Jade Boyd: You are going to enter your weeks with less overwhelm, with more confidence, with more clarity, feeling like you’re actually in control and are empowered to make time for the things that really matter to you in your life and in your business.

So I want you to start off by imagining what you think of when you think of a weekly planning routine. I’d imagine that many of you are envisioning some sort of like hour long, really calm, quiet, space where you’re thoughtfully detailing minute by minute, your plan for the entire week. Maybe a candle is lit, you have your coffee or your tea, and it’s just very cozy. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good extended planning session, and I love the idea of romanticizing your everyday life, but week to week, that type of planning routine is just not realistic for most women. And the good news is that you can become a really effective planner, even if you only have five minutes in between meetings or during a nap or in between errands.

And today I’m going to walk you through step by step what it actually takes to be able to plan a productive week in five minutes or less.

And I first just want to start off by saying that planning your week is so incredibly powerful. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but when it comes to maximizing your productivity as a business owner, it’s hugely effective. And if you’ve never done this before, starting doing a routine like this is going to change your life on a week to week basis.

I noticed even I’ve been doing this for a very long time. And if there’s a certain week where I don’t get to my weekly planning process. I can tell immediately going into my week that I’m way more stressed, things are way more overwhelming, I don’t have time for the things that I want to get done, I feel rushed, I feel disorganized life just feels a little chaotic. And so going through this routine again, it doesn’t have to take an entire hour. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy or elaborate. It can just be five minutes and you will notice a huge difference immediately in how empowered you feel going into your week and how much you’re able to get done when you sit down and put a little intention behind organizing what you’re going to accomplish on each day of the week.

And as a disclaimer, planning routines are a muscle that gets built over time. And the longer you practice, the less time it’s going to take you. And having a system in place for doing this certainly helps. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. There are certain things that if you have them in place with your business, it’s going to save you All the more time when you’re planning each week, but when you enter your week with that plan, again, you’re just going to be so much more productive.

You’re going to be so much more likely to prioritize the things that actually need to get done. Those things that you’ve been putting off on your to do list forever, the things that are probably going to move the needle the most for you and help you get to the next level in your business. James Clear talks about implementation intentions, which is basically assigning a deadline for a task and deciding when you’re going to get that task done.

And research has shown that you are much, much more likely to complete a task when you have an assigned deadline and a place on your calendar to do that task. So even if it’s something that’s recurring or that you do every single week, just sitting down and writing down the actual deadline or blocking that in your calendar is going to make it so much more likely that you actually do the thing.

It is also just so incredibly powerful to see everything in one place. And I talk about this all of the time because I just don’t know how anybody functions without being able to see it. see everything that they’re responsible for in one place. I just don’t know how it’s possible. It makes me think of my college days and you know, like in high school or college, you get a syllabi for all of your different courses.

All of your professors are thinking just individually about their own course. They do not care what your other schedules are and they can’t possibly plan around thousands of students schedules anyway, but I remember, especially in semesters where I had a high credit load, like 18 credits of courses, how overwhelming it would have been to try and print out all of those 30 page documents of the syllabi with all of the different deadlines and rules and exam dates that fluctuate every single semester and trying to look at all of those different documents and decide on a week to week basis what I should be focused on, or like what the next homework assignment was, that would have been so time consuming and so overwhelming, and I probably would have dropped so many balls and missed so many assignments and I know that most college students do not write down everything in one place and I honestly just don’t know how it’s even possible, but every single semester I would print out all of my syllabi and then I would copy every single deadline, every homework assignment, every exam date into my planner or my calendar so that I could see absolutely everything in one place. So that I knew when I was planning my week, okay, here’s everything that’s happening or that’s due this week. And then next week, I know all of the exams and homework assignments that I need to start working on this week because they’re due next week.

Planning your week and being able to see everything that you’re responsible for in one place does just alleviate a whole lot of anxiety and stress and overwhelm. And as business owners, as moms and wives and friends, We have so many different responsibilities and obligations that change every single week. Like not only do we have those metaphorical syllabi, for so many different areas of our life of things that are due or need to be done on a regular basis every single week. Our schedules also change because life happens every single week and throw something off. And so it’s so important to have a clear view of everything in one place so that you can feel less overwhelmed so that you can kind of put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your own life and schedule and not feel like you’re just being pulled from thing to thing to thing.

You’re just doing whatever is most urgent or you’re just responding to other people’s needs all the time instead of making space for what you want to prioritize. And also it just helps you make better decisions about your time and energy. All of us have different energy levels throughout the week, throughout the month, throughout the day.

So for example, I have my best energy, typically the time of day that I have my best energy, is between like 9 a. m. and 12 p. m. in the morning every single day. And so I schedule tasks that need a lot more of my energy and focus in the morning. Podcasting is one of those things. When I record podcast episodes in the afternoon, I notice a huge difference.

It is always so much harder for me to come up with words. I stumble a lot more. It takes me way longer. I. struggle to create outlines and like think clearly and organize things in a way that makes sense. But when I do it in the mornings, it feels a lot more effortless. It feels like I’m in more of a flow state, my energy is higher, my words come a lot easier. And there might be certain tasks on your, to do list that you need more energy and focus for and scheduling those types of projects and tasks during the time of day where you have that level of energy is going to save you time overall. Planning your week, you can think of it as like, oh man, that’s just another thing that I have to add to my to do list and it’s going to take all this time and I just don’t have the time to do that.

That’s too fancy or elaborate. But if you do this well, if you have a good process in place, planning your week is going to save you so much more time and energy than it takes you to go through this process. Again, we can do this in five minutes or less if we have the right systems in place. And it’s going to save you way more than five minutes, not only in time, but it’s going to save you so much energy, and also just change the way that you experience each week because you are going to enter your weeks with less overwhelm, with more confidence, with more clarity, feeling like you’re actually in control and are empowered to make time for the things that really matter to you in your life and in your business.

So with all of that being said, I’m going to dive into what it actually looks like for me on a week to week basis to plan my weeks in five minutes or less.

So like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this does get easier if you have some established systems and processes in place. And I’m going to mention three of them that empower me to do this planning routine really, really well in five minutes or less every single week. So the first one is My ClickUp space. And if you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of ClickUp. I have an entire course on how I organize my business and ClickUp. It’s called The Organize Your Business course. We can link it in the show notes, but all of my tasks are already in my ClickUp space, so when I’m going to plan my weeks, I already have a full detailed list in my life and in my business every single thing that needs to get done that week. It is already written down for me. I don’t have to think about it or make that list from scratch. It’s already in there and that saves me so much time and energy on a weekly basis.

So that’s the first thing having a system for organizing all of your tasks in your business for organizing all of your workflows for like all the automations that come through a lot of your work in your business. Having that system in place is going to save you so much time and energy when you’re going to plan your individualized week.

So if you don’t have any sort of task management system set up for your business, if you are really just trying to remember your entire to do list and coming up with these plans from scratch every single week, I would highly recommend you go check out my Organize Your Business course. It is a course that gives you the exact framework that I use to organize my business and also walks you step by step through how to set up that system and ClickUp, which is a system that includes so many different opportunities for automations that save you even more time as a business owner. And I walk you through my exact space on my backend to show you exactly how my ClickUp space functions and how I’m organizing my business in ClickUp too.

And you don’t necessarily have to use ClickUp or have my exact task management system, but you do have to have a task management system. Your business is not going to outgrow your ability to manage your tasks on a week to week basis.

And it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It doesn’t have to be expensive. In my course, you can start on ClickUp with the free plan. And I use the free plan for many, many years before I upgraded to get more features in ClickUp. You could potentially do this in a paper planner if you have the right paper planning system, but the important thing is that you do already have a system where all of your tasks are documented and you know going into your week what the things are that you need to do in order to move your business in the right direction.

Okay, the second thing that I have in place that helps this process take less time is a CEO day routine. And I also have a free download. If you don’t know what a CEO day is, it’s basically a day that I set aside every month to step outside the day to day of my business and into more of that CEO role and make plans on how I’m going to move my business closer to my goals that month, what projects I’m going to prioritize, what my marketing plan is going to look like, finalizing all of those details. I do that on a monthly basis so that going into each week of the month, all of those decisions are already made.

And so on a week to week basis, when I’m trying to think through like what big projects do I want to take on or what am I posting on Instagram this week? All of those decisions have already been made during that CEO day. So again, going into the week, I’m not really creating a to do list at all, everything is already organized and click up for me, but my CEO day routine is a pivotal routine and making sure that all of those decisions are made and made well.

So again, I have a free guide on how to build your own CEO day checklist, and it also walks you through some of the things that I touch on during my CEO days as well. Things like tracking my financial metrics and my marketing metrics, my planning routine on a month to month basis. You can grab that using the link in the show notes if you’ve never done a CEO day.

And then the third thing that I have in place that makes this process take way less time is an ideal week structure. So an ideal week is basically a template layout of your week that shows you how you’re blocking your time and the things that you’re responsible for on a week to week basis in general. And I know that there is a lot of hesitation and fear or even outright objection when it comes to building an ideal week because every week is going to be different no matter what, right?

And so for some business owners, they feel like taking the time to create this ideal week layout is a waste of time because not any given week is actually going to go perfectly according to plan. And that is not the purpose of scheduling out your ideal week. The purpose of going through an ideal week exercise is again, to see everything in one place and to make big decisions about how you can prioritize your time and even like safeguard your time blocks of time where you don’t have any meetings, for example, or theming your days so that you do have a whole day a week to work on your marketing if you’re constantly falling behind on your marketing and you need to prioritize your marketing in order to reach your business goals, whatever that might be. Your ideal week takes your current season into account.

So at the time of this recording, we’re going into summer. Your ideal week in summer is going to look very different than your ideal week in December or in March. And that’s totally normal. Your ideal week can change season to season. I think a lot of people, especially business owners who are innovative or creatives don’t want to box themselves into the schedule that feels rigid and robotic. And that can be another reason why business owners don’t take the time and energy to create an ideal week. But the goal is just to have a template schedule put together so that going into your week, you’re not trying to create the schedule from scratch. And if you are able to safeguard things like for me on Wednesdays, I don’t have any meetings, so I can rely on that time every single week to plan goal projects and marketing projects that I need time to work on like the backend and on my own business. If you don’t safeguard time like that on a weekly basis and think through that ahead of time, it gets that much harder on a week to week basis to actually scheduling the things that you need to get done and show up consistently for your business.

So to recap, the reason why I can plan my weeks in five minutes or less are because I have these three things in place: I have my ClickUp template with all my tasks, I have my CEO day routine where I’m making all of those decisions ahead of time of what tasks are going to get prioritized that month, and then I also have an ideal week template where I know which days of the week, which types of tasks are going to get prioritized and I know going into my week generally what my schedule layout is so I’m not trying to like move things around every single week or balancing meetings every single day of the week or anything like that, things are already automatically getting scheduled where they’re supposed to be scheduled, and I automatically have the amount of time that I need on a week to week basis to show up for the things that I want to be consistent in.

And I also have a free resource for planning your ideal week if you’ve never gone through that exercise. It’s called the Task Batching Workbook, and I will include the link to that in the show notes as well.

Okay, so with those three things in place, when I’m sitting down to plan my week, here is exactly what I do, and again it takes me five minutes or less.

The first thing I do is log into ClickUp and I have one dashboard in ClickUp that shows me everything that I need to do that week. It also has a space where it’s listing my goals for my business and my why for my business. So the first thing I’m doing every single week is reminding myself of that big picture. What are my goals for my business? What am I trying to accomplish here? Why am I doing this? That takes 30 to 60 seconds to review my goals, remind myself of why I’m doing this before I dive into planning, and that’s really powerful because we can get lost in the weeds and get really unmotivated or distracted in our businesses if we don’t keep our goals front and center. So at least review your goals on a weekly basis to remind yourself of what matters.

The second thing that I’m doing is reviewing my Google Calendar. I manage my entire calendar digitally in Google Calendar and I just take note of the things that are on my schedule that week and how much white space I have to get tasks done.

So, like I said, I have certain rules around meetings. I don’t take meetings on Wednesdays. So I know that I’m going to have a certain amount of white space every single week. But of course those random things come up. Like if I’m guest podcasting on somebody else’s podcast and they’re only scheduling interviews on Wednesday, then I might have a meeting on a Wednesday or random things like that, where I have to work around other people’s schedules and don’t always get to stick within my bounds of my ideal schedule.

So I’m just taking a quick glance of what’s on my calendar, eyeballing how much white space I have day to day, what appointments I have coming up, and then I’ll also schedule any tasks that are time sensitive related to things that are on my calendar.

So, for example, we have community group through our church every single Wednesday night at this point. And sometimes we have meals where we do like potlucks or something together. And so looking at that on my calendar, I’d be like, oh, we have a potluck on Wednesday I probably need to make something. What am I going to make? And then I would think through that ahead of time and add it to my calendar, my to do list on Tuesday, if I had to make that thing Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, I would schedule in those little extra tasks that are related to events on my calendar that aren’t already in my system.

And for most of my things in my business, most of my meetings or events that are happening in my business, those things are systemized and those deadlines are set for me. So for example, today I have a guest podcast interview, somebody is coming on as a guest on this podcast and the entire workflow for that is in ClickUp. So seeing that on my calendar, I already know that all of the things that I need to do to prep for that podcast interview, those deadlines have already been set in ClickUp and so sending them the questions ahead of time. There’s automated emails that remind them of the meeting time and stuff like that.

All of that is already in ClickUp and either scheduled or automated for me and most things in my business work like that, where it’s more repetitive and there’s a set workflow and I don’t have to think week to week about those time sensitive tasks that need to be done before meetings. So that’s mostly on the personal side of things. When I have like random things come up that are not true every single week.

Okay, and then next I review all of my tasks for the week and I move any deadlines based on how much time I have in my calendar, making sure that my to do list for each day is reasonable. So when I am assigning deadlines in ClickUp, like when I’m going through my CEO day and thinking about what I can accomplish on a week to week basis, I am planning around my ideal week.

And so generally, my ideal week is showing me which day of the week I’m assigning tasks to, but again, every week is not the same and there are certain events that pop into the calendar where I have more or less white space on certain days than I might have planned.

So the next thing I’m doing is breaking down my to do list day by day. And right now I’m working three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but also I manage my personal life and ClickUp. So I’m also moving around tasks on Monday and Friday that are on like a more personal level. And I’m just making sure that my to do list for the week is reasonable and it feels encouraging and possible and not just like overwhelming and frustrating.

The first thing I look at is my goals. I have a goals list for my business and a goals list for my personal life. And again, during my CEO day for my business, I’m kind of already thinking through what my goals are for the month and what projects I want to prioritize. But on a week to week basis, I’m taking note of like, okay, what did I accomplish last week?

What are the next steps? How much time is that going to take? When am I going to do that this week? And making sure that that plan is in place. And that does not take very much time because it’s already kind of detailed for me and generally already know what the next steps are. It’s just a matter of double checking.

Okay. Are my goals for this week realistic? When am I going to do that? And for me, it’s typically on Wednesdays and those things are already assigned to Wednesdays in ClickUp. And so we’re good to go.

Then I’m looking at my marketing tasks for the week. A lot of my marketing gets batched ahead of time, like podcasting, for example, where I don’t have a lot of extra work, but I’m just generally reviewing all of the things that are going live for marketing that week. If I need to double check anything or tweak anything or create Instagram content for the week, I usually batch Instagram content on a weekly basis rather than on a monthly basis. Just making sure that all of those things still make sense based on what’s going on in my business and that I have time set aside to do my marketing stuff.

Then I look at my client tasks. So a lot of what it takes to manage my client work at this point is repetitive. And so those due dates and timelines or meetings are already on my calendar. And oftentimes it’s the same every single week with my coaching program. I’m checking in with them every day and I kind of have a rhythm of when I check and respond to client messages every day.

So there’s usually not a lot of heavy planning that needs to be done for client stuff, but I do create regular bonuses for my coaching program. And so some weeks there are extended projects, like creating a bonus on launch timelines or if we have a guest expert coming in to speak that week, something like that, where I know I’m going to have some follow up work, just making sure that I have enough time and that those things are reasonable and have an assigned time and I have space for that on my weekly schedule.

So again, those things are typically already assigned to that week. I’m just moving things around day to day to make sure that the flow of things feels good.

And then the last category for my business is all of my admin stuff. And these are just like the little tasky things. Most of them are really repetitive. They’re already in ClickUp. They already have assigned deadlines. And I assign admin work at this point in time, almost always on Thursdays at the end of my three day week where I have the least amount of energy because I’ve already put a lot of time and focus into Tuesday and Wednesday for my higher focus tasks on Thursdays I’m usually winding down the week and doing like my weekly review and stuff. And so wrapping up all of those admin tasks, again, those things are typically already assigned. And if I don’t get through all of them, it’s not the end of the world.

And then at this point, since Mondays and Fridays feel like a completely separate timeframe to me. I usually plan my business stuff first, knowing that it’s only on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, making time for those things. And then on Monday and Friday, the next thing I look at is all of my personal tasks and projects.

And again, they typically already have assigned deadlines. I’m just reviewing and making sure that the things that are on my plate are actually realistic. And if anything needs to be bumped or if I’m not ready to take that on. We have a lot of, like, home renovation projects in ClickUp, for example, and at the beginning of the month, I’m always very ambitious and optimistic about what I think we’re going to be doing on a week to week basis, but when I get into the weeks, I’m like, oh, well, we actually are not ready to take on that project, or we’re still working on the project that I thought we’d get done two weeks ago, and so sometimes deadlines get moved, but I’m just checking in and assigning tasks to Monday and Friday when it comes to personal stuff.

And that really is it. After I’m done scheduling my personal stuff, my week is planned out. Everything has a deadline, a time on my calendar. I’ve checked that everything makes sense based on my capacity for that week. I’m not dropping any balls. I’m gonna be prepped for all the meetings and events that are on my calendar. And this process really does go by super quickly.

And if you’re somebody who has the Sunday scaries about your business on a regular basis, I would highly recommend just going through an activity like this, because even if it’s a big week, or even if there’s big projects that I’m not looking forward to on my calendar, it really does help just having a clear view of what’s actually happening that week, and also protecting that white space in my calendar and making sure that I have time for myself too. Again, I don’t want to go into the week setting myself up for failure every single day of the week with a 30 thing to do list Monday through Friday. It’s just not realistic. And I think that easily happens when you’re not sitting down to plan your week and making more intentional decisions about what you do have time for and what you want to make time for versus what is okay to put off until later.

And then as far as like the next steps and actually getting into the work, there’s definitely two thoughts here, two ways of planning. Some people like planning out everything on a weekly basis, and literally detailing and time blocking their entire week at one time. And some people prefer planning on a daily basis and getting through their daily to do list and then reassessing for the next day what they got done and then rebuilding their next day’s to do list.

And I’ve gone through phases of different horizons of planning in the past, and right now what I’m doing is planning out my weeks on a weekly basis and ClickUp because deadlines are much easier to move in a digital space rather than a physical space. And then every single day when I’m sitting down at my desk or waking up in the morning, if it’s like a personal day on Monday or Friday, I’m looking at ClickUp to see all my tasks and then I’m time blocking my day one day at a time, instead of trying to do that a week at a time, because as we know, meetings get canceled or rescheduled. And if you are in the habit of blocking out your entire week at one time, it can get really frustrating. If stuff like that happens often in your business or in your life to continually feel like you’re just like managing your schedule instead of actually getting things done.

And I’ve definitely felt that in the past, although it’s very therapeutic to block out an entire week at a time. Recently, I’ve been planning my tasks in ClickUp a week at a time and then on a daily basis is when I’m actually sitting down in my planner and I will write down physically every single task in time blocks for what I’m going to get done that day or what my plan for what I’m going to get done that day is.

So I like a mix of digital and physical. I think there’s something just really powerful of putting pen to paper and being more like in the moment and present and thoughtful as you’re writing down your time blocks for the day and making your plan for the day. It’s something very therapeutic and for me, it’s grounding in the morning to look through my to do list and then making intentional decisions, especially now as I’m recording this I am heavy in third trimester pregnancy. So my energy every single day looks drastically different and I can’t always plan for that. And so on a day to day basis, it is helpful for me to be like, okay, here are all the things that I want to get done today, let’s make a plan that makes sense based on the time and energy that I have on this actual day to figure out what I want to get done and what’s going to feel good to me today.

So, to recap my process for planning my weeks, first, having my ClickUp template, my CEO day routine, and my ideal weekend place saves me a lot of time. Second, I go to my ClickUp dashboard and review my goals and my why for my business. Then I review my Google calendar. Then I schedule tasks that are in ClickUp based on my ideal week, going through my goal tasks, my marketing tasks, my client tasks, my admin tasks, and then my personal tasks.

So again, if you want to build your weekly planning routine, but you’re feeling like it just takes you way too much time each week to actually plan your week, it might be really helpful for you to look into getting some of those systems and structures in place so that you can sit down for five minutes and plan a really productive week.

So I’m going to link the Organize Your Business course, the free CEO Day Checklist, and that free Task Batching Workbook in the show notes. So if this is something that you think would be empowering for you going into each week that would help you eliminate some stress and some overwhelm when it comes to managing business and all of the other crazy things happening in your life.

I would highly recommend before you tune out of this episode to head on to the show notes and grab those free resources. Until next time, Business Minimalists, take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.