Pre-Planning to win the week

Planning your week takes an additional effort to be effective and influential while working from home..

This article is my secret sauce on how I am hacking my week ....

Step 0?

Planning your week can be extremely anxiety-provoking. Your limbic brain's fight-or-flight response may be triggered, which may prevent you from consistently and completely planning ahead.

Eliminating this internal obstacle is step zero. The "hack" is to design a pleasurable pre-planning experience that you eagerly anticipate.

For example, pre-planning at a beautiful place or in nature, or making yourself a special treat to eat or coffee to drink. This is something you can decide on once, and do the same way each week (or keep tweaking it until you are happy). People who want to achieve big - do prioritization planning as a pleasurable thing

Write down the craveable experience you will create for yourself while you pre-plan:

1. I will pick up my pen diary and gadget to go to the park and spend time drinking my coffee and planning. This weekend I tried doing it in a beautiful park near Scarborough(Toronto). My most craveable experience is in nature so I have started choosing outdoor places as I have less outdoor space at my condo...

Step 1

By looking for a lesson or improvement each week, you might create a positive feedback loop where you get a little bit better every week.

The consequences could fundamentally change your life within a year. What are you talking about, A YEAR? I literally have years' worth of data. some handwritten journals and some in electronic format. My half-dozen diaries were actually left at home when I travelled to Canada.

Consider this a chance to try new things, analyze your successes and losses, and improve your play. To find a lesson from the previous week, use the following questions:

What would the ideal execution have looked like if you could go back in time and replay the last week?

• I was interviewed last week by a few client coaches and received some strong advice. I wouldn't say it was something to think about, but it was about how to avoid letting other people affect your mental health and how to accept rejection with grace.?

What went well this week that I should double down on the following week?

• My everyday schedule is starting to return to normal. I can maintain the routine and put in the necessary time. Additionally, as a working woman, organizing my home, cooking, cleaning, and other tasks on a calendar helped me take control of my schedule.

Write down a lesson from the past week:

Actions are important than planning & outputs are more powerful than just doing any activity. Writing clear outputs gave me sense of satisfaction

Step 2

The most common planning mistake is selecting the incorrect priority (or selecting many, equal priorities rather than one main priority). This causes you to lose concentration and have a smaller influence, which keeps you stuck in an endless loop of work.

Choose the highest leveraged priority instead, and set a deadline on Monday or Tuesday to fulfill it.?

This priority's success or failure will play a significant role in determining whether you "won" or "lost" this week, so make sure it is both achievable and highly leveraged.?

Ask yourself the Leveraging Question* if you're stuck.

What action can I take this week that makes future weeks easier??

*based on Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s question in The ONE Thing, “What is the one thing you can do such that, by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

Write down your leveraged priority for the coming week:

• My priorities are divided into four categories: office/client work, career development, personal and household responsibilities. I maintain different journal/diaries

Step 3

Your calendar represents your entire supply of time—your precious 168 hours (24*7) a week.?

In this method, it is your responsibility to check your calendar for minor inaccuracies and make sure it appropriately displays your available time. Years went by while I strove to create the ideal calendar, but I was never successful. I choose my office's Outlook calendar as the primary and add my personal information to it so that it only displays one calendar for me. After that, I compose high-level stuff in Notepad. Personal preference is the only consideration.

In order to truly trust your calendar's capacity to assist you in planning the ideal week and making the most of it, you should then challenge it as a lawyer would examine a witness.This goes well beyond a simple calendar "review" to show you how much time you actually have, frequently revealing secret reserves you were unaware of.?To begin with use a notepad and write everything manually slowly start blocking your calendar

Write down any landmines or errors you found in your calendar

• I started blocking for the first time my calendar for yoga/exercise time because now I feel its equally valuable & important to take care of your health

Step 4

The nature of human beings is to want to do more than they have time for. But in a world where you can’t do it all, you need to ruthlessly triage your task list. That means letting go of the fantasy of “getting it all done,” and asking a far better question…?

“How can I do the most good with my limited supply of time?”?

For this, you will be scanning your task list for things you can terminate, automate, consolidate, and outsource, such that the only remaining tasks are high priority or incredibly urgent.

Tasks I can terminate, automate, consolidate, outsource, move to my Someday List, or push out into a future week…

1. Write your experience around the last program you completed and the learnings in your personal folder?
2. ?Publish an article on Agile Coaching Dojo , plus plan for workshop in Agile Coaching Dojo
3. Complete the SAFe Latest 6.0 upgrades for BigData, AI/ML and Infra area
4. Complete reading your book The Toyota Way and Un stoppable
5. Write your notes around Remote Ways of working & how better planning can take you to leap apart

Step 5

Having interrogated your calendar and triaged your task list, you must now allocate time demands to your time supply. In practice that means allocating time in your calendar to get each task done (also known as “calendarizing” your task list). This is where your plan becomes a plan.

Have you:

Yes/No

Put the good stuff in first?

Planned Deep Work for your leveraged priority early in the week?

Put in sufficient UUW time (Flex Time)?

Stuffed Shallow Work into the cracks?

Allocated all your time supply?

Do share what;s your ..

Reference

Agile Prioritization & Planning ( Weekly Iteration)

Inspired by the Winning Week method from https://lifehackmethod.com

https://lifehackmethod.com/2021/07/23/how-to-plan-your-week-for-success/