I’m a pen and paper guy, I doodle, I draw, and I scribble. However, I massively embrace technology and try to use it at all times. I automate tasks, and admin duties, I outsource the things I don’t enjoy, and I spend my time doing what I love.
So when it comes to planning my week, I find that nothing beats the pen and paper strategy, here’s what I do to ensure I get the best stab at owning the week and not allowing the week to own me.
First up, I mind map everything that needs to be done, the topics I need to cover, the tasks I need to do and any crossovers they may have. I let my mind run wild here, adding everything from the follow-up calls, to the events I run and videos I will film.
After the initial mind map it’s not unusual to have a list of tentacles reach north of 150, now this can appear quite daunting at a glance. However, this rapidly changes when I move to the next step.
I chunk the lists together, and a good example would be to make follow up calls, emails or any creative work while videos are uploading to my community or youtube etc. Another example would be when writing content for my blog, I redistribute this for videos, quotes and social content.
Can meetings be tied together with other tasks? After this process that list of over 150 tasks generally gets down to 10 -20 tasks which can be easily managed.
The next part is to discover what outcome you want from the task and the reason for doing it. An example could be ‘Call Stephen regarding speaking at the Sales Seminar in August’, this is the task, the outcome would be, I want to get paid to speak at this gig, and the reason is to reach more people, help others succeed in sales and further grow my authority in this field.
Often we spend time doing tasks that have no real value, and it just makes us feel good (BTW, you should do a little of feel-good activity – Unfortunately, many spend over 80% of their time here and less than 20% doing the important stuff).
By spending the time working on the outcome and reason, you find the priority, the things you need to focus on first, after this simply schedule them into your diary and make them real.
The hardest part many face is staying committed to the scheduled activity, you need to learn to discipline yourself to get the task done. Treat it with the same importance as collecting a £10,000 cheque. And if for any reason you need to remove it, you have got to replace it.
I find that Sunday provides the best time for me to plan this. However Friday would most likely make the better day while things are still fresh in your mind. But work with what works best for you, for me its Sunday.
You can download my FREE ‘Power Planner Template’ to help with your weekly planning, this helps to identify more clarity around your tasks as described above. Get the template here >>
Let me know what works for you.