If you’re a teacher, you are in the habit of planning. And if you’re a teacher – you also know that, very often, things do not go according to plan. However, we don’t give up on planning. We just regroup, reschedule, and figure out a different way to teach the content, differentiate, and modify. In other words, we drop back and punt!
The same strategies apply to planning in our personal/home lives.
Do you plan your week in advance? (If not, read on to see one way to do this and try it out!)
If you DO plan a week in advance when do you do that planning?
For years, I did my weekly planning on Sunday. That seemed like the perfect time to look ahead to the upcoming week, to plan meals for the week, to arrange for child care or to plan for my kids’ activities and drop-off/pick-up times. All of this was done in an attempt to be prepared and organized for my upcoming week and to feel some sense of calm since there was a plan in place.
But then, I noticed something. Every Sunday, I still had the “Sunday scaries” and the feeling of “OMG, this week is going to be crazy, I’m not ready,” etc. I decided that something needed to change.
So I switched my weekly planning to Friday and I have never looked back.
Here are just a few of the benefits I’ve found:
*if there were conflicts with events or activities on the schedule, I could make plans for that well in advance;
*by planning my menus for the next week, I could then create a grocery list and get the shopping done on Friday or over the weekend;
*workouts and other activities I need to do for myself got scheduled in advance, which meant that I actually did them, most of the time.
I recently read an awesome book by Laura Vanderkam called Tranquility by Tuesday. (Highly recommend, by the way.) One of Vanderkam’s “rules” is to plan on Friday.
In that chapter, she cites four main reasons to plan your week on the Friday before:
“There’s little opportunity cost. It is hard to start anything new on Friday afternoons . . . If this time would otherwise be wasted . . . why not repurpose it for planning? . . . .
You can make Monday productive. If you plan on Fridays, you can make full use of your Monday mornings. . . .
You can upgrade your weekends . . . planning on Friday gives you a chance to look at the immediately upcoming weekend. . . .
You can calm the ‘Sunday scaries’. . . . If you know exactly how you plan to accomplish what you need to accomplish before you quit on Friday afternoon, then you can relax. You can give your brain a true break.”
Here is the short version of how I do my Friday planning. (A longer version of weekly planning can be found in this post.)
First, decide where you will make these planning lists.
If you already use a weekly planner (either paper or digital), you could write tasks directly on your planner.
I like to use a notebook to make my lists, then transfer tasks to individual days in my planner. (That way, my planner doesn’t get too cluttered.)
But you do you.
Before I show you my lists, let me explain that I am married but with an empty nest, so I don’t have any childcare responsibilities listed.
1 – In your notebook (or on a page in your planner, keep a running “brain dump” list of things you need or want to do, errands to run, gifts to buy, whatever.
When you’re ready to plan your week, you’ll check this list for anything that needs to be scheduled for the following week.
Call it a “things to do this week” list, but keep it reasonable.
(Reasonable varies by person. A quick test is this: if the list stresses you out by looking at it, it’s too big! What can you delegate, postpone, or eliminate this week?)
Here is a sample page from my notebook.
2 – Check your email inbox for anything that needs to be done or scheduled. Add these items to your “things to do this week” list.
3 – Review your home and school calendar for any appointments, meetings, or events scheduled for the week. These are the “must-do this week at a certain time” events. (I indicate the day of the week beside each item. That helps me to see which days might be best for certain errands and which days might be overloaded.)
If you need to build in prep time or travel time, add those time blocks to your calendar as well.
4 – Schedule any regular weekly errands (like grocery shopping).
5 – Pay yourself first by scheduling activities that you want or need to do for yourself. This might include workouts, hair or nail appointments, devotional time, time for reading, etc.
Also schedule time for your important relationships, whether that involves date night, one-on-one time with each of your children, visiting elderly parents, writing letters, or keeping in touch with friends, etc.
Schedule rest for yourself. What time will you go to bed every night to be sure you get the right amount of sleep? Other rest times might be during your workout (if you prefer to do that alone), or quiet time for prayer or reading.
It might sound crazy to talk about scheduling activities for yourself right alongside all the “must-do” activities like meetings and medical appointments. But, trust me – if you don’t schedule these things, they will never happen.
Write those activities directly on your weekly calendar, in the time slots that you are planning to do them. These are non-negotiable. Other appointments and activities will need to fit around these.
6 – Do you need to plan time for your morning routine, your evening routine, and your weekly planning for school? Add those time blocks to your weekly calendar as well.
7 – Very important: plan buffer time (or back-up time) to finish tasks that did not get done at their scheduled time. I try to keep Friday afternoon open (other than the scheduled time for my weekly planning) and Sunday afternoon open. Choose some backup times that work for your schedule. I put a big X through my Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon to remind me that this is buffer time and that I shouldn’t schedule anything for this time unless an emergency arises.
8 – Schedule some time to work on a goal of yours. It might be writing or crafting or creating something for your Etsy shop. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, but it does need to be scheduled because you won’t “find” time for it otherwise. Mark the day and the time you will do this work on your calendar.
9 – Plan specific days and times for those “things to do this week” tasks. Plug them into the time blocks for those tasks.
For example: if one of my “things to do this week” is return an item to Nordstrom, I might choose Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. to drop that box off at the post office. Before I can do that, I need to get my return authorization slip from Nordstrom and box up the return. So I might add those tasks to Monday afternoon at 5:00 p.m.
Get the idea? The Nordstrom return, while a relatively small task, also needs a small amount of time to prep it in advance so I intentionally plan for that.
10 – Other (optional) things you could add to your weekly planning routine:
*your house cleaning & laundry schedule (which tasks will be completed on which days)
*your menus for the week
*your workouts for the week
*your outfits for each day
Finally – using this weekly list of tasks and my scheduled times on my calendar, I make a daily schedule and to-do list for the day. I like doing this the evening before, but you could also make this list in the morning if you prefer that.
That’s it! Try this out and let me know how it goes. And – if you’re accustomed to planning on Sunday, try doing this planning on Friday and see if it helps. I’d love to hear how it works for you!
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