How To Plan The Week in 45 Minutes or Less

This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session. 

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Script | 349

Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long.

It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction. 

The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week. 

The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects. 

Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long. 

This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past. 

Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days.

So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour?

Hi Greg, thank you for your question.

The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone?

If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox. 

Processing your inbox is about asking three questions:

What is it?

What do I need to do?

When will I do it?

The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether. 

When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder. 

If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date. 

Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days. 

In my experience, that only takes ten minutes. 

Now what about all those projects? 

Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects. 

However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that. 

I don’t define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete. 

In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it’s a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets.

The thing is, I didn’t know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn’t know that until I had booked the flights. 

I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things I want to purchase while there. I also save my flight tickets and anything else I may need. 

Another way to look at it is if you were a HR manager, and a colleague asked you to hire a new team member, that would not necessarily be a project. As a HR manager, hiring people is a part of what you do. It’s probable you will be hiring many different team members, and managing the process of hiring is just a part of your core work. 

Yet if you were tasked to overhaul the payroll system or to organise the seamless move of all employees to a new location, given that you wouldn’t ordinarily do that kind of work, they would be projects. 

When would you review those projects? Perhaps when you know you have a management meeting coming up, or you have a one to one with your boss. 

But, reviewing is not planning. Reviewing is a task by itself. 

Planning is about deciding what you will do. A weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives for the week. Daily planning is setting objectives for the day. 

Last night, as I planned today, I made writing this script an objective. Once I knew that I would be writing this script, I checked my calendar for my committed events for today, and mentally decided when I would write it. 

It did not mean I had to go through all my previous scripts or review the list of questions I keep. That was a task I set on for Saturday afternoon—decide what topics I will create content around next week. 

When I was writing Your Time, Your Way, it was obvious what needed to be done each week—set aside one or two hours a day to write the book. How much reviewing was needed for that? Zilch, nada, zero. To complete that project required me to sit down and write the book five days a week. 

Every two weeks I had a meeting with my publisher. These were usually Friday evenings for me. This meant I had a task on Friday to review what I had written over the previous two weeks and to add any questions I had for the publisher. 

Often my publisher would ask me to do something. Perhaps he wanted me to send him a profile picture, approve the cover designs, or update the chapter list. During the meeting I added those tasks to the meeting note and afterwards, transferred the tasks to my task list. 

This meant, when I did my weekly planning, I did not need to go and review the whole project. What needed to be done was already in my Next Week list. All I needed to do was to decide when I would get the information requested together and send it. 

The reason planning the week takes so long is likely because you are not planning, you’re reviewing and cleaning up.

Cleaning up your task list, your notes or anything else is not planning. It’s cleaning up. That’s a completely different category of task. 

If you’re spending five or ten minutes at the end of the day clearing your task manager’s inbox, deciding what something is, what you need to do, and when you will do it, you won’t have very much cleaning up to do at the end of the week. 

When the special forces plan a mission, they start with the objective—take that hill—they then set about working out how they will get to the top of the hill. They don’t waste time looking at what they did or didn’t do this week or how they got to where they are. 

They focus their attention on getting from where they are now to where they need to be. 

And that’s the approach you want to take when planning your week. You have seven days to accomplish a set number of objectives. The question is what do you need to do to get there? 

And just like the special forces, your plan will break—it always does. It’s at that point you pause, look at where you are, and figure out what needs to happen for you to reach your target. 

And for us, that’s what we do when we do the daily planning. 

I should have written half of that report by now, but I haven’t started yet. What do I need to do in the remaining 48 hours to complete the report by the deadline. Perhaps I need to cancel two meetings tomorrow, so I can use that time to write and get myself back on track? 

It’s not going through the project again, and finding excuses for not accomplishing your task. You’re behind, what do you need to do to get back on track? That’s planning. 

If you are putting deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section, when you are planning the week, you can quickly see what deadlines you have coming up over the next two or three weeks and that can guide you towards what you should be working on. 

If you use task start and due dates in your task manager, then, of course your weekly planning is going to take you longer. You will need to review all your tasks to ensure you haven’t missed anything. Good luck with that approach. 

So, when do you review you projects? Personally, I review my projects when I work on them. I have a master projects list table on my notes app that shows me all my projects, their deadlines and what needs to happen next. 

Every time I finish working on a project, I update that table with what I did and what I need to do next. 

Going back to writing Your Time, Your Way, there was very little updating required. I had five two-hour writing blocks in my calendar each week for writing the book. The next action was easy—continue writing my book. 

Now, if a project becomes a complete mess and you don’t know where you are or what needs to happen next, the task is to review the project. That will then help you to get it back on track. But that’s not part of the weekly planning. That’s just a task you need to do, and you may add it as a task to do next week. 

Another question, I get asked is what about follow-ups and waiting for’s?

Again, that’s not part of your weekly planning. That’s a separate task. Personally, I check my follow-ups folders once a week or when I am working on a project and I can see I am waiting for something. It’s certainly not part of my weekly planning. 

So, if when you sit down to set out your weekly plan, you are also reviewing all your tasks and projects, yes, it’s going to take you a long time. But you are not planning. You’re reviewing. 

If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any time management book prior to 2001, none of them had you reviewing “open loops” and “projects”. That’s regressive and means you waste a lot of time focused on the past. 

These books—books that helped millions of people—focused planning on what you will do next week, this month, quarter or year. They were forward thinking. That’s what planning the day and week is all about. 

What will you accomplish next week? What needs to be done? And when will you do it? That’s it. 

And if you are consistent with this, you will find weekly planning will take you between thirty and forty minutes. 

I hope that helps, Greg. Thank you for your question. 

And thank you to too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.