How to Plan Your Week | The Art of Manliness

all righty bear wrestling at 3:00 on Thursday perfect hey bruh I care from The Art of Manliness calm now I want you to think back to your past week do you feel like you made progress as a man or that you waste your time on mindless tasks and activities do you feel like you have no control over your life and your days are rushed and harried well then you sir should try planning out your week and today I'm going to show you how come on so the power of weekly planning lies the perspective controller provides for your life instead of drifting along just doing whatever comes to your attention you give yourself control and a bird's-eye view of the maze below weekly planning allows you to manage the day-to-day and often trivial tasks along with your long-term plans and goals you need to think of your weekly calendar as an attack plan for your life it's where you hash out the tactics and logistics to make your long-term vision a reality so pick a day that you'll use to establish your weekly attack plan I think the weekend is a good time to do it because it allows you to both review the previous week's successes and failures and look ahead to next week set aside about an hour on your chosen day for planning the first few times you execute a weekly attack plan session it's going to take you a bit longer but that's okay so after a while you're going to establish a rhythm you'll know what you're doing and you'll be able to breeze through these things in about 30 to 45 minutes I also recommend you go somewhere where you can be alone and away from distractions I like to do my weekly planning sessions on Sunday nights here in my home office alright so after you picked your weekly attack plan day you need to pick your calendaring tool now everyone has their own preference for what to use for calendaring some people prefer digital calendars like you find with icalendar on Mac Outlook or Google Calendar another prefer using good old-fashioned pencil and paper to plan if you're looking for a good pencil and paper weekly calendar you can download the one that I created for myself when I was in law school by clicking the link below it's free so the first thing that I do in my weekly plan session is perform what I call a mind dump in order to free up mental RAM so during the week our minds build up a giant list of stuff that needs to be done you call mom back do the laundry respond to your backlog of emails study whatever the problem with these loose ends camping up in our craniums is that they're subtly eating up our willpower causing us to feel stressed out and mentally fatigued these unfinished mental tasks are like programs you have running on your computer but you aren't actually using I think we've all had those moments when you're working on your computer the fan on your Peters running at full blast and everything seems to be taking an eternity to load so you check the Activity Monitor only to see that a bunch of unused apps are hogging a crapload of memory causing your World of Warcraft ready to screech to a halt a mind dump is exactly what it sounds like you get everything out of your head and onto paper or onto a computer screen when you do this you can actually feel your brain let out a sigh of relief as you write down the stuff that it's been spending precious willpower trying to remember use whatever tool you're comfortable with from mind dump it doesn't matter I know several people who use a notebook and pen others that use digital tools like OmniFocus things nozbe Evernote or a word document the one that I been using lately is called to do the important thing is to simply have a place where you can store your mind domme once you settle on a capture tool simply start writing or typing all the task ideas and commitments that have been weighing you down during the previous week seriously when you do this it's like a laxative for your brain just want to diarrhea over a notebook paper mental diarrhea all right after you've done your mind dump you're going to review the previous week so reflect on your previous week and how you performed in your various roles as a man how did it go did you achieve the goals you set for yourself what were your successes and failures how could you have done things differently any tasks or items you need to follow up on I recommend writing down any thoughts that come to you during your reflection of the previous week and a journalist um sort could be a notebook could be a Word document the reason is this first the act of writing helps make your thoughts more concrete and well thought-out and second by writing down your observations about the previous week you can create a record that you can look back to see if you're actually making improvements set weekly goals so we all have different roles we fill as men what I like to do is every week I create a goal that I want to accomplish within each role that I have as a man that I've figured out for myself so for example a goal for my role as a husband could be to write my wife a love letter or take her out on a date a goal for my role as a writer could be to check out and read a book about improving my writing in addition to these role-based goals make sure you also set what Stephen Covey calls sharpening the saw goals so as you saw weigh your goals the proverbial blade is going to become dull so you have to take time to sharpen it up thus sharpening the saw goals are all about keeping yourself sharp in all aspects of your life physically mentally socially and emotionally and spiritually so I try to create a weekly goal for improvement in all those four areas so a weekly physical goal could be to benchpress X amount of weight a mental goal could be to read a book or listen to a lecture on your commute to work a social goal could be to write your college but a letter or give them a call and set something up and you guys go out and a spiritual goal could be to meditate every day for 15 minutes or to pray every day lay a foundation for success with reoccurring time blocks after I set my goals for the coming week I move on to putting them in my calendar so I first block off time on my weekly schedule Forsch my sharpening the saw goals again these are small and simple things that help me feel sharp no matter what sort of chaos happens during the week so I have time blocked off for exercising for the gym reading and prayer meditation and an important part of keeping your saw sharp is weekly and daily planning so I block off time for that - and I treat these events like doctor's appointments I don't schedule anything else during these times and don't deviate from them unless it's an absolute emergency plan your big rocks so we've talked about big rocks here on our videos before if you haven't already I recommend you check out the video I did a few months ago about plan about what big rocks are in a nutshell big rocks are the most important tasks in your life so what you need to do is you plan your big rocks first your most important task of the week and then you plan everything else around those big rocks so what are your big rocks is going to be different for every person you want to look at your mind dump list and pick three or four items that you consider to be your most important tasks and put those on the calendar first so if you're a student a big rock could be scheduling setting aside time for reviewing your notes studying read mean so if you're not in college when you're out in the working world big rock for you would be setting aside time to research outline and write a memo that's due in a few days alright now that you have your big rocks in it's time to block out time for other tasks you want to put in the sand and the gravel of life so take a look at your list of items you captured during your mind up and block out time to accomplish those tasks so for example if you need to get the oil on your car changed or you need to pick up a shirt you dropped off the dry cleaners or you need to do grocery shopping you need to clean the house so my goal by the end of my planning session is to have every one of my waking hours of every day of the week blocked out with something I want it all scheduled now don't get the wrong idea I'm not constantly doing something every minute of the day I also schedule time for doing absolutely nothing so I can just sort relax have some buffer between different tasks also if I was doing something every minute of the day I would be probably get burnt out but I like to at least have an outline of how I'm going to spend my time during the week review and adjust your weekly attack plan daily so even the best laid plans need adjusting and that's why daily planning is so important so every evening I'll review my calendar and make adjustments as needed I tried to avoid rescheduling my sharpen the saw and big rock events and goals but I move everything else around on my calendar with gusto now if you want to see success come from your weekly attack plan sessions you have to do them consistently and I'll admit that I've had my moments where I've fallen off the wagon with my weekly planning and my wife Kate can usually tell when I haven't been planning my week out because I get really unproductive and I get sort of grouchy I'm just totally off my game I just don't function well without the structure of a weekly plan well there you go that's how I plan my week out hopefully that provided some inspirations and food for thought for you I promise you as you consistently plan out your week you'll find yourself with more motivation direction and peace in your life until next time this is Rhett McKay telling you to stay manly hey it's me again if you're looking for a tool to help you plan out your week Sunday definitely recommend you check out our Benjamin Franklin virtues journal you can find this at store Art of Manliness com it's based on Benjamin Franklin's journal that he created for himself as a young man it'll help you be a more productive man but also a more virtuous man

Channel: Art of Manliness

Views: 1,143,122

Rating: 4.9328446 out of 5

Keywords: Art of Manliness, Mens Interest, Mens Style, How To

Id: KNxLNY6yxRI

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 25 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Was anyone else shocked by the mustache?

[u/rahin47]

amazing thank you