We use recipes to cook food, GPS tools to map the routes to businesses, yet we don’t have a plan for our week! The most overused excuse is “If I had more time, I would….” I believe that if one wants some control over their 24 hour day, they must plan! Planning does not mean having to take the Franklin Covey course and hefting around a 5 inch binder or becoming tech savvy and purchasing an iPhone.

Planning your week does not need to be complicated. In fact, planning your week can be liberating! I like to call the time I use to plan my week a “Brain Dump”. I sit down on Sunday afternoons and write down every thought, idea, have to, want to, need to item that is flying around in my brain. This is similar to brainstorming. A free flow of information out of my head and onto paper. No time constraints set, no due dates established, just capturing the thoughts and actions first. I like to use categories as I do this exercise as a way of helping me keep my life balance in perspective. You can make up your own categories, I have listed mine just to give you food for thought:

1. Personal
2. Family
3. Friends
4. Speaking
5. Business
6. Marketing
7. Networking
8. Service

Once I have written down everything I can think of for each of these categories, I then take a look at my scheduled appointments and commitments I have already made for the upcoming week. I would then write down any other timed commitments that need to be made as a result of my brain dumping exercise. What’s left? Essentially a task or to-do list.

Again, looking at my calendar, I begin to assign a day to the remaining tasks. The date assignment depends on several things: proximity to a needed location (running an errand for example), availability of non-appointment times (in which to complete the task), and the level of urgency or importance. Taking these factors into consideration I begin to funnel the tasks into each day of the week. One day may be heavy with tasks because I have few scheduled appointments, another day may have less tasks because I am busy with appointments.

In the end, the important things to remember is to plan your week, every week at the same time each week. I plan on Sunday afternoons, but you may want to plan on Friday mornings. This exercise works with a Franklin planner, a Daytimer, Outlook, a PDA or an iPhone. How you choose to capture the data is up to you, the point is to capture it and plan it out weekly!