Hi, I’m Peter from Amsterdam. I’ll help you get organized and be more productive. Every Sunday, I send a productivity-themed newsletter to 9,000 people. Join us!
Should you plan your week ahead of time?
|
Quick note: last Friday I launched Organize Your Life with OmniFocus 4. OmniFocus is the first task manager I ever used and it has a special place in my heart. OmniFocus 4 recently came out after years of development. Is it perfect? No. But after test-driving it, did I end up really liking it? Yes! So if you’ve been curious about OmniFocus 4, check out the course. Should you plan your week ahead of time?If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, or if you’ve taken one of my courses, you know that I’m a huge fan of doing weekly reviews. In fact, I believe that reviewing weekly is the #1 productivity habit. Everyone should adopt it. When you review, you make sure all of your to-do lists and projects are up to date. After you do that, should you also plan your week ahead of time? I always recommend periodically looking ahead. Which deadlines are coming up? Which events will you be attending soon? What will your availability be like in the coming week or two, time- and energy-wise? Taking even a quick look really helps with anticipating deadlines and making the best use of your time. I usually advise against making strict weekly plans, though. I’ll be recording some podcast episodes this week—yes, my podcast is back on and I’m very excited about it—so I’ve pre-scheduled a task for Wednesday to research the guest I’ll be interviewing Thursday. Similarly, last week I saw that tomorrow I’ll be recording a sponsored YouTube video, so I pre-scheduled a task for yesterday to prepare the outline for that video. In the same way, I schedule a few other tasks ahead of time to make sure I meet my deadlines. But I don’t go overboard. In the coming week, some other things I’d like to do are:
These things are not time-sensitive, but I want to do them soon. They’re important, but not urgent. It’s temping to identify every non-urgent task I’d like to work on in the coming week and get it on my schedule or calendar somehow. But I resist that temptation. I might schedule a few things, but not too much. I leave myself with lots of room—lots of margin—so I can react. Something might take longer. My priorities might change. A new, even more important task might appear. Planning ahead makes sense, but the further into the future you plan, the less likely you’ll be able to follow your plan. Life is just like that. The situation changes. Definitely schedule tasks with hard deadlines ahead of time. Beyond that, schedule ahead within reason. You can always rely on your regular daily planning process. You do take a few minutes each morning to make a deliberate plan for the day, don’t you? Watch: How to Organize and Integrate Your To-Do List & CalendarThe two pillars of our day-to-day productivity are our to-do list and our calendar app. How can we use these two apps together to be more organized and more productive? Let’s explore. |
Peter Akkies
Productivity Teacher
Hi, I’m Peter from Amsterdam. I’ll help you get organized and be more productive. Every Sunday, I send a productivity-themed newsletter to 9,000 people. Join us!
Isn’t it amazing what a pair of glasses can do? I don’t mean how they can transform someone’s face from clueless to bookish or from boring to mysterious. I mean how wearing a pair of glasses can change our outlook—the way we see the world. Some decades ago, my uncle Hans was a bookkeeper. (These days, he’s retired and studies philosophy.) My uncle wore glasses such as these: (This is not my uncle Hans.) These are serious glasses. They mean business. They are the kind of glasses that say “I’m...
Hello friend. In lieu of writing a mind-bending article that will instantly transform your life, today I’ll point you to a few existing resources and new videos. I’ll be back next Sunday with earth-shattering words. — Peter Which course should you take next? If you could use a little help with your organization and productivity, I offer a range of courses to help you out. If you’d like to get on top of your to-dos, start with taking one of my task management courses. You can read my guide to...
It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to build a personal knowledge management (or PKM) system. The most famous PKM method is Tiago Forte’s “building a second brain”, which—odds are—you’ll have heard of. Personal knowledge management promises to help you capture, organize, and engage with all the information that comes at you in such a way that you can resurface it exactly when you need it. Great promise. Flawed premise. Yes, the architect who reads a paper about a promising new...