Win Your Week in Less Than 15 Minutes
We’ve all had those weeks. On Friday, you look back and say, “what did I even accomplish?”
When this happens it’s easy to get discouraged. Frustration probably bleeds into the weekend, meaning you can’t fully refresh and relax. Maybe you aren’t present with your loved ones. And you start the next week feeling stressed and behind.
For too many of us, this becomes a cycle of inefficiency and frustration we can’t seem to break!
Winning the week is about more than just productivity and what we accomplish. It’s important for our mental health, confidence, and relationships as well.
Prepare for Success
It’s easy to point to excessive meetings or poor communication from team members as the reasons for reduced productivity. The truth is lack of preparation is one of the biggest reasons we aren’t productive.
It sounds obvious and simplistic, but being prepared for the week when you get into the office Monday morning is one of the best ways to have a productive week.
You wouldn’t run a marathon without preparing your mind and body to run 26 miles.
You wouldn’t sit for an important exam without studying the test material.
You wouldn’t travel internationally without planning lodging and transportation.
Yet we walk into the office totally unprepared to tackle 40 hours of work.
Sunday Strategy
Preparing for the upcoming week doesn’t have to be time intensive. I’ve found that I usually need less than 15 minutes to prepare. I call it my Sunday Strategy and it’s surprisingly simple — just 3 steps.
1. Reflect on the previous week.
2. Review what needs to be done this week.
3. Reserve time in your calendar for the most critical tasks.
Sir Winston Churchill said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This is why reflecting on the previous week is so important.
The reflection process can take several forms. Sometimes I journal about something that stood out to me — maybe a thought I had, or lesson learned. Sometimes it’s just a mental process without journaling. The important thing is that you critically consider what happened last week and what you can take from that experience.
As part of the reflecting process, I ask myself three questions:
What are the wins from last week I can celebrate?
How did I overcome the challenges I faced?
Are there ways I can improve my performance next week?
Celebrating wins is always important! It gives us confidence and energy to face the upcoming week. Celebrating wins with your co-workers, even in small ways, is also great for building morale and growing closer as a team.
When reflecting on the challenges, notice I’m concentrating on the solutions, not the challenges themselves. This keeps me focused on the positive and keeps my reflections from turning into a gripe session in my head.
Looking for ways to improve performance provides a call to action that helps transition our thoughts to the future. It can help shape our actions in the coming week.
Once I’ve completed my reflection, I move forward to planning for the next week. I start by reviewing my goal road map to see what milestones are on the horizon. Because these are strategically linked to my overall goals, they are often the most important projects and tasks I should be preparing for.
I also look at my to-do lists from the previous week to see if there are any items that weren’t completed. (Who am I kidding…there usually are)! These also need to be accounted for as I begin planning the new week.
After reviewing all the tasks I need to work on, I look at my calendar and begin reserving time for each one. For smaller tasks I may simply assign the task to a specific day. For bigger projects, I like to block specific time on my calendar — Tuesday from 8:00–9:30. This protects the time from getting swallowed up by meetings or other tasks.
When reserving time for projects and tasks, it’s important to make a good estimate of how long each task will take. This ensures you don’t overload one day. It’s also important to anticipate that unplanned items will pop up that require your immediate attention. Be sure to budget time each day for these items as well.
Simple Science
You may be thinking, “this is too simple and obvious to make a difference.” And you’re partially right. It should be simple and obvious. But you’re wrong if you think it won’t make a difference!
Because a 15-minute Sunday Strategy of reflect, review, and reserve is so simple, it’s easy to take it for granted. We overlook the beauty in the simplicity. We prefer instead to run the marathon without training for it.
Despite how simple it is, there is science behind the Sunday Strategy.
Let’s go back to look at Newton’s First Law of Motion, which starts by saying, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion.”
This explains why Monday mornings are so difficult to going. After a weekend of rest (at least a weekend away from work) it’s easy to want to stay at rest. Scientists call this inertia. Newton’s First Law of Motion continues by saying objects at rest or in motion will remain in their current state “unless acted on by…force.”
Your Sunday Strategy session is the force needed to overcome being at rest and propel us back into motion for the coming week.
This leads to one final point. You may think, let me just get this strategy session out of the way on Friday before I leave the office. Sure, this keeps your Sunday free but the problem with this is that it doesn’t serve as the force to break our resting inertia.
From a more practical standpoint, however, this also means we are thinking over the weekend about everything we must do the next week. This prevents us from getting the most out of our weekend. I like to save my Sunday Strategy for the afternoon or evening, when the weekend is almost over.
Yes, it’s simple and of course it’s obvious. But I challenge you to commit to a Sunday Strategy for one month and see the difference it can make in your life. Be sure to let me know how it goes.
