Sunday evenings are a great time for reviewing the previous week and preparing your week ahead. Spend 30-60 minutes doing this and it will make a massive difference to your productivity, effectiveness and confidence.
- Review last week. Get out your planner or diary and start by asking yourself questions like
- What did I get done and complete last week?
- What went well and what didn’t?
- Where did I waste time?
- When was I at my best?
- What am I grateful for?
Write your answers in your journal using this as a framework. It’s important to keep track of what’s working well and what isn’t and invest all your past experience into your future success.
- Plan next week. Now start to map out a general plan of the next week using the weekly view in your diary or download and print this one. Start by adding all the non-negotiables and fixed events, like meetings, regular exercise, appointments etc. It’s fine to leave gaps, just be aware of them as available blocks. We tend to over estimate how much we can get done in a day, so be realistic and make it easy to succeed. This helps to build our confidence, rather than cram in too much, only get half done and beat ourselves up over it. If you need to write a business plan, for example, set the task as ‘writing 2 crappy pages of my business plan.’ You can easily do this, and once you’ve started, you’ll quickly see that it’s not crappy at all. I tend to put the word ‘crappy’ in front of quite a lot of my tasks, and it’s an incredible powerful mind hack.
Ask questions like
- What am I 100% committed to this week? Why?
- What do I want the outcomes or results to be?
- What am I excited for this week?
- Plan each day the night before. Now you have a rough plan of the week, spend time each evening planning the following day in detail. Diarise everything you want or need to get done. I love the Self Journal. It means I can keep all of these elements in one place.
Important things to remember:
- Always have a solid morning routine. This puts you in a strong and confident state of mind and helps you get clear on what you want the outcome of your day to be.
• Do your hardest tasks first. We all have the most will power and decision making power first thing, so use it on the tasks that are most challenging.
• Get clear on what distracts you (like notifications of any kind) and take care of those before they come up. Put your phone in another room and give yourself time and space to do focussed work.
One last tip – the most helpful affirmation I say to myself when I’m feeling under pressure? “I got this.”
Try it. It’s magic.