating to the activity that I performed for this time entry? If not, update your task list and/or schedule time on your calendar to do it.
Are there any follow-up items that I should pursue relating to this time entry?
By performing this each week, you kill three birds with one stone:
You proof your time entries for grammar and accuracy, preventing you from having to do a massive review once a month.
You remember tasks that you need to perform that you failed to do.
You will also stumble across time entries that you forgot to enter, thereby billing more time … and who doesn’t want that!?
No system is perfect, but a weekly deep dive comes close. Thirty to sixty minutes, once a week, on the same day and at the same time. That’s the entire investment. In exchange, you touch every appointment two weeks forward and two weeks back, every case, matter and project on your plate, every item on every task list, every task sitting in your inbox that should be on your task list, every stray sticky note on your desk, and every time entry from the week. Nothing gets to hide.
That’s what ties this checklist together. Each item on it is a different place where your commitments quietly pile up: your calendar, your task lists, your inbox, your desk, your time report. Left alone, each one collects work you promised someone and then forgot. Reviewed together, once a week, they give you a single honest picture of what you’re actually carrying. That picture is the difference between “showing up” to work and genuinely running your week.
The payoff compounds. You stop reacting to fires because you saw most of them coming. You stop apologizing for the thing that slipped, because you caught it on Friday morning instead of hearing about it next Tuesday afternoon. Your team notices that you follow through. You notice that the low-grade anxiety of not knowing what you’ve forgotten starts to fade. That isn’t a productivity trick. That’s what being on top of your work feels like.
So, pick your day. Put it on your calendar as a recurring appointment right now, before you close this post. Recruit a buddy if that helps you stay accountable. Then guard that time the way you’d guard a client meeting, because it’s the meeting that makes every other meeting go well. We will always have more on our plates than we can handle but with a weekly deep dive, at least we’ll know exactly what’s on there.