Weekly planning process for goal setting

By Daniel Angelini on September 24, 2020

Plan weekly and achieve more. Why? Because most of us have so many things that are competing for our time, that it’s easy to lose focus or get distracted. Planning will help you avoid getting to the end of your week only to find that you spent most of it working on something that you didn’t intend to be doing. The other reason is that it helps you to avoid starting off your planning by thinking to yourself, “what do I have to do this week?” Let me take you through it.

Once a week, let’s say on a Sunday evening, give yourself 15-20 minutes to create a weekly plan of your goals and priorities. Grab a notebook - I always find that the impulsive way of putting pen to paper fastest to get ideas out.

Step 1 - Capture everything. If you have a lot of things on your mind, start off by throwing everything onto a blank page (all of your to-dos). This helps you to clear your mind so you don’t feel like you’ve forgotten something.

Step 2 - Ask what do you want? Turn to a fresh page and now it’s time to think big picture. Ask yourself, what do you really want to achieve this week that would add massive value to your work? Don’t ask what do I need to do, ask what do you want to achieve. This allows you to think about a goal first and then work backwards. Go for 3-5 goals that you want to achieve for the week.

Step 3 - Build a plan for each goal. Go back to your capture page and now you should be able to assign those tasks to goals, making your work grouped and purpose-driven so that you can work focus on one goal at a time. This significantly help to improve your productivity, as you’ll avoid jumping between unrelated tasks.

Throughout your week, keep your 3-5 goals handy at all times. Use this as your compass, look at it when you plan your days and use it to refocus your days when you have a lot of things competing for your time. Always come back to what is most important for you to achieve during the week and what will have the most impact.