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Want to feel less rushed and flustered? Planning your week helps a lot.
When you know what’s happening each day ahead of time, you can’t overschedule yourself anymore. It’s easier to say no to things you don’t have time to do (or don’t want to do). You feel like you are controlling your week, instead of it controlling you.
I like to keep my planning simple so that it’s not another huge task to add to my To-Do list. 15 minutes, once a week, and I’m done!
Ready to glide through your week effortlessly? Try my 4 favourite steps to make planning your week easy:
Choose a day to plan every week (and make it enjoyable).
I like Sunday afternoons because I’m usually home on Sundays, it feels more relaxed than any other day of the week, and it gives me a fresh start to the week every Monday. I usually make a cup of tea, light a candle, and tuck myself up under a blanket so the planning session feels cosy and more inviting. Never underestimate the power of making the task feel nice, it really helps motivate you to do it every week!
Brain dump everything that needs to be done, then assign the urgent and important things to a day.
You can do this on paper or in your Notes app. Don’t overthink it, just get everything out of your head and you’ll feel much calmer and more in control of it all.
Once it’s all written out, look at the list and put the urgent and important things into your planner so they’re no longer To Do’s, they’re now appointments. This way you know they will get done!
For the rest, you can keep the brain dump list ready for when you have spare time, but to be honest, I just throw it away or ignore it until it becomes urgent and important enough to go into my planner another week.
Use your Google calendar as your planner / personal assistant.
I love paper planners but I haven’t used them for the past few years because digital planning makes my life run so much more smoothly.
A google calendar is my favourite planning tool these days!
I can access it from my desktop, my laptop or my phone, so I always have it with me. I put regular things (like our Tuesday night extended Family Dinner) in as recurring events. I put appointments (doctor, dentist) straight into my phone calendar instead of taking those little cards, and it syncs with my work calendar so once a personal appointment is booked in, nothing else can be booked over it. Plus it sends me email and phone reminders when the appointment is coming up. I don’t have to rely on my memory or my brain at all and that feels amazing.
Block off more time than you think you’ll need.
You’ll need a buffer so that you have time to get from one place to another, time to park and walk into the building, time to deal with kid meltdowns, or downtime in between things to recharge. I purposely schedule downtime into my calendar because I’m a people pleaser by nature and say yes to everything even when it’s not good for me. Booking downtime into my calendar makes it feel like it’s downtime, not free time, so I don’t say yes to anything else.
I hope you found these tips helpful! If you're ready for next steps, watch my free workshop 3 Quick things to do today to get organised, I think you'll find it really helpful!
x Marissa
