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Your productive weeks start with a plan, so in this episode I'm sharing my simple 5-step routine to plan your successful week in less than an hour. Grab a cuppa and your notebook and let's plan together.

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In this episode, I’m going to share one of the habits that is key to my success: how to plan a super productive week. Keep reading to see the process that I go through to plan for my weeks and how I have my most productive week, every single week.

I usually do this on a Sunday, and I call it my ‘weekly prep meeting’. And the best part of this is that this will take you less than an hour – especially once you have this process down and your tools down it will take you no time at all. You just need to have to hand what you use to do your planning. So for me, that's my Google Calendar, Asana and Notion. For you, it might be your weekly planner, it might be paper in a pen.

Step 1: Scheduled responsibilities

The first thing to do is to make of any time-bound events that you have for the week. Things like classes, meetings, appointments, calls – anything that requires you to be somewhere at a specific time.

Now, in my Google Calendar, I put these in a bright colour to highlight them so that they stand out. I just find it helps make it really clear to me.

So, just plug your scheduled responsibilities in first.

Step 2: Non-negotiable priorities

So, now add in your non-negotiable priorities and supporting habits. If you don't know yours, then you need to spend some time getting clear on your vision. We want to make sure that we are spending our time and our energy doing things that actually align with the vision that we have for our lives. Whatever those look like for you, you definitely want to make a note of them somewhere, and what they look like so you can keep a track of your daily, weekly, monthly and occasional non-negotiable priorities and habits.

I’ll share some of my non-negotiables and habits with you so you can kind of get your wheels turning. So I have a personal training session once a week with the amazing Emma. I also like to make sure we're doing something with Jacob once a week, whether that's going to the park or visiting family or going swimming, there's no set day for that it just varies from week to week. Then I have things like my mindset work and journaling and reading. So those are some examples of my non-negotiable priorities and habits.

Again, once you know what yours are, get them on your weekly schedule.

So some examples of how I do that. I always put my personal trainer session on a Friday at 3pm in my weekly schedule, because it's usually always at that time. Let's say I'm planning to do my two other workouts on a Tuesday and on a Thursday. I could put it into just a task list. But ideally, I want to give it a time slot so I know it's going to get done.

Now, honestly, some little tasks I don't do this for; I just use a section on Notion to keep track of things that need to be done that day, but they don't have a specific time that they need to get done. Usually, for me, those fall under my daily to-dos and I have a daily to-do section every single day blocked out on my calendar.

When we put our non-negotiables and desired habits on the calendar, we are way more likely to actually do them.

Step 3: top tasks

When I sit down to plan my weeks, I determine and schedule my top three tasks for the week first. So, the way I like to teach it is we have three most important tasks to get done that day, our top three priorities. And then every single week we have our top three tasks for the week. Tthey are similar but we have one for weekly, one for daily.

For this step, what I want you to ask yourself is: what are the three tasks that are most crucial to get done for the week ahead?

That means going into the week you know what these priorities are and you can prepare for them. Then you can take it a step further and schedule them in as you plan out your week.

Most of the time, when I'm planning out my top three tasks for the day, they are action steps to complete to help me get towards completing my top three tasks for the week. So sometimes my top three tasks are quite broad.

It really depends, it's going to look different for every single person every single week.

Step 4: schedule rest

Before you go wild and start filling out your days with all of the other tasks that you need to get done for the week, outside of your top three tasks, I want you to schedule intentional rest.

As you plan your week, I want you to write down when you are resting and how you are resting. This means you can keep rest at the forefront of your mind instead of being tempted to think that you have to wait and earn rest after your to-do list is done.

I hope you know by now that around these parts we operate from a place of rest. It is not a reward for anything.

Whether it's an hour a day or an entire day, schedule intentional rest into your plan. And rest is whatever refreshes your soul. For me, it looks like chilling out in the evening painting my nails and watching Gilmore Girls, it looks like reading it looks like napping when Jacob naps. Sometimes it doesn't matter what it is, just get rest on your schedule.

Step 5: Fill in the rest

Finally, I fill in all the tasks for the week that need to be done. And I make sure to carve out space for margin and transitions.

So this last step is to basically write down all the tasks that need to get done, other than the top three tasks that you already narrowed down for that week. It's almost like each week has its own blank task list. So how do I go about this? If I know what day something needs to be done, I'll put it under the other tasks section for that specific day on my Notion template. If I know it's going to be in my top three priorities for that day, I'll put it as one of my top three priorities.

Now if the task doesn't have a specific day that it has to be done, I usually like to try and give it a specific day. But if it doesn't need a specific day, I just put it on my general weekly task list. And I use that throughout the week to help me schedule each day.

Usually, my last work task of the day is creating a new template in Notion and create my plan for the following day.

So as you start to make your to-do list of tasks that are outside of your top three tasks, it's a very dangerous strategy to fill every single second of every single day, bouncing from task to task to task without looking up. We are not machines. We need time to step away, collect our thoughts, change our plans and partake in unplanned rest when we need it.

While it may be tempting to fill your to-do list with all the things because, technically, the time that each item takes fits into your allotted work window, please don't do that. Oftentimes, we forget to account for transition time and the energy that is required to complete each task.

So for example, maybe it takes you an hour to write a solid blog post. But be careful assuming that you can crank out five blog posts in five hours. During the first hour, your mind is fresh, and it's probably easier to focus than by the time you get to the fourth or fifth one. By that point, maybe your mind isn't as sharp and it takes a little more energy to get through it.

Now, I'm not urging you to only take teeny, tiny little steps towards working on your goals. What I am urging you to do is to pay attention to how much energy a task requires not just how much physical time it usually takes. Give what you have available to give, but don't overexert yourself to the point where you feel like you're going to have a mental breakdown at the end of each day.

It's so important to leave margin because that is where life happens. By not filling my days to the brim with things to do, I am able to do things like this in the margin, while still reaching my goals when I'm creating my routines and my schedule for the week.

I always account for 15 minutes of transition time between tasks. Do I always need the full 15 minutes? No, but I like knowing that I have plenty of time to transition physically and mentally from one task to another. Plus, if something takes a few minutes longer than anticipated, your entire day or week isn't thrown off.

So that is an outline of what goes into my ‘weekly prep meeting’ and following these five steps sets me up to make real progress on my goals but without working 24/7 and without sacrificing my mental health or important relationships in my life. I can truly say I never sit down at the beginning of the week or anytime during the week and wonder what tasks I need to be working on every single day because of this framework.