Focused - 250: Planning Your Week

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined, as always, by the esteemed Mr. Michael Schmitz. Hello, Mr. Michael Schmitz. How are you today? I'm doing great. I got my coffee. It's Friday. I'm talking about Focus with Max Sparky.

I mean, living the dream. I should have made tea. We're recording early. Well, either way, I got my water. It is episode 250. I thought we should just say, hey, congratulations to each other. backpack 250. Yeah, 250 episodes is a lot. When I took over an episode 50 for Jason Snell, I don't think if you would have asked me, are you going to make it 250 episodes? Probably

would have said no. Not me. I'm not stopping. I am the targets. That's what the new saying is. This week we're going to be talking about week planning. We've done some planning episodes before, but got a lot of email from folks asking about where does the week planning fit in. How tactical is it versus how strategic is it and how important is it? And you and I are both big advocates of the week plan. So we thought today we just take a break here and talk about why we think it's important and what we do with it, some good practices for it. Also, the productivity field guide, you know, one of the nice things about is I've got all of these webinars that we've done and we've covered week plan there a lot. So I was able to get a bunch of questions

out of the webinar transcript. So we've got a bunch of questions about week planning to today. So I think we've got a good one here. Let's just get started. Let's do it. So why is week planning useful, Mike? Well, for me, week planning fits inside of a larger

multi-scale planning concept where really the goal is to align the things that I end up doing with, my vision and my values. So weekly planning, I feel like eliminates a lot of the reactive, this thing just showed up in my inbox and I got to do this now because you sort of pre-decided what's important and you've set your intentions for the week. So it helps keep you a little bit more stable, I would say, as life tries to life you. Yeah, I like to think about it as the tactical bridge. Like you have in your quarterly and monthly planning big goals and ideas and you're trying

to tie them to, you know, your roles or your values or whatever your foundation is. But then, you know, you get into the weeds. I mean, the days are the most tactical, but the weeks are the next level tactical. And to me, it gives me an opportunity to say, okay, big boy, you've made all these ideas and you have all these dreams, what are you going to actually do to move the needle on a daily basis for it? And you can't really plan that stuff out weeks in advance, but you can plan that stuff out roughly a week in advance. So it's the bridge. And I think it, you know, if you do it right, if you're doing the big ones, the quarterly, the monthlies, doesn't take long. And I'm just going to, you know, make the sales pitch right here, the week

that I do the plan, I get a lot more done. And if it takes you an hour to do it, you're gonna get that hour back on Monday. You know, it really has a big payoff. You don't need to do this many weeks to realize how valuable it is. Agreed, it's definitely valuable. It definitely provides a return on investment.

One thing you mentioned there, which I know what you meant by this, but it's worth unpacking, I think you mentioned, it allows you to get more done. It allows you to get more of the right things. done. If you don't plan your week, it's quite possible you actually get more done, but it's all reactive work. You know, somebody needs something. I need to reply. And some of that stuff is fine. Like, do that if that really is the best use of your time right now. But when you don't know what the best use of your time is right now, that stuff feels more important. It's even more urgent than it

really is. And so it's kind of like you have to validate to yourself that you're doing something that's worthwhile. Oh, I really got to do this thing because in your mind, you've turned up the dial as to how weighty this thing actually is. But if you look at, you know, like you said, what you actually, the things that are worth doing and you're making a list of those things as you accomplish them throughout your week or you're checking them off in your task manager and you're looking at all your completed tasks at the end. If you plan your week, you will see a lot more important things on that list and maybe less email that you've replied to. I think a meta goal of planning in general is it's so much easier to say no to nonsense because

you have a plan and you have the things you want to pursue. But on the weekly basis, it really does give you that tactical ground grounding. Another thing I think it does is it helps you avoid the Sunday night blues. You know, everyone knows what I'm talking about. Sunday night, you got to go to work tomorrow, you know, and you're like, ah, I don't want to do that. And I think part of that is fear of the unknown. And if you have a plan, you feel a little bit more on top of it. Maybe you feel a little bit more like, oh, I want to go conquer this week. You know, I want to go do the important work this week. And I think it's a bit of a cure for that, too. The other thing about the weekly review is it is another review cycle.

You know, it's another iteration of you because the weekly plan also, in my mind, very much includes the weekly review. And that gives you that feedback. Like you were talking about earlier, like you may get a lot done, but just not the right things done. It's in that review that you often see that. You're like, oh, last week, I felt like, I was spinning my wheels the whole week, but then I look at the important jobs, the important

tasks in my life, important roles, and I made zero progress on any of them. And that, you know, that gives you the kick to say, okay, what am I going to do to make that better this week? Yeah, you mentioned the Monday blues. I heard somebody describe it as the Sunday Scaries. Yeah, yeah, that works. The day before you have to go to work. And I've experienced that. It's a very real. thing. And when it happened, I was kind of like, why am I so upset about this? And not upset. That's not the right word. But it's sort of like apprehensive and anxious. And I recognize that that feeling directly stems from I had not been doing my weekly planning. And I don't even think it needs to

take an hour because mine is pretty basic. But it's just sort of looking at what is coming down the pike for the week and loosely placing the big rocks on that calendar. The trick is, and we'll get into the specifics here in a minute, but you don't want to be as specific as you would if you're making like a time block plan for your day because you can't even nail that 100% when you're only considering 24 hours. And if you project that out, you know, the plan is going to go off the rails. Yeah. So don't get, you know, too detailed with it, but do think about it a little bit and kind of pre-decide where do these things fit. Yeah. Even like,

we're getting at the weeds. I want to come back to that. But you can't like daily theme on this on a plan, but you can't say where are you going to be Thursday at 11 o'clock, for instance. Yeah. But let's just talk even, I want to stay out a little more macro first. If you want to take on this practice, I recommend that you make a repeating event in your calendar,

like commit to it. Because just writing down, well, I'm going to do a week. weekly plan. That's not enough. But you see on your calendar, I think you're more likely to do it. And there's a couple popular times to do them. Sunday evening is a popular time. That's usually what I do is Sunday afternoon. But talking to the Productivity Field Guide folks, a lot of fancy business people, they block out Friday afternoon, like, you know, 3.30 to 5. And they pick up and do their week review then. So then they hit the weekend fresh. And then they have the plan. they go through the weekend knowing that they don't have to worry about next week. It's already

kind of planned for them. And I know a lot of people who get a lot of benefit out of doing it on Friday. I know there's people listening that don't have a traditional Monday through Friday schedule. So you would probably have a completely different time. But put some consideration into when the best time would be for you and put that repeating event in. Do that right now. Just pause the podcast. We'll wait. We're happy. Happy for you to get yourself a nice drink because you did it. Maybe a cookie. because you just made a big step. Welcome back.

How's that? That's awesome. Yeah, I do mine on Sunday afternoons, specifically because that's the only block that we really have on Sundays. We're at church a couple times a week, and then actually Sunday evenings. I could do it then, but I found a group that plays basketball on Sunday evenings.

So I've been doing that a little bit, and that's a lot of fun. So I like the idea of doing it. it on Friday though. I feel like that would accomplish the same sort of thing as doing like a shutdown routine at the end of your day. You clear the decks, you don't have to think about it, totally get why that's appealing, and then you've sort of pre-decided what is going to happen during the next iteration. But now you've got two whole days Saturday and Sunday historically. I mean, maybe you've configured your weeks a little bit differently or your work schedule is a little

bit different. That's fine. Understand the principles and apply them to your own schedule. But yeah, I like that. You know, I don't even have to think about this. It's not, it's not even an item on my my to-do list. The hard part for me is the shutdown routine is one that I can very easily just blow by. So I feel like, you know, when you mentioned that, I'm like, oh, maybe I should do it on Friday. I think that's probably not a great idea for me. But I am going to take my, my slot, which like I said, is Sunday afternoons. And I am going to try to bump that up a little bit. You know, I want to make, I want to see if I can start thinking about it earlier, because if I think about it earlier, then I have more time after that where I don't have to think about it. It's not weighing on my mind.

And eventually, I would like to ratchet that up until Friday afternoons. And I think if I get some momentum with this, then I could probably make that work. You know what? I think I'm going to run an experiment, Mike. I'm going to start and we're recording this on Friday. I'm going to try and do it later today. Yeah, see, I thought about that. I was like, I should do it later today. I have no idea if I'm going to be able to do it later today. I have to go to a basketball tournament at 3 p.m. Once again, this is not, there's no magic answer to this. There's no right way and wrong way. What you do is you experiment and you try different ways. But what was I just reporting as a lot of folks like the Friday and I think the traditional one is Sunday afternoon. But the big point is put it on the

calendar. Have this as a regular event, something that you don't give yourself an excuse to blow by. And then you're going to be well served, especially if you've struggled with these in the past. All right. So you've got it planned. I mentioned earlier, I want you to do a review and plan. First one will be a little weird because you don't have one. Actually, before you get to the review, I've got a question for you. Okay, so you told people to put this on their calendar, right? So they put it on their calendar for Sunday afternoon. They don't get to it Sunday afternoon.

They sit down to work Monday morning, but they have control over their schedule and they realize, ah, I didn't do the daily plan or the weekly plan like David and Mike were telling me to do. Should they do it before they start their day on Monday? Is it still provide the return on the investment then? Yeah, if at all possible, do it first thing. if you have a Monday morning busy schedule, Monday afternoon is still fine. I did my week plan a few weeks ago on Wednesday morning. I mean, that has happened.

I mean, it sounds silly, but I just know I'm going to get the benefit from it. But we had, I had to take a trip so I didn't have time to do it on the weekend. And then I came in Monday hot. And there was like a bunch of recordings and labs events. And it's just like I was going bell to bell Monday. Tuesday. But when I woke up Wednesday, I had, you know, free morning. I realized I really am missing having that feedback loop and that plan. And it sounds silly, but I did it. And it didn't take long. But, you know, so just to give you an example, I will catch up with these things because I see the

value of them. Awesome. I knew that's what you're going to say. But that was the point I wanted to just illustrate was it's never too late to do your weekly plan. Maybe if you get to Friday, then you're like, Okay. Well, we're doing next week again. Okay. It's a wash. Let's try again. And, you know, I want to be clear about this.

I'm not perfect at these things. I occasionally do miss one. And I go a week without a week plan. And honestly, what really gets me is the next thing I'm going to tell you to do is the review. Because when you start the week review or the week plan by looking at the past week, on those weeks where I don't have a plan, I do find that I was generally, much easier to distract into rabbit holes of unimportance. And on the weeks where I have a plan, I do much better. And for a variety of reasons, I think you become more intentional when you

plan it into the week, but also in the back of your head, you're like, oh yeah, I really said I wanted to do these three things this week. And at Tuesday, I haven't done one of them. So it's like, I got to really put my nose to the grindstone here and get those things done. It really gives you a motivation. It gives you an easier no to nonsense. There's just a lot of benefits. But I start with the review. So what I do is I look at last week's plan and I compare it to last week. I say, okay, last week I wanted to do these three things. And what did I actually do on that? What happened? You know, what worked, what didn't? And a lot of it is great. You know, you look at the week and maybe a surprise that showed up and you didn't expect it to happen. And your life

got sidetracked a bit. That's okay. You don't beat yourself up for not doing your plan. Just say, okay, well, the reason it didn't happen last week was because I had a big surprise. But maybe you look at the past week, you're like, well, I didn't really get the things done. What did I do? Well, I watched a lot of TV, you know, I, you know, I just, I just didn't, I didn't do the thing that week. And there was really not a good reason. Okay, well, how do we avoid that in the future? You know, what are some things we can put in place? So you're giving yourselves these loops. The other big advantage of doing the review is the loose threads because you try and pick them up and you're shut down every day, but some days you don't shut down as good as you do others.

I like to look at all my events from the past week and say, oh, did I make a promise to do anything? Did I tell Mike I would record that ad for him? Or I better do it. I don't want to be a flake. You know, so like you just kind of look at it and you catch loose threads. And I do almost every time I do this review, I catch loose threads. So, you know, another big advantage. of this is you're not as flaky if you do the review. Mike, do you do like a review practice before you start planning? Lusely. So I had been doing the plus minus next that Anne Laura the Kuhf talked about. Yeah. But it didn't stick. And I've been looking for something to replace that for a while. In the last couple of weeks, I have actually created a

digital version of my personal retreat planner. Yeah. Which was a major, major pain to redesign every page for the page dimensions to make it compatible with my shiny new object, which we'll talk about in deep focus. But when I did that, I also created a weekly review page, which is very simple. As part of my personal retreat process, I ask these three questions, which I start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. my wife and I have used those even when we do our weekly date nights.

I use those all the time. So I've actually built those into a weekly review. And then I've simplified the plus minus next to two columns. So I've got a big chart at the top half of the page where it's what went well and what could have gone better. And then from that kind of the third part of the plus minus next is like, well, what are you going to do about it? That's where the what should I start doing, stop doing, keep doing comes in.

And I just jot down bullet points of things that are options. possibilities. It's not things I'm committing to. From there, I may carry some of those forward to my weekly plan. So I've been doing that for the last couple of weeks, and that actually works really well for me. Yeah. And that's what you're going to find. You know, your secret sites. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I don't, I don't even know, like, what should I start doing, stop doing, and keep doing? Like, those three questions, those are magic for me in that weekly review. I do think they're really powerful when you're thinking about planning your quarter. But I can totally see why those questions may not work for people as part of their weekly review, but because I've applied them

so generally, it just fits. Yeah, I don't do those as part of my weekly review. But the last step I do in the review process is once I've gone through, you know, looked at last week with caught loose threads and just kind of thought about what happened is I dictate. I just open up, you know, a recorder. There's so many ways now with AI that you can get accurate recording voice to text. There's a bunch of apps, you know, they're all called Whisper Something. And you can also just do it in Apple's voice memos application. But I just narrate, I just, after I finished the review, I just kind of talk to myself, talk through it, like my recorder is my own little therapist. And I just kind of talk through what happened, what went well. I always make a point to congratulate myself on my

successes. I think it's easy when you do these reviews to just say, well, I didn't do. I had three things. I only did too. So instead of being yourself about not doing one of them, congratulate yourself for doing two of them, you know. And then I talk to myself about the ones I don't do, but I ask, or are there legitimate reasons it didn't get done? Or did I, did I over sampling and did I put too much on my plate last Sunday? You know, that's also, but the point is when you do this every week and you see the last week review and then you see the current, then you do the review, you get that feedback loop. And after a while, you'll get a better idea of how much you can put on your plate. But if you just do the planning without looking back at the,

prior week and comparing it. I feel like you're missing a lot of the magic that you get from this process. Yeah, the feedback loop is the thing that makes the plans more accurate and ultimately more valuable. It's kind of like time blocking and time tracking in a sense where you can block your time, but if you have no idea how you're actually spending your time, then your plans are kind of broken from the beginning. So the review is definitely important for the plan. And And like I said, I've been struggling to find a version of that that really clicks for me. But I think the core elements of this that you really want in any type of weekly review that you do is a couple of important things. You mentioned celebrating your wins.

I don't think that's how you said it, but that's basically the idea. It's very easy to just move on to the next thing all the time. And that can create a feeling of overwhelm and burnout. So taking the time to just recognize what you actually accomplish. accomplished is wind in your sales. So definitely do that. I think the other thing is, okay, all this stuff happened. It doesn't have to be a valued judgment. Well, this was good. This was bad. But you do want to basically ask, what can I learn from the things that have happened? And what, basically, what am I going to take from these experiences? How am I going to redeem them and

use them maybe to create better plans? And then the last part really is, the open loops. If you don't consider, you know, this is what I had planned for the week and did I get this stuff done that I said I was going to do, there are guaranteed to be open loops there that need to be closed. Either you are saying, I'm not going to do these, and that's okay by, you know, choosing not to incorporate those into the new plan, or if this really is important, it's got to carry over. And that means that I have to be a little bit less, what's the word, aggressive, I don't know, like you got to scale it back a little bit when you're creating your next plan because you got to make room for some of the stuff that didn't get, didn't happen the last time around.

And then when I do that review recording, I also often kind of just check in on how I'm feeling and doing like, you know, overall. For me, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have this, like you get into the zone of doing the work or do it or pursuing the thing, you know, being the actual thing you get paid for or maybe family events or you know you know the things you need to do on the daily basis you get through it um sometimes when i do the week really review i ask my question well how are you feeling how are you you know doing right how you coping and i'm surprised by the answer it's like oh you know i actually feel kind of stretched thin right now i feel a little like you know that i am a little overdrawn in general and i need a little more shop time i need a little more i need to sleep a little

better. But you, like, you don't, I don't catch that in myself on a day-to-day basis, but when I force myself to ask the question in the weekly review, I also do that question monthly and quarterly, but sometimes I'm surprised by the answer, and it gives me another point that I can work with. Okay. So you've done the review. You've done the feelings. Now it's time to get serious about next week. How do you plan for the next week, Mike? again I've got a very simple template that I use and I basically have three intentions at the top of the page which I want those to align with my quarterly personal retreat and I limit it to three intentionally when I have more than three big intentions I feel like it's easy for things to just get watered down and

I've got to force myself to pick what's really important to get done this week. So I'm not putting in, you know, regular email inbox cleaning cycles in there. These are like the three most important things this week. And I've, in my community, actually, we have this win the week thing where we share every Monday morning the things that we're going to get done this week. And I've found that, you know, the people who have more, and I started this way, you know, you got five or six by the time you're explaining, you're telling everybody about them because that creates this public accountability.

When you get to the fifth or sixth one, you're just like, oh, this is a lot. When you force yourself to pick three, it's like, I'm really proud of the three things. Look at all the focus I brought to my plan here today. You know, so for me lately, they've been like, I'm doing this cohort. So I'm doing these cohort sessions.

And then I've been focused on trying to create a new YouTube video every week. And so there's really only room for one thing that's outside of the normal flywheel lately. And I just got to live with those limitations. So I have the three intentions there, and then I've got space underneath that for why I want to do these. And when I have some that repeat over and over again, I might skip that. But if it's something new, I find it valuable to actually write out, you know, this is the why behind this thing. And then I've got a grid where I'm showing it's really two rows and five columns. So it's Monday through Wednesday through Friday. And then the top half of that is AM, the bottom half of that is. And the bottom half of that is. is PM. And I am picking one thing that I am going to be focused on in the morning on Monday, in the afternoon on Monday, in the morning on Tuesday, et cetera, for the entire week. And that's basically the big rocks that go in there. I'm not saying this is exactly when it's going to happen.

So for Friday morning, for my weekly plan this time, it was record focused. Will I do other things Friday morning besides record focused? Absolutely. But I'm not going to try to figure that out when I'm creating the weekly plan. I know that the most important thing for me to do Friday morning is record focused. And so I do that. And then at the bottom of that, I have just one prompt, which I sometimes answer. Sometimes I don't. And it's this week will be successful if.

And I find that prompt helpful when there's a lot going on. Because what forces me to do when I have things in all 10 of those boxes, it's like, wow, that is, you know, that's a lot of stuff that has. has to get done this week. Sometimes it's just like, I want to write the new YouTube script. So I'll just put writing in those boxes. But sometimes it's like, I got to do this, and I got to do this, and I got to do this. And they're all time constraint. I got to deliver on these promises. So condensing that down to a single sentence, I always have to simplify it. So I might have 10 things I got to do. And I'm like, if I can record my podcasts and publish my YouTube video,

this week is successful. You know, and it just kind of like creates the 80-20 for the week for me when I force myself to write that out. Yeah, you know, that doesn't work for me. You know, the successful measure. I understand, and I'm sure people out there will like that and use that. But for me, because what if for some reason I don't get to do it, something comes up? And then at the end, I'm like, well, that was an unsuccessful week. But like, what if, you know, a kid has a crisis?

so suddenly you've got to like deal with your kid a lot and at the end of the week that the success measures not hit but you actually help your kid through a hard thing was a week unsuccessful you know so so it's like my my lawyer brain has a trouble with those hard lines you know yeah i i get where you're coming from with that and i would say you know if if something off the wall happens like that and i deal with that i i would say that would still be a successful week my definition of success changed throughout the week. But when I'm doing the planning, you know,

this is what I think success would actually look like. That famous Eisenhower, quote, plans are worthless, but planning is everything, right? And I feel like, but I do kind of what you do in a sense.

Like I look at the week and I think in terms of days, I've got a lot of different obligations. You know, I've got two podcasts, I've got the labs, I got the field guys. So I kind of have days

where it's like, for me, Mondays, I try to not schedule anything on Mondays, and that's usually day I don't have to look at a camera, and I can, like, deal with all the admin and the prep and the, there's a lot of stuff that goes into making sure everything happens. So I try to make that, like, Monday, the day I deal with all that. And then Tuesdays is Mac Power Users Day, and that's largely the day, you know, and then, you know, Wednesdays is Labs Day, Thursday, and Friday, I do field guide. work. And like in my head, that's generally what I want to do. But sometimes things fit into them.

And I do have big rocks that I throw into a week. Like I've been trying to do a better job at public YouTube. And in my case, that would be anything in public YouTube would be a better job. But like I said this week, I really want to record a video. So I did, and it's getting processed. It'll probably be released on Saturday. But we're recording this ahead. So it'll be in the past. Podcasts are weird. But the, but I do think that, you know, occasionally I'll throw some things in there, but they're not success measures. It's like if I had not been able to record that video this week, but I, but I kept up with everything else and did what I needed to. I wouldn't be particularly hard on myself,

but I did want to bring some intentionality into the week that I did do that and I deliver the goods, so that's good. So I like to write down some expectations for the week, but I don't like to put too much weight on my, my personal judgment of myself based on what they are. That makes sense. And to be honest, I never go back and look at that and think, was I successful or not. Okay. It's always just with the plan as I'm thinking about, you know, what are the things, the really big things that I want to get done this week. Yeah. So we're kind of doing the same thing. We both have, you know, our usual flow we want to keep up with. But this week I really want to put a little effort into, you know, that vacation planning or that, you know,

that work thing or whatever. And we really kind of say, okay, on top of what the normal flow is, those are things we'd like to carve time out for this week. Yeah. So the flow, if you don't mind, let's unpack that a little bit because that's an important part of this, especially if you work in a like fancy corporate setting. There's a whole bunch of stuff, a whole bunch of regular meetings that really aren't things that would show up on probably either of our weekly plans. And just even as a content creator, there are certain things like the newsletter goes out on Monday and I record the podcasts every other week and all these different things. Those don't end up on my weekly plan necessarily either in terms of like the big rocks that

I want to do. So there's a distinction here between, I guess, the way that they would describe this in the four disciplines of execution. I didn't really like that book. but the idea there is you've got the whirlwind, which is kind of like the keep the lights on, the regular routine type stuff. And then the wildly important goals,

which are the new initiatives that you're going to do. And in that book, they talk about 80% of your time is devoted to the whirlwind. I think that number probably feels about right. The specifics may be a little bit higher, a little bit lower. But the bottom line is that you can't assume that I've got five days, 40 hours.

I'm going to tackle all this new stuff. No, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you have to continue to do just to keep up with things. And so recognize that going in and your plans will be a lot more successful. And if you do the reviews, you'll find that very quickly, you know. Yep. You know, so it doesn't take a lot of time to figure that out if you're paying attention. But that insight is so powerful when it lets you pick.

Because then you say, okay, now I accept. I really only have, eight hours a week to do the new extra stuff. So what is important enough to earn that eight hours? Whereas opposed to the other way, you just throw everything on the heap and you pick one randomly and that doesn't help. Exactly. And it also changes the equation or the consideration when you're looking at where did my

time go. You know, if I'm going to spend an hour surfing social media, just doom scrolling, like there's no intention behind it. You can view that as like, well, it's only one hour out of 40. It's really not that big a deal. But really, it's the one hour out of eight. The percentage of time that you've just wasted by not being intentional, it hurts a lot more. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Gusto. As a new year begins, a lot of us are trying to get our business operations together. And honestly, having payroll benefits and HR handled by Gusto feels like starting the year with a clean desk and an organized inbox. So you can focus on actually growing

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So if you're going to start weekly planning, maybe we've sold you on the concept now, let are some nice tools to use as you structure your week out. I think there's a couple tools that you need to have. One is going to be a calendar because that's going to have all your appointments and meetings and things. And the concept there with weekly planning is the same as it would be for daily planning

where those have got to go on there first. You got to recognize that these promises that I have made usually to other people, but if you've got calendar events for promises that you've made to yourself or thinking time and things like that, you know, I've got a thinking time block on my, my calendar regularly. Then that protects the time for those things to happen and everything else needs to happen around that. So you've got those big rock tasks that those I think need to be figured out first.

And that's kind of what the grid does for me. Then you've got around that your intentions or the things that you actually want to get done with the, the non-world wind type stuff that we were just talking about. Yeah. And then you've got the admin stuff that really just needs to fill in around that. So to borrow that Stephen Covey analogy, like the big rocks go in the jar first, I feel like the appointments are sort of the big rocks. I mean, maybe you could make the argument that the big rock tasks go in there first,

and then you adjust the meetings and appointments if you need to. But for most people, I think those meetings and appointments, those are the things that are kind of non-negotiable. Yeah. Right. So then you take the time that you've got left and you figure out when am I going to do those tasks or those intentions that are important to me. Slot those in. And then all the admin and the whirlwind stuff kind of fits in around that. So you've got the big rocks as the just the visually

the way I think about this would be the meetings and appointments. The pebbles and the smaller rocks after that, you know, are going to be the things that I actually want to get done. And then all the other stuff that has to get done fills in around that. And if I run out of capacity before that stuff gets done, oh well. And that's why I got to look at the, review and figure out, you know, where did I hit my limitations and maybe I got to bite off a little bit less next time around. Yeah. I think that's that's the way you do it. Historically, I've talked about stretch goals for people. And I'm like increasingly not in favor of stretch goals when you're planning. I think it's a bridge. Like if you if you're struggling with taking

too much on. And you just can't bring yourself to say, no, I'm only going to do two to four things. I'm going to have eight on my list. If you just can't bring yourself to cut it down, I like to label the top, the bottom four of those stretch goals because you know and I know that you're not going to do those things. Like, you know, you just got done explaining my time you finish the appointments, you know, the actual priority big rocks, all the admin, if you get through all that, then you should go have a drink or go watch a movie or go take your dog for a walk. You should not be saying, okay, give me more. You should be patting yourself on the back and moving on. But if you can't bring yourself to do it, go ahead and label them stretch goals. But I really hope that if you do this for a

little while, you come to the conclusion that, no, I'm not going to do that. Just get the list down. Like Mike insists on three. To me, I don't have a hard number. Sometimes it's one. Sometimes it's five as much as five. But if it's five, that doesn't mean there, a lot of them might be kind of small. But it's never more than five. And just don't let yourself get in the position of adding on so much and using the stretch

goal idea to make you think you're going to do it because you are not going to do it. You are not. Exactly. I've done the stretch goals before, and I think that's actually how I started with this is, you know, I'm forcing myself to be realistic with my plans. And I'm going from, I've got 12 things that I got to do today to, like I said, the magic number being three. I use three for the weekly intentions, three for the daily intentions. And that is sort of, that number is, I arrived on that just based off of trial and error. I can force myself to get more done. And at first, I remember Sean sharing with me, Sean Blanc when I was working with the Blanc media team. The three most important tasks ideas, I totally ripped that off from him. And when I was working with, I was like, three's lame. You can totally do more than three. And I think I had five for a very long time.

And what I realized was that those stretch goals, when I define them as stretch goals, I feel like I need to do these. and so it was effectively me picking five things every day. It wasn't three and then two bonus. My mind just couldn't work that way. And the minute that I basically said, okay, you don't have to worry about those other two. Let's just focus on the three.

It completely changed the way that I approached the work. It sounds silly, but it really went from, oh my gosh, this is a huge burden to, yeah, I totally got this. and if you're dealing with with burnout on any level, that can be the difference between you having a productive day and you just, I can't even. So the thing that I tell myself and I tell other people now too inside a, like I'm doing that the cohort and we just did the actions and intentions week,

it's like stick with this to begin with. And if you want, when you get done with your list at 2 p.m., and you got three more hours before you wrap up your workday, go back to those essential lists, pick something else to work on, and consider that your bonus. Identifying it ahead of time, though, that's where I fall into the trap.

So I give myself permission to do that. You know how often I actually do that? I never do that. Yeah. I don't even, like, give myself the option. If I finish them, it's bonus for me is to go out into my creator studio and make something, you know, or read a good book or, like I said, walk the dog or go spend time

with my wife. But the, but just had a curiosity, Mike, as we record this today, I didn't tell I was going to do this. What are your priorities for today? What's your three today? Well, I needed to review a video with which my editor was working on that I'm going to publish to it to YouTube. So I did that prior to recording this podcast. This was number two. And then number three is I've got a Q&A call a little bit later for my community as part of that practical PM cohort. Those are the three things. I have other things that I should get done. I have not written the newsletter for Monday. I would have loved to get that done by Friday. But like I said, we've got a basketball tournament to go to. So that may not happen, you know, until Monday morning. And that's just,

just the way it's going to have to be. But if I hadn't identified, well, these are the three things and written those on my daily plan, I would be freaking out about, well, I got to write that newsletter and I got to do this other thing and I'm supposed to reply to this email. Like, that's just the way my brain works. It fills in those blanks or tries to with all of these different things using that. You know, David Allen talked about emergency scan modality. I don't know why my brain works this way. I think it's probably just the human brain where you know, emergency scan modalities, you're constantly scanning the horizon for the next fire to put out, right? So you see something, you're like, that's important, that's urgent, I got to do that right now.

That's what the, what's your brain tells you. But then when I, I can't just, you know, once I see that thing, write that down on a list and be like, okay, well, there, that's one. Now I got two left to go. If I don't take the time to intentionally plan ahead of time, it just continues to It's like it's turning the dial on the radio back and forth all day long and it's always looking for something new, something to trump whatever it picked up last time. Yeah. My two are, I have two today.

One is I've got a crazy idea for my next field guide and I'm going to spend like an hour and a half exploring that. And then it's, I've got a couple friends I want to send handwritten cards to. So those are the two that are the big ones as an example. But there's also flow tasks. I know there's people listening saying, oh, fancy podcasters, you know, they have three things. I work in a, you know, sales job, and I got a million things. I got to do everything. I'm going to get fired.

And I consider a lot of that kind of flow work. Like I have on a list for today, I need to give the dog her monthly flea pill. You know, that is not a priority thing for the day. but it's on the list of kind of options that that showed up today because of computers, right? And I've got flow work to do in addition to those two things. But I'm really like kind of measuring and working today about, yeah, those two things I really want to make sure I get done. And the other stuff will work out, you know. And like if I decide to take off early and go have dinner with my sister or something, it's like the flea pill.

can wait till tomorrow, you know. And so you just, if you have a job with a lot of priorities, I'm not saying that you only have three things on your list, but you have three things on your list, right? Yeah. Well, three big things. When it comes to time blocking my day, I'll have more than three things on there a lot of times. But the key is the meetings and appointments go on first, and then the most important task go on.

And then whatever time is left, that I can spend how I want. Yeah. And the flow tasks, you know, those will be baked in. The way I do my time blocking for my day is I use one hour time blocks, nothing less than that. Yeah. So this podcast, I've time blocked for two hours. It's not going to take us two hours to do, to record the podcast, most likely. Maybe we'll get done five minutes before.

Maybe we'll get done 25 minutes before. we get done 25 minutes before. I now have 25 minutes that I can plug into something else. And so the checking the email and the responding to people in my community, like stuff like that happens as part of the flow test, like you said, in those margins or those pockets of time that I have kind of systemically built into the daily plan. I call it the whirlwind because it's just always there. There's always more things to do. and the trick is not to prioritize the whirlwind. To figure out and apply intentionality to the hours that you've got discretionary control over,

and then everything else fills in around that. If you've only got a couple hours a week that are truly under your control, that's fine. You know, just start where you are with what you have and make the most of those hours. And then the whirlwind is what it is. And you reply to the things that need to be replied to. And then when you're done, you close the book. You know, what you want to avoid is continuing to try to manage that mentally after you've, you're done working or you moved on to something different.

You don't want that attention residue there. You've got to figure out a way to close the chapter. Something you and I are both doing, which we haven't said explicitly on this, on the idea of time blocking, is, I guess, I don't know who came up with the term time boxing, but I really like it. We're essentially boxing. You call it your whirlwind or my flow tasks into boxes. So going back to the dog example, it's like I've got an hour household block for my day, you know, later today, where there's a bunch of stuff I need to do around the house and giving the dog, the flea pills,

one of those things. And by setting time boxes, setting, amount of time to work on this thing. Let's say you're in sales, I'm going to give two hours to the Smith project. Then you do what you can on the Smith project during those two hours, and then you stop. And if you do that,

that gives you the time to still hit the big priority items that you've added to the list. And that's really all there is to it. It's the discipline of just picking a few items and the discipline of stopping the boxes. and not letting the Smith project take all day and letting everything else all, you know, go sideways on you. Exactly.

And there's two approaches to that, by the way. Like you could timebox your important work. Yeah. And then all of the whirlwind stuff happens around that. And when you're not working on the Smith project for those two hours, you are checking Slack. You are checking your email because maybe you're in sales and someone needs a proposal and you've got to be able to respond to that. but you can turn that off for just an hour here or an hour there.

Like that's still worth doing. If you take that a little bit further, you could time box those flow activities. So I did that when I was working at the digital marketing agency. So agency life is not something I didn't really like it. I'll just say that. But even in that environment, we were able to, not just me, it was the rest of the team, too, we were able to time block our communications. So people need to be responsive.

You need to get back to people via email. You need to respond to your teammates via Slack because we were 20-some people on a remote team. And we were able to come to the understanding that, you know, when someone needs something via Slack, there's these set communication guidelines that people are going to follow. So if I need something from you and I send you a message, it's expected that you'll get back to me within three to four hours. So if I send it in the morning, you'll get back to me before you break for lunch. If I send it to you in the afternoon, the afternoon, you'll get back to me before you leave for the day. But you don't have to constantly be going back and forth all the time. And just like the weekly plan, it takes a little bit of forethought and like, how are we actually going to do this?

When we talk about these things, what are the rules that we're going to play by? And then by coming to that shared understanding, you know, you can easily protect the time for the things that are truly important. One of the things we've been dancing around is tasks, how they fit into this. And I think a big piece of the task list is just remember as a list of lists, you know, as an ally, not a boss. And you can really have a healthy relationship with that list as you do your weekly plan. Yeah, the list of lists is a good way to put it. Another way to frame it, I wrote about this recently in my newsletter,

the brain versus the list, which is an idea I picked up again from from Sean, the list of lists or all of the task managery type stuff, let the computer do what it's good at, analyze all that metadata and give you all the options. Just don't assume that whatever it presents to you is the list that you should work off of. Because there's going to be more on that list than you can possibly do. So taking that list of recommendations and deciding for yourself, what I'm actually going to do from that list. That's where the magic happens. And that list that you make outside of the lists of lists or the brain that's making the recommendation engine, I guess that could live just about anywhere. But I find it helpful to say, you know, the lists of list, that's the computer.

So we're going to go all the way to the other side. We're going to write these out analog. Or I guess, spoiler alert on my fancy new E-ink tablet, the superiors. nomad, which we'll talk about in deep focus probably. I think Mike likes e-ink as much as I dislike it. I think that's what we're getting to. It's fun. But the handwritten piece, that's the thing. Like there's no way to connect that back to the recommendation engine.

If I'm going to make my list work off of that list, and then even I'll take it further, I'll write those on a note card. I'll prop it up on my desk. So it's always in my face, but it's always an analog thing that's in my face. If I want to check those off as complete, I have to go all the way back to the task manager to do that. That's intentional. That separation means that I'm not constantly going back to that list that the recommendation engine has given me and saying, what else can I do from here? Yeah.

If you take on this idea of planning on a weekly basis, your calendar is going to be an important tool for you. There's a lot of ways, though, to skin that cat. Like, you could, if you're on a computer, get a calendar app. and just put it in week view. This is something I do with Fantastico. I make it a full screen view, and I have a giant monitor, and it's just a separate space on my Mac.

So anytime I want to reference calendar, I just space over, and I've got this really nice, beautiful view of my calendar. UGMunk makes these really amazing little week cards where you can put it on your desk and write it out. I've got those. I use those on a different desk, but I actually take the time to fill it out every week

with the major block. times throughout the week and the week cards are good but you should have some sort of calendar that you can rely on that's going to be correct and that you can get to easily in reference as you work your way through the week so I think that's and as you do that then when you do the week plan you'll make take more effort to make that data right and and set the days the way you want them to be yep 100% agree a calendar is super important um the accuracy of the calendar is even more important when other people are looking at it. Yeah.

This is something that Rachel and I have kind of struggled with because she homeschools and has all the stuff that she does. And she actually even works outside the home a little bit. Like she is very busy, but she's got her method for figuring out, you know, what she's going to do when and I've got my digital version in fantastical and they don't always reflect the same the same events at the same times. And so like we talked about when Tom Gibson was on the show, it's really important for us to have that space where we communicate about those things so that we can make sure that we're on the same page and pulling in the same direction. Because when we don't

talk about that, we feel like all we don't have time to talk about that. Really, we don't have time not to talk about that because we've got five kids at home and we're trying to coordinate all these schedules and almost every time, every single day that we don't do that, there is potential and it frequently happens where we end up going in opposite directions and things are harder than they need to be. So Mike, we had a bunch of questions about week planning. So I thought it'd be fun to just kind of go through and answer them around Robin. The first one was, what if I can't commit to the same time every week for the weekly planning?

And I'm going to right now tell you that you have our blessing to do that. That's okay. You can't commit to the same time. That's fine. But put it on your calendar anyway. Right. Even if there are different times. How far in advance should I look just next week or further off?

I think if you can't make a regular repeating event at a specific time block. I would probably do it a week at a time. Yeah. So there's got to be some sort of weekly planning ritual that you get into in terms of this is what I'm going to do this week. But don't, like, just pick the time within the next seven days that you're actually going to sit down and do that. And then when you do that, I think I would pick the next one.

So I would do it at the monthly plan. I would, if you know that you can't do at the same time every week, you probably do have some sort of rhythms that, you know, there are usual times that you can do it. Like, maybe you've got a church commitment every other Sunday and you can't do it on Sunday that week. So you say, okay, I'm going to do on Fridays on the weeks that I have the church commitment. I'll do it on Sundays, the weeks that I don't. But just, you know, bring some intentionality to it.

But don't just do one week because then you will fall off the wagon after the first week. I would say try and do four weeks in advance if you can. but make blocks for them. Just in general, though, how far should you look at when you're doing the weekly plan? Should you be looking out 10 days or 14 days? That was a question we had. I just look out seven days. It's fine.

You know, I do a monthly plan. I know it's kind of generally coming down the road, but I just need to look at the next seven days. Yeah, I think seven days, you don't want to go further than that. The further route you go, the less accurate the plan is going to be. And the thing you want to get into is the rhythm. So figure out those time blocks when you're going to do the regular planning. It's not just daily. It's not just weekly. For both of us, it's quarterly weekly and daily. You've got an additional monthly in there. I guess you could also do annual planning. Just recognize that the more time periods you do the regular planning like that, the more commitments you've made, right? So the more times you've got to show up and do it. If I had to give somebody some recommendations for creating this regular routine, I would say, build these one at a time. I don't know, maybe the place to start for me would probably be

the daily. I feel like if you got in a habit of that, that would give you the biggest bang for your buck initially. And then once you got some feedback loops in with the daily, and you sat down to do weekly, you could kind of already know how this stuff was going to play out a little bit so you could make an educated guess at a weekly plan. And then quarterly, I feel like going out further than that, you have no idea what the future holds. I feel like the biggest benefit of weekly planning is honestly the review cycle and the prep of the big things that you want to add to the whirlwind. I think that's the big payoff.

The actual daily, like, a lot of them have saying, well, I'm going to try to do this on Tuesday and that on Wednesday. That is less of a payoff because life happens and you don't know what's going to happen. In fact, even planning on Sunday, I find that I barely plan Friday because by the time Friday gets here, I don't know what the world's going to have presented to me. So the actual day-to-day planning out of it to me isn't the big benefit. It's actually the thinking part, the emotional check-in, the looking at realistically how you did and being able to be more accurate in your future plans. To me, that's the big bang for the buck. somebody wrote in, do you ever skip weekly planning?

What happens if you do? I talked about that earlier. It happens sometimes. And the trick is, you know, get back on the horse. Don't let the fact that you missed it one week mean that you don't do it anymore. And actually take a minute to look like what happened when I didn't do the planning. You'll see the evidence of the problem. Yep.

Real quick, I want to go back. I agree that the biggest bang for your buck probably happens in the, the weekly. But the way I framed it the, the, the, the why I framed it the way I did is I feel like if you're coming to this new, this is the first episode of focus you ever listened to, how do I start applying more focus? Get one hour of intentionality applied in your daily plan and you'll be like, oh, this is awesome. Oh, yeah. I agree. And what I meant the bang for your buck. I mean, what do you, what's the biggest benefit you get from the process of weekly planning? Not that I'm not comparing it to others. Gotcha.

I actually think probably the most important are the daily and the quarterly. Yeah, I think you're probably right. The monthly and the weekly are, to me, it's like that's the tactical bridge going back to what I said at the beginning. Yeah. There's a question here. It says, what's the difference between weekly planning and just looking at my calendar? That's a great question.

So I feel like if you just look at your calendar, that is basically the calendar telling you what you are going to do. And planning is telling your calendar what you are going to do. So it's approaching it from a different perspective. Instead of just getting your marching orders, you're applying intentionality. The master versus the slave. Yeah. How do you decide what makes the cut for the week and what gets pushed? You do that based on your reviews off your experience. And we talked a lot about that already in this show, but be very wary about biting off more than you can chew because, you know, there's a huge difference in your ability to move forward based on what you did. Like, just imagine a week where you chose three things and you did three things, what you're

feeling is going to be about yourself versus a week that you chose 20 things and you did one thing. because when you choose 20 things, you get that administrative overloading. There's no way you have time even for the three things. It really just changes your outlook and it gets you that momentum you need. So if you're worried about you're taking on too much, then you're probably taking on too much. Yeah. And in fact, that's the next question I wanted to address here is, what if I have way more to do than time available? How do I choose?

you've got to choose. Like there's not an, it sounds, it sounds maybe a little bit like we're blowing off. Well, you don't really understand my situation. But this really is what it boils down to. I'm reminded of a story. I forget if his Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger was talking to the driver. He's like, you know, how do I achieve the level of success that you got?

And they're like, well, what are 25 things that you want to do before you die? You know, make that list. Yeah. Okay, now narrow it down to five. Oh, man, that was really hard. narrowing down to five. Okay, now pick one. Now go do that. Yeah. You know, the ruthless prioritization of what is really important, the ability to focus. That's why we're doing this show at 250 episodes in and no signs of slowing down, in my opinion. Like, this is just going to become more and more important

in the world that we live in when there's all this information that's coming at us and all these options that we have available and all these things that we quote unquote should be doing. We have to be able to sort through all that and be like this one thing right here this is what i should be doing right now nothing else matters i feel like one way to look at it is like think of it as you look at your calendar like when you look at your calendar you cannot book a you know a gym workout and a dentist appointment at the same hour yeah it is not possible for you to do that you know but then when you do the task assignments and the priority assignments, you do effectively the same thing. You're signing yourself to go to the gym, go to the dentist, and, you know, do your taxes all at the same time.

You just can't do it. Everybody struggles against that. We all resist against it. We look for hacks and efficiencies to make us feel like we can do it. But everybody who pursues this journey eventually gets to the point that they realize they have to do less. And you know, what happens is they try to do less and it's okay. The world does not end. They just actually enjoy life a bit more and they actually work on the things that are more important. So you accept that you can do less. You figure out what's important and honestly that's the end of the game. Once you figure out those two things. Yep. Yeah, there's another question here which I love. Don't you lose spontaneity with all this planning.

No, actually this increases your ability to be spontaneous. It feels counterintuitive, but to me, this is sort of like budgeting, but instead of money, it's with your time. And again, there's, you know, the weekly plan where this is loosely figured out, and then the daily plans where it is actually time blocked for me. but I remember I remember was it Dave Ramsey

talks about give every dollar a job tell your money where to go instead of wondering where it went again though if you're going to

budget your finances you've got the budget and then you've got how you actually spent your money you have to reconcile those things but the same principle

applies with your time if you're able to budget your money you are able to budget your time and you are able to protect that time and say

this is what I'm going to be doing at these specific hours. It is a skill, and you have to learn it, and you have to develop it. The more you do it, the better you get at it. But what happens, much like a budget when you've got your finances figured out and you've got things delegated to the different areas, you find that at the end of the month, you actually do have money left over. And you can use that for things instead of, you know, running out of money before the month, or running out of money before the month ends. There's always more month than money is the way that I've heard that described. It's the same thing

with your time, but you've got to be realistic and you've got to take it seriously. All right. Last question on the same thread. How do you balance planning with being present? And I would argue the answer is planning allows presence. It enables it.

I mean, if you have planning, you're actually able to be intentional about the actions you take. I don't know how you get presence without planning because the world comes at you. Would you call it again the whirlwind? It comes up you every day and you've got to have a plan to be present. I rebel against that question. So if you've been listening to us and you are inspired to try this, schedule some block time, do both review and plan. Don't be too hard on yourself. Any other generic

advice you can give Mike to people getting started on this practice? Just get started. Keep it simple at the beginning. Don't try to do too much and get the cycles in. Yeah. The feedback loops are really the thing that's going to provide the payoff. Somewhere write down, I'm going to try this weekly planning experiment for three months. You know, write it down, make a contract with yourself.

don't just try it for a week or two. Give it three months and then you'll see the benefits. Okay, Mike, what are we reading? I've got a book called The End of Burnout by Jonathan Malisich. And it's an interesting book because it talks about burnout being this cultural phenomenon where we go to our work and expect it to provide meaning and purpose, for us. Yeah.

And I've just started it, so I don't even know the author's real arguments there. But basically in the introduction, he's kind of arguing that we should flip that and we should instead bring our meaning and purpose to the work that we do, which I think is a very interesting idea. I've got a life-themed cohort where we basically talk about your personal mission statement and your personal core values. And so this topic comes up a lot. and I think when people first start talking about that sort of stuff, they feel like, oh, no, I'm going to get clear on this and realize that I was doing everything wrong and I need to quit my job and not be a lawyer anymore and go make stuff on the internet.

Uh-oh. You know? Feeling close to home. And that may happen, but most of the time that doesn't happen. What actually happens is you realize how the why behind the things that you're doing and you're bringing, you know, motivation to the things that you're actually doing every day. So I think this is kind of cool. and burnout is definitely a thing. Like I see that popping up over and over and over again

and the different conversations and things that I'm seeing online. So I think this is going to be an interesting topic. I have no idea if the book's going to be any good yet, but I am definitely interested in the topic of burnout. I feel like I've dealt with that myself. And maybe that's a topic for a future show. We've talked about this on the show before,

but I think this idea that you get fulfillment from your work is a relatively new phenomena. Like, I look at my dad's generation. You know, he was born in the 1920s and like, I look at him and all his friends. They all had jobs, but they didn't look at the jobs as their source of fulfillment, you know. But now we do. And that is interesting. Maybe I'll have to read that book. I am, I'm enjoying poetry this month. I have gone down a Wendell Berry rabbit hole. The most recent one I got is called the Peace of Wild Things. And I find reading a few Wendell Berry poems every evening to be very enjoyable.

So if you haven't checked them out, you should. Nice. All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find links to everything that we shared in this episode over on the website at relay.fm slash focused slash 250, 250 episodes of focus. in Deep Focus, which is the ad-free extended version that we do for members, we'll be talking about my shiny new object, the Supernote Nomad, and what I love about this A5-size E-ink tablet.

Thank you to our sponsor today, which is our friends over at Gusto, and we'll see you next time.