my simple weekly planning routine (that actually works)

hey guys how's it going welcome back to another video right now it is sunday afternoon around 5 30 p.m and this is the time in which i usually plan the upcoming week so in this video i'm actually going to show you guys how i plan my week prioritize different tasks and schedule them throughout the week so back in my undergraduate and even my master's degree i didn't actually spend that much time planning my week or planning my day and organizing things i kept things mostly in my head and that worked out okay because my schedule as a student was very straightforward it was essentially go to class and make sure i finish all the assignments and study for my exams and that was about it however once i started working and especially after i started doing youtube and all the other stuff on the side i quickly realized that there was just a lot of stuff that i have to get through each week and by trying to keep everything in my head i ended up being super stressful because i was always stressed out about potentially like forgetting something that i had to do and also just felt like my process was really inefficient because i always just do things whenever i remembered when to do them even though like the sequence of tasks that i would do it would not be in a very efficient way so naturally i started thinking more about how to optimize my workflow and i looked at a bunch of different productivity videos different productivity apps and most of them just did not work well for me so i developed my own system which borrowed heavily from a lot of books that i've read which emphasizes two things especially the first one is simplicity and the second one is flexibility so let me show you guys my system the first step of my weekly planning process is a brain dump this is something that i first learned from chris bailey in his book the productivity project what a brain dump essentially is is that you take all the stuff in your brain and as its name suggests you dump it all onto a page it doesn't matter how big or small a task it doesn't even need to be a task any thoughts that i have i just dump everything in my head onto paper so let's start off with that today is october 24th 2021 so i'm literally gonna write down everything that's in my brain right now by the way if you see blurred out stuff that's just stuff that i need to blur out because it's related to my job so these are pretty much all the things that i have to do for the week i know it's pretty long list right all of that was just kind of in my head just swirling around taking up so much cognitive space feel a lot less stressed because at least i can see now and then because i can see the things that are here i can start acting upon them and prioritizing them so the next step from this process is i'm gonna go through this list over here and cross out the stuff that i know for sure that i'm not gonna do and things that are not actionable things i can't actually do anything about so let's do that okay so it seems like most things that i have here are pretty actionable i mean i'm not gonna redesign my filming space i'd be something that i've been thinking about doing for a while now but you know i kind of set up this setup now and i think it's gonna suffice the next step is to organize everything into four different categories i call them p0 p1 p2 and dependence so p0 p1 and p2 are priorities so priority zero is considered the most important and then is priority one and priority two and then there's the category called dependent the stuff that i'm waiting on like maybe i send an email to someone and i'm waiting for them to get back to me on it uh was like an application that i put in and i'm waiting to hear back from it i don't want to forget about it but there's also nothing i can actively do right now so i put that in the category of dependent in terms of how i go from p0 p1 and p2 um i used to do in eisenhower matrix which is when you do stuff based upon urgency and importance but these days i tend to not be so obsessive about like actually splitting it up into the matrix um i just have like a general feel of what i consider to be urgent and important and put that as priority zeros and then go down a list of priority ones and priority twos so let's do that so what i do here is p0s p1's p2s and dependence on notability which is the app that i'm using right now it has this nice little function um where you can move stuff around easily let me show you this is considered to be a p0 so i can just do that and then just move it down to pizza over here and then i just do that for the rest of the to the rest of them a few moments later and that's done everything is organized into p zeros which there's so many of p ones and p2s and dependent which is just my property tax bill the next step is the two-minute rule so i talk about a two-minute rule in this video over here which i will link but it's basically an anti-procrastination micro habit and it's all about the fact that if you can do something in two minutes and you might as well do it now because it's gonna take less time for you to do it as opposed to worrying about it and thinking about it and putting it off from each of the categories i highlight everything that can be done within two minutes and then i would just go and do it i find that doing this first of all clears up my list at least by a few items and i feel a good sense of accomplishment which is always a good start to the week cool so that is six items uh that can be done within two minutes so usually i will go and do that now but since i'm in the middle of filming this video um i will go and do that after i finish filming this video moving on now to the next step for things that i definitely know when it is i'm gonna do them i'm gonna write down the date in which i'll be doing these things so for example i always film a sunday and generally for thinking about what it is that i'm going to be filming for next week i usually do that on wednesday or thursday so i just write wednesday slash thursday i find that doing this is helpful in the sense that it gives me an idea of what my week is going to look like what i used to do before is i would also pre-schedule and pre-plan each day but i found that i ended up having to change things a lot because my week doesn't always go as i think it will go so now i just pre-plan for the week using the brain dump and then schedule each day when that day comes before i get to that though there is one more thing that i like to pre-plan on sundays i like to pre-plan my outfits primarily for two reasons when i use my precious brain energies in the morning to do something uh which i consider to be relatively trivial i feel like i'm wasting that brain energy and wasting that time now the second reason is that if there's one pet peeve that i have it's when i can't find things like it drives me absolutely insane when i can't find stuff and for me that's always socks like i don't know i can buy like 50 pairs of socks and for some reason when i need to find socks in the morning i cannot find socks it drives me insane so pre-planning outfits helps a lot for me i have 10 black t-shirts and i also have two pairs of leggings and a couple pairs of pants so i hang up my uniforms for each day onto my rack so in the mornings i can just pick them up and then get dressed really quickly i find that if i just wear gym clothes throughout the day despite being not very fashionable uh it does help me kind of get over the resistance of going to the gym because i don't have to change anymore less fashionable looks slightly homeless but end up going to the gym which i guess is worth it to me so today's sunday night and usually i would go and plan each day on the morning so on my monday mornings i would plan monday but since we're doing this now it's already sunday night anyway i'm just gonna plan for tomorrow's schedule so the way that i do this is that i go from 6 a.m which is when i wake up and 11 p.m which is the latest that i'm gonna sleep and then just write those times and then start blocking out chunks of time the first thing that i schedule in are meetings and urgent things that are time-bound the next thing that i do is i leave some space on the top and then i put down the two p-zero things that i get from my brain done one thing is a work related thing that's important that i need to do and one of them is a non-work related thing i got this concept from the book called the one thing um the reason why i do two things is because i just find like i always have one work thing that's really important i always have one not working as important so i kind of just made it my own so that it's two things now and what i like to do is always schedule these two things in as early as possible and the reason for this is because for me um the mornings are when my brain is the most clear and it's also where i tend to procrastinate the least so it's always best to get these important things done in the morning also it kind of just sets the tone for the rest of the day when i finish these and i feel a lot more relaxed afterwards while scheduling these things in um i wanted to give you guys a few tips that i picked up since i've been doing this for a while so the first thing is that things always take longer than anticipated generally take however long it is i think it's going to be and multiply that by usually 1.5 to 2 times the amount of time because the way i see it is that if i finish early then i'll feel good about myself but if i actually finish late it's gonna mess with the rest of the schedule and i generally feel worse about myself so i might as well just potentially finish early then finish late my second tip is always schedule a little bit of time for contact switching between tasks for me i actually schedule in 30 minute blocks whenever i have to switch between one task to another task because it does take me a while to switch between contexts and that's something that i actually struggle with quite a bit third tip is to also schedule in breaks and times to eat ahead of time as well for example um if i'm not going to schedule time in to watch anime i'm still going to watch anime anyway so i try to be more honest with myself and just schedule those times in it also makes me feel less guilty because it's actually i'm still following through with that schedule and i'm just being more intentional with my time so i was so excited about putting an anime that i totally forgot to actually schedule in the short scripts i need to work on as another p0 that's not work so the way that i usually do this is that i start working on the shorts during the live streams because that's early in the morning so i start working on this usually around the last 20 minutes or so the rest of it i'm going to be completing it here so from 8 30 until nine and that should be enough to get my second item done and then i'll watch anime finally my last tip as your day goes along there's gonna be things that are gonna be shifting you know things happen or you just fall behind on schedule or maybe you are ahead of schedule i try to see this as like a living document and the way that it's organized is such that you can easily change as time goes on and you can reschedule blocks of time the key thing to note here is that at any point in time even when things are shifting you are able to take control of however much time you have left in that rest of the day and prioritize that and shift to time so that you're still in control of what it is you're going to be doing for the next day like you don't want to do the thing that i used to do which is if things don't go according to plan i kind of just like give up for the rest of the day so i try to always go with the schedule and if the schedule changes then i would just re-prioritize my task and just do that for the rest of the day there are days in which everything completely shifts for me and i'm learning to be more okay with that i've been doing this for a while now and a really big benefit that comes from doing this is i feel like i understand myself a lot better now planning these days and trying to be honest with myself and scheduling things i start noticing like when it is that i worked at best when is it that i have a tendency to not actually follow through with something um also like when things generally shift a lot little by little day by day i notice that i am a lot more accurate in terms of how i schedule my time because i understand myself a lot better now so yeah that is my system it works pretty well for me in a couple months time if i were to remake this video it's probably going to look a little bit different so guys i'm always adding on more stuff and experimenting with different things to see if it works well with my current system or not let me know in the comments below if you also plan your week and if you do how you do that and also how you plan your day as well i hope this video was helpful for you and maybe gave you some ideas about how to organize and plan your week i will see you guys in the next video or live stream [Music]

Channel: Tina Huang

Views: 168,081

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Id: _5jlPHUWvpQ

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021