“Image credit: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/weekly-planner-planner-weekly-5058720/”
“The game is won before it begins , if you plan to win!” ~~ Darren Hardy
Planning is a very important element of productivity and proper time management. With all the distractions and noise whizzing around us, it can be easy to get sidetracked by petty activities if we don’t clearly define what’s important to us. And I believe that planning – daily, weekly, quarterly – helps a lot in this regard.
In an earlier post titled “Daily improvement routine” , I shared some ideas around maximizing the your waking hours day by day. The days make up the week so in the post I will be covering some ideas on how to plan the week to make each week better than the previous one.
The 4 quadrants
If you’ve read the book – “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” – the 4 quadrants may be familiar to you. But that’s not exactly what I am referring to here.
I had learnt this 4 quadrants planning system from best selling author, speaker and coach, Darren Hardy , after attending one of his webinars. The system is simple but powerful. The system entails that you first identify what your main mission/purpose is. After that, you’d the pick out the 3 main goals you’re working to accomplish (maybe it’s for the quarter or month). Each of the goal will be associated with a quadrant. Next, outline all the activities you plan to do for the coming week.
After that, you’d map each activity to one of the 3 quadrants which in turn maps to one of your 3 goals. At the end of this exercise, the activities that don’t fit into any of the 3 quadrant will fall under the 4th quadrant which is the “Devil’s vortex”, the term according to Darren’s system. The Devil’s vortex basically refers to the non-urgent and unimportant activities that don’t move the needle of your goals and hence your life’s mission/purpose; they’re just distractions. And so, the goal is to have fewer items under this quadrant if possible none at all. (This can be tough, I know, but for sure it’s doable.)
To learn more about this system and how you can begin applying it to transform your week and life, be sure to check this out.
The 6 elements of high performance
Another idea to track and improve your weekly progress is one that was gleaned from Brendon Burchard’s book – The High Performance Habits. After studying and coaching top individuals for years, the author was able to identify 6 habits that of high performers.
- Seek clarity
- Generate energy
- Develop influence
- Increase productivity
- Raise necessity
- Display courage
And so to make each week better than the previous, how about you assess your weekly performance around each of these 6 habits and grade yourself on a scale of 0 – 10, where 0 is bad and 10 is perfect. The goal for each week is to surpass your previous week’s scores . This will be a great way continuously improve your weekly output.
In addition to these weekly systems, it will also help to review your ‘why’ behind the actions you take as that will keep fueling your flames.
How about you… how do you plan your week?
To your productivity!