Planning as part of the craft

When dealing with a lot of moving parts in life, weekly planning and reviewing is one of the steps we can take to ensure being on the track with what matters. Still, getting around to actually doing a proper weekly planning and finding value in them might be a different story. At least I know this to be true for me. I struggled with getting a weekly planning done and getting sufficient value out of the planning sessions. Whenever I managed to get around to making a plan, I often found myself leaving the meticulously curated (and overly optimistic) plans behind in the following week. Not following my own laid out plans left me demotivated towards planning in general and less prone to do a weekly planning session at all. This left me vulnerable towards filling days with ‘urgent academic housework’ with less time and attention span for deep work (Newport, 2016).

Turns out making plans is a craft in itself. In that sense it is no wonder it takes time to master. One of the things that makes a weekly planning session get done and also become valuable I have found is about equal parts of structure and flexibility.
In this post, I will share some elements I have found helps provide both structure and flexibility in the weekly planning session, supporting the weekly planning actually getting done and making it both more efficient and joyful.

Building the structure

Leveraging low energy times for planning

This advice comes from Vanderkam (2022) advocating for planning at a time during the work week where energy is low, leveraging on these periods where working on things needing high energy and focus would most likely leave us with diminishing returns. As Vanderkam (2022) explains, Friday afternoon is often such a time. Picking out a time each week (or a span of time as for instance some day during Friday (Milkman, 2021)) for overarching weekly planning where it does not take the place of potential focus work on the projects that matter most, I have found to significantly help carve out time for this during ‘regular’ working hours and experiencing it as a valuable use of work time. It helps acknowledge how planning is an essential part of intellectual work (Allen, 2015). While Friday afternoons might not be the right timing for you, taking a ‘planning on Friday’s approach’ of leveraging lower energy times of the work week can help accept planning as part of work hours instead of necessarily pushing it to nights or weekends if it does not fit with your other commitments. Even though this approach does not demand you to choose Friday afternoons, a part I like about actually doing the weekly planning sessions at this time is that it allows for (re)thinking through the plans for the upcoming weekend. Often opportunities or new plans has been added to the weekend during the week and this provides a way of integrating these new plans into the schedule.

Using checklists

To practically get through my weekly planning I have created a template in my note system with a weekly planning checklist. The checklist provides a step-by-step plan that walks me through the planning session. When I import my weekly planning template into the Friday daily note, it marks the start of the ritual of the weekly planning for me. The checklist provides me with cues for what I need to plan for, so I don’t have to keep everything in mind each time, while at the same time leaving enough space for flexibility and creativity in the planning session. As Gawande (2022) argues in writing about the power of checklists; a checklist does not have to be only filled with simple steps that needs to be taken care of. Checklists can also be used as reminders for more open ended or creative steps. The weekly planning template and checklist provide me with the necessary structure, while still leaving space for open and creative reflection on things which at the moment matter for me when planning the following week. Even if initially checklists might seem too rigid for your weekly planning ritual (or too boring perhaps) I invite you to try a form that fits you. Checklists can be designed so that they accomodate how each week are different while also acknowledging how often there are commitments that keep showing up in our life that we would rather not forget taking into account.

Reviewing the past week

Make reviewing the past week a part of weekly planning provides a small step of learning from last week and following up on whether the projects that you are working on are still heading in the right direction, needs adjustment or perhaps needs to be abandoned. This has been helpful for me to integrate more consistently in the weekly planning session. On my weekly review list I have a few simple check points I fill out; key events from last week; wins from the week; what can I take with me and lastly a quick project status update–what moved forward, what’s stuck and how to fix it.
Trying out different lenghts of the review (from short to long) is a way of experimenting with what scope the review of last week needs to have in your planning for you to gain enough clarity towards planning next week.

Batching similar things
This is the oldest trick in the book about time management and planning, but I want to mention it here while I keep forgetting. Blocking time in the calendar for tackling similar actions during the week is saving a lot of time and avoid task switching. Because I tend to forget, I have created blocks of time that even though they are movable across the week, contain sort of the same actions. For instance I have a weekly maintenance block where I backup systems, check bank balance, top up my daughters lunch money card etc. All these things I usually forget, but by batching them onto a weekly maintanance checklist and block a suited time for it in the following week, I get it done in one go. This way its batched together in a system while still being flexible about timing. I add things specific for the following week on the checklist if anything new comes up that are valuable to batch in the maintenance category.

Making space for flexibility

Creating a sustainable relationship with goals for the week

I have tried different approaches for blocking out time for projects in my calendar from being ultra specific “write 100 words on research article in this hour” to being very vague “work on research article x”. The specific word count goal for a work block only works in very specific situations, and often not in everyday research work. So much of what is happening around writing a research article are pre-writing practices, that primarily going for the word count in one scheduled work block is often not viable. At least this is how it often is for me. Instead I focus on what to work on next, being specific while also leaving space for different practices in the next scheduled blocks. I block time in the calendar with for instance “Introduction for article X” in the coming week, exept for the first entry. Here I am specific about the next action I am going to take in relation to this work. So let’s say that Tuesday is the first day I am able to block time for working on article X. Instead of only stating that I need to work on the introduction of article x, I write out the next action: “read xx article for introduction work with article x”. Then everytime I look in my calendar before Tuesday arrives, I know exactly what to work on when this Tuesday block arrives. In the weekly planning I mark the rest of the scheduled work slots I potentially have for working on article x simply with ‘introduction work article x’, letting the work on Tuesday (the first working block on article x) decide what the next action on this article is going to be. Too many times I have tried deciding on next actions upfront for all the scheduled times of the week for a specific writing project. This almost always result in having to abandon these, while the work showed something else needed or I was not as fast as my more optimistic and impatient planning self. If I remember and I care, after the initial work on article x Tuesday I could change the naming of the next slot in the calendar into the specific next action. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. What I always do is write the next action into the project note or the document I am working in, so that I have a plan for what to work on next with this particular project.

Creating a backup slot for planned flexibility

Creating backup slots where nothing is actually planned has become essential for me, since I am almost always too optimistic in how much I can get done. Reading and writing and other deep work actions is usually difficult to precisely predict the timeline for. This makes a backup slot a crucial part to remember in planning the week ahead. It’s also really nice to see some white space in the calendar. I try to keep Fridays free for dealing with the overspill from other days of the week. Sometimes this even becomes Thursday afternoons, while Fridays might be taken for something specific. Sometimes I don’t succeed in creating a backup slot. Every week is different. But ideally keeping in mind to clear for a backup slot in the weekly planning is a way of getting every week to feel more doable and just a tiny bit lighter.

Always can be too rigid

Even though sometimes weekly planning seems like too time consuming (at least one hour, oftentimes more) it can still help remember that weeks are never created equal.
Different demands in work such as for instance teaching, writing or empirical work as well as different seasons in work projects and personal life, makes for the need of a fresh schedule for the upcoming week to create space for intellectual work and other commitments. In the PhD process, these seasons seem to change up constantly. This I have found means being careful about creating rigid ‘ALWAYS’ blocks. For instance deciding to write every day from 8-9 in the morning and making this a forever repeated appointment in your calendar. As Newport (2013) explains, making planning decisions of for instance always doing deep work between 7-8 am might lead to demotivation if not actually being able to reach that specific objective every day, every week consistently. Making agreements with yourself about deep work in your calendar and considering these blocks just as important as other obligations is powerful and worthwhile (Silvia, 2019). But there is a distinction between consistency of scheduling deep work and consistency in when this needs to happen. Sometimes a rigid schedule of when something needs to happen is called for. Sometimes it will only result in shallow planning that do not stick. It has taken me time to surrender to the fact that not everything important can or should have an ALWAYS space in my calendar for me to be consistent with it.

Focusing on making weekly planning (and review) both structured and flexible, both in relation to the actual planning ritual and in relation to how it is planned out for the coming week can create more space for realistic demands on ourselves and make the plans we make more sustainable and hopefully a lot more joyful.

To thoughtful planning and purposeful weeks,
Agnes

References

Allen, D. (2015). Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity (Revised edition). Penguin Books.

Gawande, A. (2022). The checklist manifesto: How to get things right (First Metropolitan Paperbacks Edition). Metropolitan Books.

Milkman, K. (2021). How to Change: The science of Getting from where you are to where you want to be. Portfolio/Penguin.

Newport, C. (2013, January 13). ‘Write Every Day’ is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects. Calnewport. https://calnewport.com/write-every-day-is-bad-advice-hacking-the-psychology-of-big-projects/

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world (1. edition). Grand Central.

Silvia, P. J. (2019). How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing (Second edition). American Psychological Association.

Vanderkam, L. (2022). Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. Portfolio.