Weekly Planning System I Wish I Had Learned Sooner

Introduction

Here’s the system which I use for planning my weeks, tracking my progress, building weekly dashboards, and so much more.

Preparing Flashcards

First of all, we need some flashcards like these. Personally, I use A5 papers and divide them into 16 pieces to have small flashcards. Each of them is 5.3 by 3.7 centimeters. I prefer making a cross on each card to create 4 quadrants.

Using Quadrants

The fourth quadrant is for daily habits and routines, such as reading, learning a new language, exercising, and so on. You shouldn’t fill this quadrant now; you will see why in the following steps. Each of the first three quadrants corresponds to each of your first 3 goals, ordered by importance. If you have fewer than 3 goals, you can use fewer quadrants.

Example Scenario

To illustrate, suppose you are a person named David, working in a company. Besides your everyday job, you have two goals: your first goal is business-related, like writing, and your second goal is to lose some weight to improve your health.

Defining Deliverables

The next step is to define at least one deliverable for each goal to be completed by the end of the week. For example, David wants to publish one article of one thousand words every week on his website. He also plans to publish a two-hundred-page book each year, totaling about fifty thousand words. Therefore, he needs to write 1000 words weekly for his book as well. These are the deliverables for his first goal.

Adjusting for Accuracy

You might argue that David needs to write more to deliver 2000 net words (edited), which we will consider in future steps. For his second goal, David wants to measure how much he eats each day of the first week. He will use the “Measuring Backward” strategy, learned from James Clear's article. David will roughly track the calories, focusing on simple metrics like grams of rice and bread. He plans to place reminders on the table or counter to remind him to record his eating habits.

Simple Daily Tasks

David also plans to walk 1000 steps each day, which is easy to accomplish. These are the deliverables for his second goal.

Choosing Supportive Habits

Next, we should fill the habits and routines quadrant. It is important to choose habits and routines that support your goals. If David doesn’t choose habits that support his goals, he might not stay consistent due to a lack of motivation. Reading, for example, is essential for his career to gain new ideas and inspiration from other writers. Exercise is another necessary habit for his second goal.

Assigning Specific Times

We should now make these tasks more specific and assign times to each. For reading, David wants to finish a two-hundred-page book, like The Compound Effect, each month. He plans to read 35 pages weekly, which is 7 pages daily. He also specifies the book, such as “How to Be an Imperfectionist” by Stephen Guise. For exercise, David plans to walk around 6 PM, tracking 1000 steps with his smartphone.

Writing Routine

For his writing goal, David will wake up early and write for 1 hour each morning, producing at least 500 words daily. By the end of the week, he aims to have written at least 3500 words. This accounts for editing and potential word deletions, making the plan reasonable.

Tracking and Dashboard

After setting specific times or refining his plan, David will track his progress throughout the week and build a dashboard to monitor his goals. He will use a spreadsheet to list tasks for each goal and track his reading time, pages read, writing time, words written, walking steps, and the duration of each activity.

Analyzing Progress

At the end of the week, David should summarize the different metrics for each task. Then, he should sum these numbers to get the grand total time and divide each task's time by the grand total. This calculation shows the percentage of time spent on each activity. Sorting these percentages from largest to smallest, he can analyze the results.

Applying the Pareto Principle

David should check the cumulative percentage to see if it follows the Pareto principle: spending more time on important goals. As Jim Rohn says, “You shouldn’t spend major time on minor things.” If David spends 50% of his time reading instead of writing, that's a problem. He can use strategies covered in the next steps to fix this issue.

Visualizing Time Management

Before proceeding, it's worth mentioning that you can plot different charts. For instance, you can use a pie chart to visualize the time spent on each goal or a Pareto chart to see how time aligns with priorities. Line charts can provide insights into progress over time. However, if you prefer simplicity, you can skip these visualizations.

Incremental Improvements

If David is unhappy with the total time spent on his goals, he can aim to increase it by 1% daily. But how can he achieve this? Let’s take walking as an example. If walking 1000 steps daily was easy, he could set his goal to 1100 steps each day next week to improve by 1%, a small but manageable increase.

Goal Adjustments

David wants to apply this strategy to his writing habit but not his reading habit. For eating, based on his first-week tracking, he plans to decrease food quantities by 1% daily. For example, if he usually eats 417 grams of rice, he aims to reduce this to 390 grams for the next week. Applying this strategy depends on the results of the previous step.

Measuring Backward

This planning and goal-setting method is called measuring backward. David sets goals based on his current level and past performance. This approach is realistic, suitable for him, and makes the process like a game, known as gamification.

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