Conquering Your Week with a Weekly Prep
An important part of your routines is the weekly prep. The freeing power of routines are that they set you up for success as you have a clear view of what you need to do personally and professionally.
Weekly preps also allow you to look at what you might need to do from a self-care perspective so that you can manage your energy. Going to have a week that has higher than normal work demands? Balance this will ready-to-eat crock pot or instant pot meals. Going to be preparing kids for the new school year in its modified formats? Carve out some time for family conversations about school and what that will mean to help manage their stress and concerns.
Your weekly routine can include anything you want but as with any good routine should focus on reducing your stress and eliminating decision fatigue that you might otherwise have. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Work Prep
Whatever your schedule might be, look at what you have coming at you for the next 5–7 days. What are the big items that you have for the week? Do any of them require additional preparation or review?
What have you had on your list of to-do items that continues to get pushed off but is causing you to be frustrated?
What would you like to or need to learn that you haven’t taken the time to do?
What does your email look like? Are there a lot of flagged or overdue items that you can delete, delegate, do, or still need to defer on?
What does your workspace look like? If you did the weekly wrap-up you shouldn’t have anything that you need to do. Check out the posts for additional tips on how to wrap up your week effectively.
Answering these questions will allow you to map out a plan of what your work week will look like and identify the big rocks that you need to address on Monday so that you can create powerful mornings.
Home Prep
What is the energy that you are getting from your personal environment? With more and more of us working from home having an environment that helps us focus is critical. Take time to reset your physical spaces by putting away items, doing laundry and vacuuming.
What meals will you have for the week? This is a huge area of stress for me and unfortunately not one that I have mastered yet but am making baby steps towards. With five now teenagers with varying schedules, planning is critical. Getting in the habit of checking what you have on hand, identifying what you will make and then shopping. This can help you maximize what you have on hand, reduce food costs, and reduce waste. I am good at shopping for items, but rarely have a plan on how I will use those ingredients. Making a plan for how I will use those ingredients will keep us from ordering takeout and increasing our food budget. Again…baby steps!
What does your budget look like? Do you have bills coming up that are not automatically scheduled that you need to take care of? What is your progress against your personal budget goals? Are there adjustments that you need to make to account for higher-than-normal expenditures — school fees, clothing, etc?
Personal Prep
These preparations are focused on you and you alone. They are not items that relate to your job or keeping a home, but on what you need to manage your mental head space, care for yourself physically, and for your goals.
Having done the work and home prep, I now have a good idea of the energy that I will need to cultivate during the week. If I have stressful work meetings or a big project that I am getting across the finish line, I know that I will mentally need to get myself prepared. For me, this means making sure that I am carving out a bit more time to journal or take walks.
Caring for myself physically helps with your energy levels and improves your cognitive functions — decision making, memory formation, learning retention. What activities are you going to do that fit with your schedule and clear your head? What will help improve your overall wellness?
What goals do you have on tap and what actions do you need to take against them? If I am not working towards my goals, I have the tendency to feel adrift. Taking time to sit down and review my goals, make adjustments, and refine my actions sets me on a productive course for the week. I know exactly what I need to do and for those areas that are less well-defined I can do some research to shape up what they might look like.
A Few Reminders
If you haven’t created a weekly prep routine in the past or have had a haphazard one, don’t expect that you are going to create the perfect one out of the gates. Good routines (and habits) take time to create.
As with anything you are trying to achieve remember that progress is greater than perfection and that you are on a journey, not a race. I call this the designer-ly approach where you start small, built the minimum routine you think you need, and then use curiosity to understand what didn’t work, why, and then adjust accordingly. With this mindset, you move quickly out of thinking into doing and doing better.
If you’re new here…
We are on a journey to helping you Become the CEO of You so that you can become the best version of yourself. Over the course of the month, we’ll cover knowing yourself, creating goals, adopting mindsets, embracing habits, and practicing self-care. You can find all the posts in our publication Living to Learn. You can also find my random musings on my personal page here.
