Weekly Planning System: A 6-Step Method to Achieve Peak Productivity Throughout the Week and Stay Focused on Your Goals | by Duka John | Nov, 2021Weekly Planning System: A 6-Step Method to Achieve Peak Productivity Throughout the Week and Stay Focused on Your Goals | by Duka John | Nov, 2021

Weekly Planning System: A 6-Step Method to Achieve Peak Productivity Throughout the Week and Stay Focused on Your Goals | by Duka John | Nov, 2021

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Duka John
Weekly Planning System by John Duka

How do you stay focused on making progress with your goals every s-i-n-g-l-e week?

Dale Carnegie said it the best:

It’s very common to approach planning your to-dos through daily planning.

But it’s very rare to see someone planning the whole week in advance strategically. Is it better to plan weekly than daily?

You see, most people plan their days in the morning. However, using your day as a timeframe to get things done is very constricted because you can only get so much done within 24 hours.

A better way to plan your to-dos and tasks is to use the week as a timeframe when scheduling your projects.

Why? It’s a long enough timeframe to spread out the subtasks of your ‘iPhone project’ (your main project) and short enough to get them done.

How do you plan the week? I plan the week using my Weekly Planning System.

I am a social media manager intern for a CHPC and am on my way to working full-time.

I also have this writing project as one of my dreams is to build an online business doing what I love — sharing what I’m learning in productivity, in peak performance strategies, in writing, and in content creation.

We also have Church obligations and serve our members which take up a huge pie of our time as well.

Without my 1–hour Weekly Sunday Planning session, I would crash and die — I mean philosophically. I would be running around with my head cut-off and my hands trembling due to extreme overwhelm.

Then it would be easy for me to procrastinate my dream project, my weekly article, my Church obligations — and psychologically, self-hate will increase.

For us who have big ambitions and living our purpose, we need to have a system, a method we must follow consistently each week so we make consistent progress, maintain our sanity, and achieve peak productivity and joy throughout the week.

By strategically spreading your tasks throughout the week, sequenced and batched, you eliminate the anxiety of not getting things done and hating on yourself for not executing.

And the Weekly Planning System is that tool — and today, I want to share with you how I do it to the extreme detail, with lots of examples to bring as much value to you because I believe this is going to lift you to your next level of productivity.

Before we dive deep into each step in detail, let me share with you what those steps are first, so you know where we’re heading towards this article.

Step 1: Macro Vision Alignment
Step 2: Weekly Life Reflection
Step 3: Micro Progress-Makers (Weekly 6)
Step 4: Happiness Pursuits + Personal Growth Sessions
Step 5: Calendar Integration
Step 6: Execute Daily

I highly suggest you try all of the steps out. It might take you 1 to 2 hours to do it, but it will become easier as you continue to implement this method every week.

Without further ado, here’s how I plan my week in 6 detailed steps.

Clarity is always — always the first step.

Before planning your week, do you still know what you’re being productive for?

What is your goal? Why are you showing up each week?

What is your Mountain Everest journey? What is the mountain top you’re trying to achieve?

Climbing the wrong mountain is the best way to be unproductive.

Without clarity on what specific outcome you’re trying to achieve, without clarity on where you’re heading towards, of course, you won’t make progress on your goals.

So, the first step I do each week is to remind myself of my 5-year, 3-year, and 1-year goals.

What’s your 5-Year Goal: ________________________

What’s your 3-Year Goal: ________________________

What’s Your 1-Year Goal: ________________________

To give you an example, my 1-year goal is to grow my email subscribers to 2,000 people. Now, what projects or weekly tasks must I accomplish each week to achieve this goal?

See how easier it is to plan your week when you know where you’re heading? That’s is the power of clarity.

Until you’re razor clear on what your yearly goal is, don’t proceed to do any of the next following steps in this article. You will only schedule unnecessary tasks, making yourself busy for the sake of being busy instead of making progress.

Second, I use the Whole Life Assessment section in Brendon’s High-Performance Planner to review each core area of my life.

This includes core areas such as health, my mental and emotional wellbeing, career, and relationships.

Health: (From 1–10, score yourself how well you did in this core area)

  1. What are your weekly wins:
  2. Where should you improve (nutrition, sleep, movement):
  3. What day and time will you execute these optimizations:

And I do that in all core areas to give me a measurement of where I did well and where to improve.

Remember, what gets measured gets improved.

So think about 5–7 core areas of your life, write them down, and review how well you did in each, so you get an overview of your whole life — and improve next week.

After assessing and reflecting on the past week, here comes the setting of this upcoming week’s progress-makers.

Let’s say your goal is to grow your email list to 1,000 subscribers next year, a micro-progress maker would be to create a lead magnet. Another one is creating a landing page for that lead magnet. Another one is creating weekly content — a podcast, a blog, or a YouTube video.

So, progress-makers are the necessary steps you must take this week to get to the mountain top of your ambitions.

Micro progress-makers are essential because having a goal or a vision is one thing, but making progress towards it is everything.

Ed Sheeran example of progress makers — write a song every day and produce.

Ed Sheeran says in one of his interviews “Yeah, I have writer’s block all the time. I think to be a good writer you have to know when not to push it. But when I’m on, I try and write as much as possible, so like, two or three songs a day, maybe more. “Shape of You” was actually one of four written that day, and it was the first one, and then we carried on.

And I thought that’s genius! He’s prolific on producing outputs that will advance his career — writing songs. That’s how Shape of You was born — by being showing up and cranking out songs — which are his progress-makers.

So, what are your progress makers? For me as an example, one of my progress-makers is writing this blog article every week. Another one is ‘prolific Instagram engagement’ to grow my audience for my articles.

These progress-makers become your Weekly 6. Now, 6 is an arbitrary number. I choose six because I have an internship, my writing project, and our Church activities. Yours might be Weekly 3 or 5 if you’re focused on one thing.

Weekly 6 Example:

  1. Internship Work:
    1) Write the next three batches of Instagram posts for JP’s brand
    2) Design the written Instagram posts draft on Canva
  2. Online Business:
    1) Publish my weekly article
    2) Engage in different hashtags on IG to drive traffic
  3. Church Activities:
    1) Practice playing the organ effectively
    2) Project plan the upcoming Monthly Meeting event

You see, not all of us are Gary Vaynerchuk-type of achievers who are always on, 18-hour workdays, meeting after meeting, client work after client work.
Most people need a break from work, to play, to recover, and to recharge.

It’s critical to schedule your happiness pursuits for your well-being. These are the pursuits that make you feel alive, recharged, and they don’t feel like work at all.

So, what are yours?

One of my pursuits is reading psychology books and articles for long hours. I also categorize some of my Church activities as my happiness pursuits because although I’m more of an introvert, I still enjoy being with my mates in Church. Another one is playing the organ. Try to think of at least three and write them down.

Moving on to your Growth Sessions. This could be you reading a book to advance in your field. It could also be taking an online course to upgrade a core skill in your field — if you’re a website designer, it could be taking a course on UI/UX design.

I love Robin Sharma’s approach to this. He says that every single day, dedicate at least 60 minutes to your personal or professional growth.

Learning is a critical part of your week because you probably know why some of the greatest icons and companies of our world decline — they got too high on their supply and neglected to learn.

I always remind myself to stay humble and be a student of life forever. That’s why a huge part of my week is listening to podcasts — to improve my humility, growth, integrity, joyfulness to not fall into what Robin Sharma calls the ‘Titan Decline.’

Scheduling your happiness pursuits and personal growth sessions ahead of the week is the secret to continuous growth, constant professional advancement, and unshakeable inner joy.

This is the most important step. If you’ve been focused on to-do lists so much, this is where your next-level lies.

Why is Calendar Integration important? You get more free time.

The more structured block times you have early in the week, the more free time you get on the backend — to rest and recover, spend time with your family, and celebrate your wins.

So, your Weekly 6 must be blocked — ideally frontloaded early in the week so when you get sidetracked on Thursday, you already got the progress-makers done.

Remember, the tasks that get scheduled are the tasks that get done.

Here are all of the key activities we covered in this article that you must schedule each week to consistently make progress…

Calendar Integration (What to schedule):

  1. Weekly 6 Progress Makers (Reverse engineered from your Macro Goal)
  2. Personal Life Improvements (Based on your Weekly Life Reflection)
  3. Happiness Pursuits + Personal Growth Sessions
  4. Mid-day breaks + post-work breaks (Taking longer breaks meters your energy throughout the day and allows your mind to breathe so you have the energy in the evening when you spend time with your family and friends. Add these to your schedule!)

Nothing gets done unless we do the work — joyfully, of course.

I use Google Calendar to schedule my progress-makers, my happiness pursuits, and my growth sessions. And putting all of them in there keeps my mind sane and free from excess worrying.

But let there be no confusion — execution is the variable of productivity.

It’s ultimately about producing the outputs during the blocks of time you scheduled them to be.

So, do not betray your plan. Do not betray your ambitions. Do not betray your personal growth. Do not betray your professional advancement.

It is your responsibility to plan your week — to get more things done in less time so you can have more free time for your family, for your happiness pursuits, and to enjoy life.

Execute and weaponize your hours. Win your hours daily. Adjust your activities weekly.

Every week is not going to be perfect, but it should not stop us to do our best to win the days ahead.

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