It’s Friday evening.

You sit down on your couch and let out a slow, heavy and dragged exhale.

“It’s Friday.”

But as you sigh in relief, a tightness in your chest forms,

“Where did the week go?”

Then, in the blink of an eye, it’s Sunday.

A part of your heart sinks because how did your weekend go by so quickly?

Now you’re dreading Monday.

This is the reality for so many.

They dread Monday and the week to come.

Only for the week to go by with no memory of it, and the weekend even faster.

You get to Friday again, and it feels like you didn’t do anything.

Although you've ticked off tasks here and there, what progress have you made?

What results have you achieved?

You look back on the week and feel you wasted so much time.

You look towards the upcoming week and feel overwhelmed and stressed.

How many more days, weeks and months are going to look like this?

Feeling like you didn’t make progress?

Feeling stressed and overwhelmed thinking about the future?

The good news is that this doesn’t need to be your reality.

You can create days and weeks that feel peaceful, build momentum and help you achieve your big goals.

The Power In Planning

Schedules, calendars and planning get a bad rap.

Unfair one at that.

Most people are fine with planning. Planning things like outings, events, trips, weddings, etc.

But when it comes to their personal lives and day-to-day, it’s the opposite.

It makes them feel mundane, mechanical and monotonous.

It feels restrictive and like a waste because if your days look the same day-to-day, why do you need to schedule that in? You already know what you’re going to do… more or less.

But it’s the more or less that comes to bite you in the butt later.

Not only did you know you had to do that thing, but… You didn’t do it?

And that’s where the biggest problem lies.

It’s often not that you don’t know what to do, but you didn’t follow through on it.

Why?

Because you didn’t prioritise it.

You didn’t highlight its importance.

You didn’t commit to it like you would to attending a friend’s birthday party or a meeting with an important client.

Planning your days isn’t about being restrictive and taking away your spontaneity.

It’s about making progress.

It’s about prioritising your goals.

It’s about showing up for yourself.

It’s about using structure to create your freedom.

Without a plan, there is no flow. There is only reaction.

Think about it this way.

If you wanted to play a board game with friends, but didn’t know the rules, you wouldn’t have much fun.

If everyone could do whatever they wanted, the game would be a shit show and now no one wants to play.

Rules are what make games fun because you know what you can do and what you can’t do.

And if you’re a rebel, sure, you can try to bend the rules as much as you want, but the principle remains.

Rules give order and structure that allow freedom to flow.

The same is with your daily, weekly and monthly planning.

Structure and planning don’t take away your freedom, but give you freedom.

When you set goals, you have a direction that you’re working towards.

When you set monthly benchmarks, you have checkpoints to make sure you’re still on course.

When you set weekly targets, you create urgency and accountability to make progress.

When you have daily actions, you stack the smaller wins that turn into the larger win of your long-term goal.

Planning allows you to make time for the things that matter to you without getting lost to distractions, emergencies and other people’s agendas.

Planning puts you in the driver’s seat and gives you control over your life.

If you don’t take control of your calendar, someone else will.

And they’ll either waste your time or put in their agenda.

Planning and using schedules is also powerful for reducing overwhelm, decision fatigue and protecting against wasted mental energy.

Decision fatigue is defined as the mental overload and exhaustion you experience from making a lot of decisions and the deteriorating quality of those decisions over time.

From the moment you wake up, you are making decisions.

What to wear

What to eat

What to listen to

What to do at X time

What to have for lunch

How to reply to that email

When you take lunch

What are you doing when you get home

What to have for dinner

When will you do that task

How do you want to structure the sales page

When to respond to your friend

When to call your mom

and so on.

You make thousands of decisions a day, some small, some big.

And as you make decisions over the day, the quality of those decisions decreases, and as your mental energy drops, you’re too tired to make those decisions, which means a further drop in the quality of those decisions.

However, if you plan out your days and weeks, all you have to do is follow the schedule.

Planning your day the night before allows you to start the day with clarity and energy, and keep your energy up much longer than others.

You move with confidence because your priorities are already laid out, and you don’t waste time worrying or second-guessing yourself.

You are clear.

That clarity builds confidence.

Confidence leads to action.

Action taken leads to results and feedback.

Results and feedback lead to progress and momentum.

Progress and momentum lead to your vision becoming a reality.

A simple tool with incredible power to determine the trajectory of your life.

So planning doesn’t take away your spontaneity.

Structure doesn’t take away your creativity.

Restriction doesn’t take away your freedom.

They are protecting and promoting more.

And ultimately, they are creating your future.

How To Plan Your Days, Weeks and Months

The flow of this planning system is for you to reflect, prioritise, plan and execute.

Phase 0: Vision

Before you can plan your day, week or month, you want to know where you’re going.

Where you want to be in the long term.

Whether it’s at the end of the year, 5 years or 10 years from now.

This is your vision and goals.

If you haven’t outlined and written down your vision and goals, this is when you do it.

Make sure you know what you want and are clear about it.

Phase 1: Reflect

Once you’ve gotten clear on your vision and goals, we can get into planning your days and weeks.

First, you want to start by reflecting on the previous week.

Doing this will give you a benchmark for where you’re starting from. It’s important to know where you want to go, but you also want to know where you’re starting from so you can make the best decisions moving forward, given your circumstances.

Reflect on things such as:

• What did I achieve?

• What did I do well?

• What didn’t I do well?

• What can I learn from last week?

• How can I do better next week?

• What do I need to focus on next week?

Self-awareness is a crucial part of this process.

Yes, you can focus on creating the next external systems, but without the internal systems (your mental state, your energy, your focus, etc.), which are your inputs, it’s hard to get the larger system moving.

Once you’ve reflected on the week, you want to braindump everything you think you need to do for the upcoming week.

You’re not planning or scheduling anything yet, just creating a rough outline.

You want to be clear on what needs to happen and have it all out in front of you.

Phase 2: Prioritise

With everything in front of you, now it’s time to prioritise.

Before you get into it, I want to encourage you to prioritise your health and well-being first.

You most likely have a list of work tasks listed but without adequate energy, you will struggle to perform at a high level and get everything you need to do done.

Even if you haven’t written down, going to the gym, prioritise movement, sleep and well-being.

This could look like knowing what time you go to bed and what time you’ll wake up.

It looks like blocking out time to go to the gym or go for a walk.

It looks like knowing when your peak energy hours are and when you most likely need a break.

Thinking energy first helps you perform better.

Once you’ve prioritised that, you can move on to identifying your highest leverage outcomes and tasks for the week.

I recommend keeping this to 1 - 3 outcomes and tasks.

Remember, these are the tasks and outcomes that, if done and achieved, would lead to you achieving your long-term goals and would make everything else easier.

Think of Pareto’s Principles: “80% of results come from 20% of your actions.”

So instead of overwhelming yourself with 20 or 30 things, focus on the 1 - 3 things.

For other tasks and outcomes, you want to delegate them, outsource them or eliminate them. If you can’t do either of those, then you want to make them bonus tasks and schedule them AFTER your high-leverage tasks.

Your high-leverage tasks are your biggest dominoes, so you want to do them either first thing each day or when you’re energy, focus, and cognitive functions are at their highest.

Once done for the day, you can move on to your bonus tasks.

Phase 3: Plan

Once you’ve identified your highest-leverage tasks and bonus tasks, now you want to get your calendar out and organise and plan everything.

Block out specific times for your tasks so you know when you will do them and on what days. Overestimate where you can. Things tend to take longer than expected, so give yourself some breathing room here.

In this phase, you can also batch your work.

So, for example, if you create content, instead of doing one piece of content every day during the week, you have one day when you create everything.

For example, I create all my short-form content for the week on Mondays instead of doing it each day.

This saves me time and overwhelm because I can create everything on Monday and schedule them for the week.

This then allows me to focus on other high-leverage tasks on other days of the week.

Batching your work is advised because you want to avoid multitasking and task switching as much as you can.

After all, this eats at your mental energy and focus during the day.

(You can read more about multitasking in this newsletter.)

Phase 4: Execute

In this phase, this is when you take action on everything you’ve planned and organised.

This is waking up on Monday morning and doing what the calendar says.

One thing to keep in mind:

Think of your schedule as a guide, not a rigid and strict structure to adhere to. Life happens. This goes without saying, so allow for flexibility.

Remember when you were time blocking your tasks and I asked you to overestimate how long tasks would take you?

These times can also act as buffer times.

Maybe you finish a task sooner than expected. Instead of immediately jumping into the next thing, you can use this as a short break. (You should have also scheduled breaks between tasks already, but in case you haven’t). Or if you’re still feeling good, you can move your tasks up.

But if life happens? Sure, you didn’t get the hour you wanted, but at least you got 30 minutes in.

That’s better than nothing.

So as you go through the week day by day, reflect on what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments.

Small reflections and reviews at the end of the day are great for course correcting during the week.

This is how you work less and earn more.

This is how you build momentum without burnout.

Your Sunday Planning Checklist

Every Sunday (ideally), here’s what you can do to plan your week:

1. Block 30–60 minutes on Sunday to plan your week

2. Reflect: Ask the reflection questions above in phase 1

3. Brain dump: Write down everything you think you need to do

4. Prioritise and identify your 1–3 high-leverage tasks

5. Time block them into your calendar

6. Build in your health, breaks, and flexibility

7. Review daily. Adjust weekly.

No more regretful Fridays or dreadful Mondays.

It’s time to start planning your weeks and living actively and making real progress towards your goals.

If you want to have a great life, start taking care of the days.

Take care of the days and the days will take care of weeks.

The weeks will take care of the months.

The months will take care of the years.

The years will make up your life.

Thank you for reading.

I hope you enjoyed it.

See you in the next one.

— Shana

p.s.

If you’re ready to unlock deep focus, master your performance and save 10+ hours a week, click here.