7 Weekly Planner Hacks To Boost Productivity | At Home With Quita

[Music] [Music] hey guys what's up welcome back to my channel and thanks for joining me for another video this is marquita from at home with kita and here i share tips on how to plan a balanced life so if you're new here i hope you'll consider subscribing so in this video i'm going to share with you seven weekly planning hacks to boost productivity so let's get into it so struggling to be productive is common for a lot of people as the new week begins you may feel overwhelmed and stressed out because you are not prepared at all then by the end of the week you feel frustrated because you didn't get anything accomplished so in today's video i'm going to share with you seven hacks or things that you can do on a weekly basis to boost your productivity so the first thing is to plan everything out on sunday and this is a huge thing for me every week on sunday i sit down to plan out my week and so at this point most likely my month is already planned out so i'll come to the month and i'll look and i'll see what i've got going on and i also refer to my checklist to see if there's anything that i need to make sure that i plan for that maybe i didn't plan for and so i'll just scan the week and i'll see everything that i need to do and i will go ahead and dump it out on my weekly spread i'll do my menu planning i'll create my to-do list i do my theocratic schedule all of that is done on sundays and i don't know about you but i love sundays on sundays i like to relax and recharge myself and i try to do as minimal work on sundays as possible but i always try to make time to plan out my week sundays are the perfect day to start prepping and planning for the upcoming week so i also have a sunday routine so within my routine section i have it all laid out every single thing that i want to do on sunday and this is super helpful for me so again i do my meal planning on sundays my grocery shopping i prep the lunches for addison for the week i'll wash our face masks i wash my sheets i tidy up clean my work bag clean out my car fill my gas tank fill my vitamin organizers again plan my week when it comes to budgeting i check the weather so i can plan out addison's outfits i fill my water cup and i check her book bag for the week so this is everything that i do on sunday in addition to some other things but this is the main things or are the main things that i do on a sunday and that really helps me to get things um going and figure out how my week is going to go and make sure to have everything in order and i'm prepared so i recommend taking about 30 minutes to an hour and find a quiet spot with your favorite planner or digital planner or both whatever you prefer and use this time to plan out your whole entire week also do a brain dump which is something big that i do so i'll come here in my brain dump section i do have a full dedicated video on how to do a brain dump but i come here and i literally sit down and i dump it all out because there's a lot of times that i have a lot of ideas and thoughts and things in my head so i keep this in my planner and i cross things off as i get them done and so it's more like a running brain dump and so i'll come here on you know a weekly basis most likely on a sunday and i'll get out all the things that i need to do that are mainly considered to do list items these aren't those items that you saw on my monthly planner that i transferred to my weekly planner these are going to be to do list items and then i categorize things by now soon later and if i have time these inserts are available in the shop and i did do a whole video on how to use these and do an effective braindom there's also some questions here that you can ask yourself when you're coming up with the to-do list and so once i get them all out here then i'll transfer them all the way over to my to-do list within my week so i have a running to-do list and so i'll write it down here so that way i can start chipping away at it and some of these items i do add to my tasks section here and some items i don't um especially if i'm not quite sure if it's going to be done during this week i'm definitely going to do those items that you saw on the brain dump that said now and i may even do the ones that said soon but for the most part these are going to be all urgent to do list items that i know i need to get done immediately or within this week and so that is all a part of my sunday process so bring them everything you want to get done tasks that are a must appointments events goals for the week and so on and after that you can start planning the process and mapping out your week and i have found that sunday is the best day to do all of that so the next hack is to not over complicate your planning tools now i can't say that enough okay you don't need all of the things all right so these are all of my tools that i use for planning these are our new cases from the shop i have them in white gray and pink they are so cute i've been waiting like two months for these to come in so i'm really really glad that they're finally here so prior to this i was just using a clear envelope which you guys i think i've seen before i was using this and this had all of my tools in it and now i just keep like my sticky notes and things like that in here and this all stays in my planner bag but i have just essentials here this is everything i use on a week by week basis now may not always use all of these things or all of these things but i like to have them available to myself and for me this isn't a complicated thing this isn't like too much these are all things that i actually use and even when it comes to notebooks and to-do lists and things like that you still want to make sure that you keep it simple we tend to over complicate our planning efforts by being organized or duplicating the process by writing things down in different areas and i too have done this numerous times and it does not help at all so try to keep it simple when it comes to your planner and when it comes to notebooks that you're using to write in to-do lists if you're not using a planner digital planning try to make sure that you keep that simplified and your tools as well you don't want to have a wide variety of everything and that can over complicate things and just confuse you so i personally like to use a paper planner your preference might be different you may just want a notepad whatever simple means to you that's what you want to do and so when it comes to planning tools whether it be tools like this or your actual planner tool you want to make sure that you keep it simple maybe one to two planning tools to help you stay organized should be sufficient so as you can see i really have one main planner this is my catch-all planner and then i also have my work and social media planner and when it comes to tools i have a couple of things in here that i really use which are my exacto my tweezers i do use this tombow white out my scissors and this sticky adhesive i use as well on a weekly basis but i have all of this other stuff in here because i may need it at some point but when it comes to the main tools that i use on a weekly basis it's really just maybe four to five tools so again tools are a necessity when it comes to planning in my opinion so i do think that you need them but over complicating that can tend to just jumble your thoughts and make you confused you don't know what direction you're really going in and also when it comes to your planner if you have a gazillion planners now i'm not saying there's anything wrong with using eight to nine planners i too have been guilty of that at some point in life but as you can see now i have really simplified and less complicated my process and this has kept me sane and i really am able to have a little bit more clarity and accomplish those things whether it be business or personal the next thing is to prioritize your tasks you have your to-do list filled with tasks and it looks overwhelming and endless well the next step is simple pick the top three tasks for the day and schedule it so what i do when it comes to that is i write that here my priorities section so every week i know my top five actually most of the time i write down my top five sometimes it's just top three but in this particular layout which is the vertical week on one i have a place for five tasks or five priorities so every week i do sit down and i say what do i have to get done first because you wanna make sure that the priorities the urgent things are always done first the harder things are done first at least from what has helped me so eat that frog i don't know if you've ever read that book before it's a great book and it talks about how you should do those harder things first and prioritize as well so that's what we're talking about now so write down your top three or your top five tasks and those are the things that you want to try and accomplish first you can always add more but make sure you finish the top three first before moving on to other tasks and this is such a great way to not feel overwhelmed and to really focus on three tasks at a time and once you finish those three tasks and are able to move on to more you're gonna feel great and you're gonna feel so accomplished so when it comes to your to-do list like this if you write it out like me that's fine but you also want to prioritize this to-do list you don't just want to just write it all in and go for it so i do have a video on my channel with how to write a to-do list that's going to work the best for you and i have inserts for that because you guys know i have inserts for everything and so back here i used this particular insert that was the brain of insert and that works very well with this but i went ahead and wrote all of my to-do list items out and then i put a deadline to it so you want to see when that needs to be accomplished and right in your deadline it could be a deadline you're giving yourself or a deadline that you actually have to meet or work or what have you you want to write that in some things don't have deadlines like you see here and that was just items i added to my to-do list and no particular order because it didn't it wasn't urgent but these are the urgent things so you want to prioritize by your top three and one of these items may be your top three and then you wanna still write in those other to-do list items and assign a deadline to them so that way again you're getting done your top three but then you're also getting done other items in your to-do list that have a deadline and that are still urgent and again that's just going to give you such a sense of clarity and accomplishment for that week and it's so important for this process the fourth hack is to batch your work now batching is when you group similar tasks together and work on them all at once instead of switching between different tasks now i do this a lot especially when it comes to business and social media as you guys know i do film a lot for youtube and i need to make sure that i have something for you guys on a daily basis because i do film daily except for saturdays and sundays sometimes i'll do a video on sunday but it's so helpful for me to be able to batch those things out and so this is my schedule of videos that i have going on for this week and i do that for every single week as you can see last week i did that as well and so that way i knew exactly what i was filming for the week and so sometimes what i'll do on a sunday preferably or saturday because saturdays do also work for me is a bulk film and so especially because a lot of times i'm not always you know dolled up and have makeup on a day-to-day basis and so if i have it on i want to go ahead and film the videos that may require me to have a sit down and be on camera i'll just change my shirt and i'll sit down in different areas and i'll film that particular video and sometimes that may be just an intro and i'll film the intro for that video but i'll do two to three all in one sitting and that is just so helpful when i can do that and i can't do that all the time just because life gets in the way but i find that when i do it my week does go a lot smoother you could also batch list tasks like emails you may say i'll sit down all right now do all of the emails within that certain period of time so you'll want to schedule that out on your planner to make sure that you know exactly when you're going to do that so this is a very focused time on specific groups of tasks so that you can get them all done and not have to work on them for a while so an example if you're a blogger like me you write four blog posts a month a good way to get that task done is to batch write four posts or three posts or five posts in one day that way you won't have to do it again for the following month and you can use that time to do other tasks like promoting the blog filming other content for the blog or creating other content for the blog if you're doing printables or whatever have you you have more time for those things and so again blogging is a great example of how you can batch those tasks just sit down and write out all of those four to five blog posts and then you'll have five blog posts if you're doing it on a monthly basis for five months i mean that's fantastic same thing with your youtube videos or even with your instagram content go ahead and do bulk filming and take all of your pictures all in one sitting for the entire week or month or whatever you can do reasonably for you and you'll have all of that content ready when you get ready to post it you can just write your caption and you are good to go you can even take it a step further and write captions out and that way you'll have that ready for you as well and the same thing with emails if you work and you you know like me i do have a lot of emails that i have to respond to for customers and different things do all of that at a specific time of day so batch all of those or group all of those tasks that may be similar and try to accomplish them with a within a certain window during the day and so i recently started batching and has really helped me to become more productive and get all similar tasks completed in one sitting so i'm not jumping all over the place doing too many things at once so try to batch see how that works out for you and i guarantee you'll see that you're a little bit more productive and it's just so helpful to do that so try it out see if it works and i touched on this a little bit during the batch part of this that we just talked about but the next hack that i would try is to time block your batch tasks so when you come up with all those tasks that are very similar that you can be batched together go ahead and write them in your calendar and assign them to a time now this particular layout probably wouldn't work well for that because there's no time slots here but you can go to or you can grab a hourly planner which i do have in here this is an hourly layout which you probably could use as well it's not a weekly planner what it is is an hourly schedule for you to be able to have a sample hourly schedule every single week so i'm working on mine and so i wanted to write out how i think i want things to flow first and then i'm going to come here on the blank one and rewrite it but you'll want to go ahead and write in the time of day that you want to do those batch tasks and so come up with your schedule first before writing it on your actual planner pages but this is an example of how your day could look when blocking and batching so this is just an idea of kind of how things would look in terms of batching now i'm just writing this out just as an example this is not my schedule i just wanted you to kind of see how that would look of course you want to write it down somewhere else before you transfer it into your planner because once it's in your planner it's in there and so of course you can change it if it's in your planner but i like to write it out first before i transfer it into my planner so let's say you want to wake up at six then from six to seven you want to do your morning routine from seven to eight you want to do all of your emails and dms that is batching okay you want to do all of that all at one time those are two like tasks then from 8 to 10 you want to film two videos or three videos that is batching okay then from 10 to 12 you want to take a week of photos for instagram that is batching because you're doing multiple and that's gonna take you through you know for the whole rest of the week if that's how you choose to do it then from 12 to one you have lunch from one to three you write captions for one month that is batching and i'm catering it more towards what i do just because that's how my brain works but you want to cater this towards what you do then from three to four you may say you want to interact on social from four to five you want to do your admin tasks from five to six you want to do your dinner prep six to seven down time eight to nine work out and then at 11 you want to be your bedtime again just a sample just so you can see what i mean when i say batch so you've batched one two three four tasks for the day and i guarantee you that is going to be a lot of content already and available for you to use and you're going to be so grateful for it when you get ready to use it and so look how productive that day actually looks especially when you get it out on your hourly planner because you've got a lot of little gaps that you can fill in as well if you want to break it down even further and then plus your after work routine may look a lot different from this as well again i'm just showing you this just as an example for reference so by sticking to batching and time blocking it's gonna help you to stay focused and complete tasks efficiently so try it out may not batch as many times as maybe i would or the next person would but try to batch at least one time during the day see how that makes you feel and then slowly incorporate more batching throughout your week so the next tip or hack is to have a review with yourself a good habit to build for productivity and accountability is to create a review with yourself so this is the time you use to see what's working for you and what is it now i do a monthly review at the end of the month where i summarize how things went i talk about with myself my accomplishments my challenges my personal work and health things that i've accomplished and then my favorite moment so i love these inserts from our shop we have weekly review inserts and monthly review inserts now this just happens to be for march 2021 so i you know haven't been able to complete the one for this month yet so i'm showing you one from past that it was able to find i did purge out my planner and i have everything stored so i could do a yearly flip through of all of the layouts and i just quickly reach for this one so create some sort of weekly review or monthly review or both whatever you decide is going to work best for you so this is really going to give you a good sense of what's working if you've been checking off your tests or if you've been getting distracted or maybe something really important came up and you haven't been able to accomplish anything on your list look life happens don't beat yourself up about it just readjust and create a new plan but this is where you're going to be able to see all of that and so either on wednesday's time block of course we want to schedule it out so we want to schedule out a midweek review with ourselves to see what you have or have not accomplished what is working and what needs to be changed and what may need to be added or removed from your schedule and so again i do this on a monthly basis typically you can do it midweek on a wednesday or you can do wednesday every single week to check in with yourself which is a great idea and then at the end of the month just to see overall and so holding yourself accountable is so important because only you can determine your destiny you guys know that and so let me just give you a quick view of kind of how things looked so for march it seems like overall it was an amazing month as you can see but overall march was amazing so that's great to have a summary here and then accomplishments list out everything that you were able to accomplish also your challenges you want to see what challenges you had so that way the next month you can kind of fix those challenges or you can at least work towards fixing them and then personally work career and health and fitness what did i accomplish then i like to have my favorite moments as well just so i can see as a family or just individually what were some fun things we did and then there's a place for additional notes on the back the weekly review looks exactly the same as this so take those inserts pop them in at the end of every week or in the wednesday of your week and that way you can do a monthly or weekly review i guarantee you'll see the benefits of it and again it's just something that you can reflect back on to see kind of how things went and you can make those necessary changes and the last tip is to schedule down time you guys know that it is important to be able to have some down time and so i build that into my routine and so i have an evening routine in my planner and within that routine section again one day i'll come back and i'll show you guys kind of how things look with this weekly schedule because i think this is going to work out really great just to have for reference but within my evening routine i build in time for me some down time for me to be able to enjoy a good book for me to be able to have some prayer time some time with my husband time with the kids my skincare routine all of that stuff is done in the evening so you want to make sure that you schedule that out planning your day should not only be about errands and work stuff be sure to schedule down time to schedule time between meetings for you to catch your breath if you are a working person that works outside the home even inside the home every now and then i'll go outside on the back porch and i'll just say you know what i have to sit down for a minute and and just you know think about things how's my day going do i need to change anything right now what's working what's not working i take a little bit of time to reflect so do that in between meetings or in between work on your break catch your breath your daily self-routine family time and even alone time are all important things as well scheduling downtime is going to help you take a break refocus and rejuvenate it's important to not burn yourself out so and actually downtime is going to make you feel more productive so that is super important to remember and that's because you took time to take care of yourself re-energize and breathe so schedule that down time in as well and schedule those things you want to do during your downtime if you want to be a little bit more specific so that is it guys those are my seven weekly hacks to boost your productivity so hopefully those help i know we all have so much to do and it seems like it's not enough time in the day we all have the same 24 hours but for some reason it seems like it's never enough right so taking time to plan out your week is essential for success and i've explained throughout you know the course of many years kind of how i plan my day out and especially in the last maybe you know five to ten videos you guys have been really getting a sneak peek into my productivity and how i make myself more productive so i do hope these tips have helped you to become more organized and productive throughout the week and make sure to implement them and then if something needs to be changed change it there's no shame in that it's not working so you don't want to keep beating your head against you know a brick wall doing some things that are not working for you and helping you to be more productive so hopefully you have gotten inspired today and you found a couple of things that you want to implement hopefully again these things have helped you in some way and you will consider subscribing to my channel if you're new here you'll give me a thumbs up in this video if you enjoyed it and you'll come back and catch another video in which case i'll see you guys then [Music] you

Channel: AtHomeWithQuita

Views: 5,600

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Keywords: planners and organizers, what to write in your planner, how to actually use your planner, how to plan in your planner, how to use a planner, the happy planner, best ways to use planner, the happy planner for beginners, how to get things done with a planner, planner routine, planner newbie, how to make your planner functional, being productive with a planner, functional plan with me, starting a planner, happy planner beginner, beginner planner setup, functional happy planner

Id: YnruK_lwiNU

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021