A day with too many tasks to complete. A day with too big tasks to complete. A day with only one uncompleted task, but it’s a most important task.

Occasionally we all have such a day. The world is not perfect. None of us neither. And that’s fine.

But when most of the days look like that, you better set aside the tasks. Instead, think why this happens day after day and how to prevent this.

Years ago my days were full of reactive tasks.

Instead of priority I was operating based on urgency. Despite completing lots of tasks every day, I felt smashed. Instead of a warm feeling of progress, I felt stuck.

I wasn’t intentional about what I have in a plan for the day. It was whatever I didn’t finish tomorrow and a pack of new tasks.

Then I stumbled upon a concept of weekly review in a book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I believe this book (and weekly review in particular) started my journey of exploring topic of productivity.

Moving my view from days to weeks changed the way I plan and execute.

Nowadays planning in weeks sounds obvious. Two decades ago it didn’t. At least not to me.

Since then I’ve been through ups and downs in my relationship with weekly reviews (or weekly resets as I call them now).

One thing was remaining the same: Without week plan every day of the week becomes a fiasco.

These days weekly reset for me boils down to 3 things:

• Reflect on past week
• Get current on goals and projects
• Plan the week ahead

When I’m short on time, I can shrink first two steps to a total of five minutes.

However, planning the week definitely will have its half an hour of my attention.

Setting up productive and pleasant week

Week plan is an enabler for pleasant and fulfilled days. It’s the lowest horizon of planning.

Days are execution units. They follow the path outlined by week plan pretty strictly.

A solid week plan creates a harmony between different areas of life. It combines tasks needed to achieve goals with tasks supporting ongoing life needs. It leaves room for unexpected things. It embraces rest and joy. And it prepares the stage for each day of the week.

1 – Start with 2 levels in mind

How many tasks do you have in your week? Definitely we’re talking about tens of tasks. They are of different priority and urgency. Then belong to different projects. They pull in different directions, and request different attention.

How many tasks do you have in a project? Ten? Twenty? Some of those are interconnected, some can be done in parallel, some are subtasks of others. The list gets messy quickly.

I like to think about week in two levels:

• Week objectives define my week.
• Tasks needed to complete those objectives define my days.

Week objectives come from strategic and operational projects. They are steps in my journey to achieve goals and to keep my ongoing life in check.

When thinking about project I look for steps leading to completing it. Those steps are not actionable. I aim for small steps. Yet, usually I would need multiple tasks to finish each step.

Naturally steps from projects become week objectives.

How many objectives would I have in a week? Three. Maybe five. That’s the number I can focus on. That’s the number of things I can use to navigate my week. A couple more and deciding what’s important to do becomes a challenge.

Once I’ve picked my week objectives, it’s time for old good tasks to arrive on stage. What I need to do to complete week objectives becomes my tasks for the week.

They become a skeleton of the week. Few more bones will be added in next steps. Flash and skin appear when executing tasks and completing them.

2 – Blend in stand-alone tasks

There are always some tasks floating around which are not related to any project. Without them week plan won’t be complete. At the same time they are rarely important enough to drive the week (unless they are masking projects).

Some of them are pure stand-alone things like errands and chores.

Some may be unique for the week while others are recurrent.

Some may be not tasks, but events.

Anyway they need attention. How much of attention depends on how important the task is.

3 – Don’t forget about margin

Packing the week as if this will be perfect week is the fastest way to an unpleasant week.

Things will go wrong. Having a margin gives a chance to fix those situations.

Margin for things that will take more time should be in a form of free time. This can be deliberate buffer time to specific tasks you see a high risk in. This can be underplanning your week. Whatever feels best for you. The key here is to take off optimist’s hat for a moment and have a rational look at your tasks.

You need to have a margin to cover unplanned things. When your week plan contains only urgent and pressing tasks, any tiny incident influencing any of the days can break the whole week. This margin doesn’t have to be a free time in days. It can come in a form of tasks which you could postpone to another week without any guilt.

One more margin everyone needs is for rest and fun time.

Rest is essential to stay productive in a long run. Without enough rest everything else will start falling apart. Focus will go away. Attention will disappear. What was taking minutes will start taking an hour.

When you work on something that you love, it brings you joy. Still it’s not the kind of joy which fun time gives you. Joy from work adds value to your fulfilment. Joy from fun time resets and recharges your mind. Nobody is truly happy without enjoying hobbies, social life, family.

Spending time doesn’t mean being present. To be present you need to completely unplug your thoughts from your tasks. For that you need to deliberately choose to plan less tasks. Give yourself guilt-free fun time.

4 – Prepare your days

Last ingredient is distributing tasks and margins among the days.

With practice comes the ability to predict resulting days load at previous steps. Your gut feeling will warn you early about overloading the week. Then distributing tasks becomes easier to do.

Each day I tend to have 3-4 tasks for projects, 3-5 stand-alone tasks, and leave myself about an hour as margin for unknowns.

Honestly, that’s more than I would like to have in my days. I can handle this because currently I’m working part-time. With a full-time job I wouldn’t aim for more than 2 tasks for projects and 3 stand-alone tasks (while an hour of margin would still remain).

Everyone has unique situation. From person to person size and number of tasks may vary a lot.

Number of tasks doesn’t really matter. What matters is a pace at which you can sustainably move forward at least for a couple of years.

When I look at my week plan as a whole, I’m not quantifying it. I follow my feelings. When I feel uncomfortable even before week starts, I know I better make changes. It’s better to remove week objective then feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the middle of the week.

Having a week overview and reasonable workload for each day sets me emotionally positive.

On a practical side this means fast and simple daily planning. Occasionally something can slip into another day or urgent task can appear. Yet, the days are already drafted.

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