How to Plan Your Week to Achieve Your Goals (for Entrepreneurs)
In this video we’re going help you to stop being so fed up and overwhelmed at the end of your days 😭
We’re going to show you how to plan and prioritise your days for maximum impact. So you can keep making more and more money month on month without just having to work longer hours. No more working late and no more feeling like you just haven’t done much. 💥
👉 Watch the video and plan your perfect week!
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In this video we’re going help you to stop being so fed up and overwhelmed at the end of your days.
We’re going to show you how to plan and prioritise your days for maximum impact. So you can keep making more and more money month on month without just having to work longer hours.
No more working late and no more feeling like you just haven’t done much.
What we found when we saw the to-do lists of small businesses 😲
Recently, we asked a lot of small businesses to show us their to-do lists, and quite frankly, we were shocked.
They were so unorganised, there was no priorities there was home tasks mixed with work tasks. There was no workflows, things weren’t broken down, there was no times allotted, and some of them were just like let’s scrawled on a piece of paper somewhere.
This is not efficient, and even though it’s that hard the Trello boards or the Asana boards like to do list is not enough. So let’s fix this!
Step 1 – Make a list of your daily, weekly and monthly recurring tasks
Daily tasks are obviously things that you do every day, things like emails, having lunch, you might do a daily team check-in, things like that.
Weekly tasks are things that you do every week, but not necessarily every day. Things like content time or bookkeeping or client work, or watching Atomic trainings, that you great atomic members I know you all have that scheduled in.
And monthly tasks are things like you might do your accounts once a month, or you might like check your analytics once a month, or you might have specific monthly meetings. Things like that.
Step 2 – Create your perfect working week times and categorise your days
For example for us, Mondays and Tuesdays are all about business development. That’s about improving the team processes, systems, sales. Anything to make customer experience better, all that kind of stuff.
Wednesday is our client day so for us, our membership Atomic means that we are there to just improve Atomic. For you, it might be client work, if you have one to one services or cause production or whatever that is for you.
Thursdays is all about content production, this is videos, this is blogs, this is podcast. Whatever you create, it’s all about that on Thursday.
And then Fridays for us, it’s all about contingency. Nothing is booked in, we can take the day off if we want to. We can have an extra meeting, if we want to, we can make up if we’ve had a day off earlier in the week, it’s all about contingency. We might even book in some calls or have some catch up meetings with people, that kind of thing.
So that’s how it works for us, and now we want you to think about how you might categorise your days, because that’s the important part. If you can categorise your days into themes or topics, when you get to that day, you can put that hat on and be a lot more effective and productive with that hat on than trying to wear all your hats on every single day 🕵️♀️
We schedule in our client work too. For us, because we have the membership, our client work is actually looking after the members and improving the membership.
But remember, it’s always best to put client work in the diary and schedule it in. This is the best way to streamline your time and your services. It also means that this client work gets done efficiently, effectively, but it doesn’t take over your whole week and creep into every other day and other aspects, when you’re trying to focus on other things.
Remember that the key is having that business development in the diary, as well as the client work okay, your full week, isn’t all about client work. We need to have business development time. If you’re ever going to grow, you need to work on the business, not just in the business, so schedule both in and be absolutely anal about sticking to those two things.
Step 3 – Allocate time for your recurring tasks within your daily and weekly schedule
For example, for us, our daily schedule looks like this:
⏰ 8-9am – We just confirm what we’re going to do that day we catch up with each other, we have a little bit of a chinwag, we check in with our team on Slack and we jump into our membership group and just answer any questions.
⏰ 9am-1pm – We do deep work. This is when we actually get stuff done with deep focus. We allow no distractions during this time, we don’t want to take meetings during this time. It’s just us heads down doing what actually needs to be done in our business.
Remember it’s better to work four hours at a 100% energy than eight hours are 50% energy. So we highly recommend schedule and then deep work time into a diary, and making sure that it’s sacred for you too.
⏰ 1-2pm – We have lunch
⏰ 2-3pm Meetings. And remember meetings don’t have to be a full hour. We try to schedule in 20 minute meetings.
⏰ 3pm – We try to finish for the day. We plot in the next day and discuss how the day went. We might do a little reset meditation to empty our mind.
Obviously the schedule is going to be different for everybody and it doesn’t always go to plan. Some days we have to work harder, some days we have no meetings and we can finish earlier, it’s great. But at least now we have a structure to go from and a starting place to start to fit in everything else that we want to do.
Make sure that when you’re creating your schedule for your days, that it fits around your energy levels, your lifestyle, your kids, etc.
Step 4 – Trim the fat
If your days are already full with client work and recurring tasks, then you are not gonna find any time to work on the business. And that’s what we really need to do to grow the business.
So you need to ask yourself a very, very important question, that might be very, very tough for you to answer and take action on which is, what can you stop doing? What’s on your list of projects and things that you like to do and things that you do every day or like every week that you just really don’t need to do? Can you streamline it? What do you not enjoy doing? Can you stop it? And most importantly, is there anything on that list that you can outsource?
Remember the more you outsource, the more time and energy you get back to do either more client work and make more money or do more business development and create more processes. You can win more work. Or you can just take some more time off to re-energise.
What if your days are already full with client work?
If your days are already full with client walk and you feel like you can’t afford to outsource, then you’re not charging enough.
Step one for you is that you need to raise your prices, so you can do less client work and make more money.
Step 5 – Make a list of all the things you want to do to grow your business
This is everything like marketing, sales, funnels, customer experience, team building, system, processes being put in place, all the things that are really really exciting. Write it all down, put it in a big list go crazy, don’t hold yourself back and don’t worry if at this point you feel a little bit overwhelmed with that all, that’s absolutely fine, onto step six.
Step 6 – Prioritise that list of stuff that you really want to do
Here’s a tip, take a look at that big long list of things that you’ve just made and got really excited about and ask yourself, which of these are going to have the biggest impact? Can you decide on the top three?
You should prioritise either things that make you money, things like give you’re time back, or things that just make you happy.
Pick the top three things from that huge list of stuff and just park the rest. We’re not saying we’re not going to do the rest, but we’re just not doing the rest yet. Put them in the waiting room for now.
And then the other idea that comes into your head that you think that would be a really good thing to do. Put that in the waiting room too, for now, and you’re not allowed to look into that waiting room until you’ve done those three things.
Then looking at those top three things, they’re probably going to be projects and not just simple one off tasks.
So step seven is…
Step 7 – Break down your projects into manageable tasks
Remember that projects are not tasks and they cannot be managed in one sitting. So they needs to be broken down into individual tasks that we can accomplish when we see those on the to-do list.
For example, set yourself 40 minutes just to go to reply to a few emails, but getting from inbox 1 million down to inbox zero is more of a project. You can’t do that in one sitting.
So just to recap, at this point we have a weekly schedule with recurring tasks already slotted in, and we have deep work time in our diary with a tonne of tasks from all projects to fill that deep work time with. So now all we need to do is slot them in.
We’d recommend you dedicate one deep work slot to one project, rather than having a tonne of different tasks from all three of those projects that you’re working on.
At this point, we’d also like to say that when you allocate the time to your task, you should always overestimate how long it will actually take you. Not only does this relieve a little bit of pressure for you on the day, so it’s not as tight, but also it allows for some contingency for things like tech going wrong or unexpected calls.
The exciting thing here is that, you know how successful you’re going to be, and by when, because if you’ve followed along so far, you’ll know exactly how much time you have. You’ve broken down all your tasks, you’ve fitted them in, so you know, when all of your tasks and projects are actually going to get completed. Success is inevitable, if you put that time in the diary to work and grow the business.
Step 8 – Fill your deep work time with these tasks
Now, let’s break those projects down into tasks.
For example, replying to emails is a task, as you can just set yourself 40 minutes to reply to emails.
Whereas, getting from inbox 1 million down to inbox zero is more of a project. You can’t do that in one sitting.
So just to recap: At this point, we have a weekly schedule with recurring tasks already slotted in, and we have deep work time in our diary with a tonne of tasks from all projects to fill that deep work time with. So now all we need to do is slot them in.
We’d recommend dedicating one deep work slot to one project, rather than having a tonne of different tasks from all three of those projects that you’re working on. And to do this, as you can see in our spreadsheet example, all we’re doing here is dragging the tasks into the relevant deep work time slot. Then we add in expected times that we think is gonna take us to complete those tasks. This spreadsheet even tots it up for us, so we can see how much time we have to do those tasks and if it does actually fit into that deep work slot that we’ve given ourselves.
We’d also like to add that when you allocate the time for your tasks, you should always overestimate how long it will take you. Not only does this relieve a little bit of pressure for you on the day so it’s not as tight, but also it allows for some contingency for things like tech going wrong, unexpected calls, having to pee too much because you’ve broken the seal, and so forth.
The exciting thing here is that you know how successful you’re gonna be, and by when. This is because if you’ve followed along so far, you’re gonna know exactly how much time you have, you’ve broken down all your tasks, and you’ve fitted them in, so you know when all of your tasks and projects are actually gonna get completed.
Success is inevitable if you put that time in the diary to work and grow the business.
Step 9 – Schedule each day
Now before the day starts and preferably the day before even, you should schedule the day so you know what that day should look like to you.
Plan for success. Add in exact times when you want to tackle the tasks in your day. For example, you might say between 10 and 10:45 AM, you’re going to do emails.
Because if you start breaking down your goals into projects, into tasks and scheduling them in your day, then you’re going to succeed. Remember success doesn’t happen by accident. Success is scheduled 💥
Now at this point there might still be a few things, a few really really big things actually, that are holding you back.
- Are the things that you want to focus on actually going to have an impact in your business?
- Or are they going to have a low impact?
- Are you putting off the things that are going to make the biggest difference in your business?
- Are you trying to offer too much?
- Or take on too many projects at once and spreading yourself too thin?
- Are you not charging enough?
- Can you not afford to outsource?
- Are you too scared to outsource?
- Are you outsourcing the wrong things?
- Do you have a scalable business model that allows you to grow?
No matter how scheduled in you are, no matter how organised you are these are the big important questions that form the foundations of your business that are critical for your success. There’s no point in being organised if you are organised and doing the wrong things.
In fact, we’ve found that people often aren’t organised or procrastinate a lot because deep down they’re unsure or unconfident at the right path to take for their business. And so rather than doing something about it, they’ll just do nothing at all.
So if you want to know the answers to all these really important questions, if you want to have rock solid confidence that you’re doing the right things, so you can confidently go forward and rocket in your business, then we’ve got a training that will help you and sort you right out! It’s going to help you decide on that focus and help you get rid of that overwhelm, cut down that to-do list and help you give you more time in your day so that you can grow your business faster than ever before! Check it out here!