The Power of Weekly Planning - Part 3

By Action Coach Dave Beam

If you have read the last few articles and done your homework, you should now have a basic understanding of your core values and priorities.  To help you gain mastery in your life and schedule, I recommend that you read David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done”.  He provides a clear process for capturing and processing all of your ideas, to do’s, duties, things to read, places to go, – EVERYTHING in your life and on your mind.  He outlines a brilliant system that shows you how to capture, define and process everything in your world so that your mind can be freed and available for maximum performance.

Once you have captured all your thoughts and stuff and have it defined, cataloged, and sorted, then you are ready to go to work on it.  The weekly planning session is a set aside time to choose what to work on during that week.  If you use Allen’s system, you essentially capture everything onto simple lists that can be easily and efficiently reviewed allowing you to choose your most important actions for that week.

Picture a one gallon glass jar filled to the brim with several large rocks, lots of gravel, sand and water.  Now envision dumping the full contents of that jar into a pan.  Your task is to fit100% of the contents back into the jar.  The only way you can get it all back in is to put the big rocks in first, followed by the gravel, then the sand and finally the water.  The order is critical.  If you try to put the sand or the gravel in first, the big rocks just won’t fit.

Here’s the lesson.  The space in the jar represents the limited amount of time you have to fill with activity.  The big rocks represent your most important tasks.   To accomplish what is most important (the big rocks), you need to put those priorities into your schedule (the jar) first.  Please note that these “big rock” priorities are usually not the most urgent items in your life.  That is why without intentional planning, they will get pushed out by smaller things.  The purpose of weekly planning is to be sure that you put the most important tasks in your schedule first and allow the other lower priorities to fill in.

Think about it.  If you consistently accomplish 7 top tasks in your life every week, you will have completed 364 important tasks every year.  What difference will that make in your relationships and success?