Steal My Weekly Planning Routine

I'm always curious about people's routines, especially their weekly planning routine. I don't know why, but I just kind of nerd out about other people's processes and the steps that they go through to make sure that they are getting everything that they want to done in any given week. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I'm going to share specifically my three-step weekly planning routine, which has gone through so many iterations over the past two or three years. And I think I finally landed on something that works and has been working well for me for the past probably six to eight months. So I feel confident sharing it with you. This is how I'm able to be very strategic and intentional about all the balls that I'm juggling every single week. But first, if you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button, especially if you love planning and productivity topics and you really like Notion, which is my ideal digital organization and life system. Let's be honest, my business organization system too. I literally cannot live without it. So I share a lot of different Notion tutorials and how to use it and maximize it on this channel. Now, before I had this weekly planning routine in place, I would probably spend every single Sunday night, one, maybe close to two hours planning my week. And that's not a joke. Like I didn't have things written down. I didn't have a system. I was trying to search in the back of my mind. What am I, what do I have to do this week? Wait, what's on my calendar? I had to-do lists, but I didn't have that like step-by-step instruction guide, if you will, to follow to make sure that I have all my test triggers in place so that I know exactly what I need to do for the week based on my different roles and responsibilities. So once I created this system and documented all of the steps, then I was able to stay on top of all the things that I have to do for my business, for my home, and the personal things that I want to get done as well. And I can plan my week in about 30 minutes or less. Now I do my weekly planning session inside Notion. You could use any tool for this. You could use CoverNote. You could use a Word document. You could write it down on a piece of paper. The key is to go through what you normally do to try to plan for your week, even if you don't have a great system down yet, and start documenting the things that you want to do during this time and the things that kind of pop up while you are trying to plan your week. And that's how you're going to find the right system that makes sure you hit all of those points so you're not forgetting anything that you have to do for the week. So let's go actually inside Notion and show you what mine looks like and the process that I take. I have my weekly planning page linked right at the top of my personal dashboard page so I can easily find it. And then in terms of when I do this routine, ideally I'd love to do it Friday afternoon and close the laptop for the weekend. And there we go. But because of my weird schedule, traveling full-time in an RV, sometimes we're traveling midweek and I have to work on Saturday because maybe I can't work earlier in the week. So it really depends, sometimes Friday, sometimes Saturday, sometimes Sunday, but it goes a lot smoother than it used to be. On this page, we have here on the left-hand side my week database filtered to just show me this current week. And under here, I have what my focuses are for this week. Sometimes it's just one item. This week, it's two because I'm focusing on a project for a online summit that I'm speaking at in a few months. And I also started a new workout program that I had to flesh out as a extra project. So both of those are linked there. That is what my weekly focus is, my big thing that I want to do. Then I have some formulas working behind the scenes for me that tell me how many completed workouts that I have done for the week, how many hours I have worked so far. I don't think I put in yesterday's hours yet, so that's why it's a little bit low. And then it pulls from my TV tracker database. This is purely, no other reason that I'm tracking this except that I just find it fun to know what TV shows I watch on specific days. So I've actually watched nothing this week except YouTube. So no TV shows, so nothing is there showing, but if there was, it would say you've watched this show. Then on the right-hand side is where my three-step process starts. So the first thing is to review this past week. And by doing that, I want to celebrate my completed tasks. So this is pulling in my master task list database, and it's showing me everything that I have accomplished in the past week. Just to prompt me to celebrate those items, sometimes I will get to the end of the week and think, I didn't do a lot. What did I do? Was I not really that productive? And then I come here into this little toggle, and I can see, oh yeah, a decent amount. And when I look through some of these things, that actually took me over the course of two to three days to finish some of those items. So it's mainly an encouragement piece for me, and I really like seeing that called out. The next toggle under my review section is to record how I felt about this week. So I have this filtered to, sometimes I don't get to it until a few days into the next week. So that's why I have a filter bringing up two different weeks here to make sure that I'm clicking on the right one. And then I can open up that week, and let me make this full page. I can go down here and fill out some journaling prompts about how I spent my time this week. Like what took my time and attention? Did it align with my overall goals and objectives? What am I most proud of? I can look through those completed tasks and write down some things that I was really happy that I got done. And then the third one is interesting. I found this prompt somewhere, I don't remember where, but what work did you do this week was draining and what was rejuvenating? And that helps me think through, like sometimes I have draining work that I just have to do, but is there a way that I can make it more fun? Like that's something that I've been really thinking about with Ali Abdaal's latest book, Feel Good Productivity. I read that and it just like the full essence of the book is to try to infuse fun into your work where you can so that it feels good. So that just helps me be a little bit more intentional in my approach to the work that maybe I didn't enjoy as much and then to do more work of what I actually did enjoy and what gave me energy and built me up. Let's go back to this page and to do these toggles, if you're not sure how to do them, you can just do a plus sign to add a new block, do the slash command and type in T-O-G and you'll bring up a toggle list where you can create a title and then put whatever you want under that toggle and I just like that it neatly hides that information away so that when I look at this page, I'm not overwhelmed with everything that there is to do and I can just go step by step through the process. This saves me so much time. So the next element of my weekly planning routine is to reset and that means clearing some inboxes. So closing browser tabs because I am notorious for having a ton of browser tabs open. So I go through those tabs and say like, is this an article that I wanna read? Well, then I need to add it to my learning library. Is this other tab requiring action for me? Is that why I have it open? Well, I need to add that to my master task list and then just grab the URL and pop it in to that page. So going through and trying to close out my browser tabs before the next week and then I process my quick capture page. We did a video on this, I don't know how long ago, but I'll link it below where you can create a page that's just full of buttons that you have as a widget on your phone. So you can easily, when you're out, up and about, you can click on that page and add a task, a personal task, a work task, a home task, whatever it is and it automatically goes into your master task database and you don't have to go searching for it in Notion. I'll just show you quickly what mine looks like here. So I have a task section, I have content ideas section. So if I'm out at the grocery store and I suddenly have a YouTube idea, I can click this button and type in my idea and it will automatically go into that database. So the only things that I have to process from this page that I don't take the time to organize right away are my tasks and anything I'm saving to my learning library that I have already read that article or I listened to a podcast or watched a YouTube video and I just need to organize those notes. So here under my task tab, I have create a content creation dashboard. So this is for my blog. I need to just kind of make that a little bit cleaner and better. So I just threw that up there because I had that idea. So now I can go ahead and assign a due date. So let's say I'm gonna do that this next week on a Monday and I'm also going to give it an energy level. I don't think it's gonna take that much time. And then once I give it a category, it will disappear from this section. So that's where I have this filtered to show me any tasks where it's not assigned to anyone else and it's not done and the category is empty. So once I put that category in there, it will disappear which is why I have it last on the list. So this is going to be an administrative task and there it goes. I've processed the task. Thankfully, I didn't have a lot to do on that section. Then we go over to my learning library. So something I was listening to a podcast this morning actually about YouTube and thumbnails and I use the SNPT podcast player and I do pay for it because I think it's really worth it. And it basically runs AI on your podcast and if you connect it to Notion and just hit the button, create SNPT, then it will automatically take the chunk of information that you were wanting and it's very smart about summarizing that information, giving you the transcript of what you want and putting it into Notion. So I have this automatically going into here and saying to process. So this is filtered to where the status is not to read, to watch, to listen or archive. It needs to be to process. So that means I go into here and sometimes the title is really long. So psychology of why people click thumbnails. I'm just gonna make that a little bit shorter and then let's see, a medium. That was going to be a podcast and a topic. This is going to be content creation topic. I think that's all I need. It automatically brings in the show notes link, episode link and here is where my SNPTs and episode notes are. I did not put this in here, like type it myself. It literally creates a link to that exact portion of the podcast and under here, these toggles, it has like a little summary and then the actual transcript of what I wanted to remember which I think is just the coolest thing and I got that idea from a viewer actually uses it and shared it with me and so I had to try it out and now I love it. So now that I've organized all of that, I can go in and say that's in the archive and it's back into my learning library which we will do, I promise, a video on my learning library in the future. I'm still tweaking it to how I like exactly want it to work but once I figure it out, I will let you know. So that is the clearing inbox portion of the reset portion of my weekly planning routine. Then I need to go through an audit task that need my attention. So I embedded my master task list database again. However, instead of filtering it to completed tasks within the past week, I am filtering it to any task where the status is not done and the timing says it needs attention. So this is a formula that I have used to say whether my task is due today, tomorrow, upcoming or needs attention which means it is overdue. So I need to go through all of these due dates and assign them a date in the next week or objectively look at these tasks and say, if I keep going overdue on this one, is it that important, do I really need to do it? So I just kind of look through and assess exactly whether I need to keep that task and just push it forward or delete it entirely. These ones I do need to push forward so I'm gonna quickly assign some new dates for them coming this week. Okay, and now that is done. So I am ready, no pun intended, to go on to the ready portion of my weekly planning routine. This is where the nitty gritty starts happening and where I spend the majority of my time. So the first thing I need to do is create a brand new week in my weeks database that's this card or gallery view over here. So I need to create it so it shows up for my next week. So under this toggle, I have a button that just adds a new week to that week database. However, sometimes I've created them in advance, especially if I'm working on a six week sprint and if you're not familiar with the six week sprint goal setting system, I'll leave a link for that video below so you can check it out. But I have a linked page to that database just to show me, do I already have a week created? And I do. So this upcoming next week is already in there. Yep, because the project that I'm currently working on, the 12 week express is gonna take 12 weeks. So I added like a few in there ahead of time. So I just need to add a cover for this. So this is going into May. And I don't know why I've just really loved like putting some spring flowers on my cover pages. So let's go look for one that I don't think I've used yet. Let's see, this one looks really pretty and like we're getting into May, getting into spring. So once that is done, and this is right here, this is a page of my database and I just have like, what's this week? Although maybe I need to fix that filter because it's bringing into all of the weeks that I have in case I need to reference a previous week. And this one, I think was just a different view to be able to easily add weeks. So let's go back to my weekly planning routine page and finish this out. We've created a brand new week. So that will pop into this section when we cross over into that new week. Then I want to update my recurring tasks. So the way Notion handles recurring tasks is a little different, not as intuitive as I would say like to do list or even click up or another like actual to-do list app. But since I do everything else in Notion anyway, it just makes sense to do my tasks in Notion. So what I do, and I have a video that I shared of recurring tasks, two different methods that you can try. I do the more manual method and that video explains why I do that. So I have a tab here for weekly and monthly. And again, this is my master task list database. However, it's filtered to I think where occurs is weekly and then filtered to where occurs is monthly on this tab. So as you can see, like I'm using the same database in multiple sections on this page, just filtered to show me a different view of it. There's so many things that I find myself saying, that's what I love about Notion and this is one of them. So I go through and I need to update the due dates for every single week. So I have an automation running behind the scenes and automations are paid. So you do have to have a paid account to be able to do this. But whenever something that is recurring weekly or monthly is completed, so I check it off, it automatically clears the due date for me. And that's the status back to now instead of like recurring, instead of the recurring status. So here I haven't updated my finances yet. Cleaning the RV, I'm doing those two things today, my weekly sync, which is just a update that I have for my team. That's gonna be happening on Monday. But my newsletter, I need to say is happening on next Wednesday. Meal planning, I probably won't get to again. We'll do that next Friday, sometimes we do it Friday or Saturday. And then schedule my newsletter, that will be on Friday as well. And now that column is completely filled with all the due dates. Now I go over to the monthly section and I can see, okay, what, this is where the completed column comes into play for me. What have I not done in a while in regards to like a cleaning task? So washing our big back window in the RV happened on, what is this, March 10th, and it is almost May and it's getting a little crummy. So I'm gonna put in, let's do that actually tomorrow. Get that over with. It's getting near the end of the month, so I need to brainstorm next month's content. So let's actually move that to Monday. And the microwave could also probably use another cleaning. Let's do that tomorrow as well. So you can kind of see like how that is working in terms of recurring tasks. If you didn't quite get it, then go watch that recurring task video and I go into a lot more detail about how to create something like this for yourself. So now my recurring tasks are completely updated. They're gonna show on my next week. Now I can go ahead and choose my workout. So I'm embedding a different database here, my workout database. I have it as a list view and I am organizing it or grouping it by the type of muscle group that it does. Now, this is a little bit different for me this week because I did start that 12 Week Express program through Heather Robertson. So I'm not gonna be like going through these and checking to add it to my week. But if I did, we'll do this actually just for kicks. Actually, I did put a lot of the 12 Week Express workouts in here. I haven't finished it completely. So day five, I haven't gotten to yet. So let's click add to week and I'll show you what happens when we go back to my personal dashboard. We'll open that in a new tab. And under here, under my workout section, you can see day five is added. So this is where it adds those workouts for me automatically because of the filters that I have set up. And then when I click completed, then it will disappear from this section and add it to the workout section of my day, of my daily journal. Those are the workouts that I'm gonna be doing this week. And then it's time to add new tasks. So this is where I have to take a little bit of time to figure out what do I wanna do on this next week. Under this toggle, I have three buttons of the three types of tasks that I do, business tasks, personal tasks, and personal is like more home and personal tasks mixed together. And then open roading tasks is the travel brand that I run with my husband, Joseph. I also have some task triggers that I work through here on the side. So calendar events, is there anything coming up? Well, Mother's Day is coming up, I know. So I need to figure out some gift or card that I'm going to send my mother. So I would add that to my list. Actually, let's just do that right now since I have to do that. So add a personal task, and I'm going to say, brainstorm gift idea for Mother's Day. And I'm going to add a due date. And let's brainstorm that on, we'll do that on Tuesday. And then this is actually gonna be a high priority because it's coming up. And the energy, I don't think it'll take that much energy. So that'll be a low energy tag for that. And then it will show up on my week down here on the next week. So I like looking at, when I'm planning my week in particular, my master task list in a calendar view. So let me go actually show you how I did this. Three dots on the right hand side. And then I go into layout calendar, show calendar by week instead of month because I just need to see the weekly view. And then I can easily drag and drop items, like I kept adding things to Monday and look at Monday. It's like packed, that is a no go. So when we get down to this section, I'm gonna have to drag and drop and make sure that my week is fairly balanced. But that's why I like seeing that view down there. So then I go down to the next task trigger, sprints and projects. Okay, so I'm working on the 12 week express workout program. I've already like added those to my workout section for the week, the online summit that I'm speaking at. I do know, so when I open up this project page, this is my project and sprint database. I can go down to the tasks here and say, I still need to outline an email marketing campaign for this. I've done my presentation, but I still need to like figure out how I'm going to promote it. So let's actually move that from Monday to, we'll do that on Wednesday. That sounds good. And I'm not gonna start writing the sales emails yet. So we'll just focus on that for that week. So that's my sprint and project task trigger. Anything else for my Kalenbrook brand, which is this brand, YouTube, my newsletter, my Notion community, nerdy about Notion community, my blog and the brain book library that I also run, which is a membership site for planning printables. I need to check my content calendar to make sure that there's nothing coming up. So I'm going to check my content calendar down here. I have this tab section here that's gonna show me, okay, what do I have coming up that I still need to work on? What is coming up next month? And then I start adding tasks related to those content pieces to my task list for this next week. So I'm gonna do that real quick. All right, so I did that for my brand. I did it for the travel brand. Now I need to like think about, are there any other little administrative tasks that I'm thinking about that I might be forgetting that need to be done this week? What personal tasks do I wanna tackle? What RV projects do I want to tackle this week? And then I have some reminders here in this call-out box of make sure you add no more than one to two high-energy tasks a day because before I was tracking my energy levels, I was adding what I didn't realize was high-energy tasks to like my day and a lot of them. And then when I started adding that little tag of energy levels, so this little property here where it's like high, medium, or low energy, then I was able to properly assess like how much energy that would take from me to do that task and now I don't do any more than two, one to two a day because I just don't have enough brain power to do like three or four of them. If you wanna learn more about energy management and how it's like so much more beneficial to track that than time management, then I have a video on that as well that I think you might be interested in. And then the other like reminder I have for myself is add no more than five tasks a day. So we need to go down here and like lighten up Monday's load a little bit to anything I can automate or delegate to someone. So my next step is to kind of go through here and just rearrange some pieces. I have two high-energy tasks on Thursday. Friday I'm starting to feel a little like, I'm like checking out so I don't really wanna do high-energy tasks on Friday, but we do need to move this over. So I'm thinking we'll move that one over here and Monday's potato day. So all those fit in with like my potato day type tasks. I have a video on that as well. I feel like I'm, I don't mean to like be promoting all these videos for you to go watch, but they do add more context to everything that I'm bringing together here on my weekly planning routine. And what I also try to do is I try to have, you can see this like diagonal where it's going through the week and lightening up a little bit. I like to leave a lighter load in the remaining part of the week, like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, just because I know that if I don't get to things, I'm gonna have to migrate it over to the next day. And if that day is piled full already, then it doesn't leave a lot of room to be able to complete those items. So that's where I just would rather front load Monday and Tuesday to make room for that. And that is all part of like planning realistically instead of idealistically, knowing like how your week is going to go and planning for it properly. So I think that is pretty much it. I feel really good about that this week. I know things are gonna get shifted as I don't do them maybe on a specific day. And so I can close up that toggle. And then my final steps for the weekly planning routine are to go and time block those tasks in Morgan Calendar. Now I don't time block every single task. I mainly time block the major ones. So let me go in, I just wanna see like four days of this. You can see I'm nearing the end of the video block right now but so upcoming, let's just refresh this. So Morgan connects or integrates with Notion. And I think my next video is gonna be all about this because I have officially switched from Google Calendar to Morgan and I absolutely love it. Okay, so now it has connected all of my changes and I'm just gonna turn on the due date that I know when each of these are happening. So on Monday, let's see, Monday I was gonna create that dashboard, that's the major thing I need to do. So I think that will take me like an hour max. I try to schedule a little bit more time than I think it will just to be realistic. I want to update a blog post and that's pretty good. And then the afternoon I'm just gonna leave, I'm not gonna time block that out, I'm just gonna leave it for some little tasks that kind of pop up throughout the day. Tuesday is going to be really focused on, let's see, creating that content for open roading, that's gonna take a while, let's do two hours for that. And then writing the newsletter in the afternoon. So I'm also time blocking things that are gonna take me a little bit more time. So I will go through and time block those tasks based on the specific days for the week and I can easily change them, move them around and that's why I really love time blocking in a digital format. And then when I check them off here on Morgan, it will check them off in Notion, which I think is really cool. So that's kind of one of my final steps. And then I also create a weekly sync in my meeting database. So this is specifically for my business where I track call meetings that I have calls with certain people and my weekly syncs are in here and this is basically just going over some of the things that are happening in my business that people need to be aware of. Now, I do not have this massive team. I have, my husband does some editing for me and two girls do a few different things for me. But I find that taking this like organized approach and having us all on the same page at the beginning of the week is really helpful no matter like how big or small your team is. So that's something that I try to get into the habit to do every single week. The one thing that I didn't talk about was this up next tab. So this is pulling in items from my master task list that are high priority and something that I want to complete eventually, sooner rather than later. They're not like some day tasks that I maybe think I wanna do. These are tasks that I definitely wanna do. So if I have room on my week, which it actually looks like, I think Thursday's pretty open. I don't think that much stuff will migrate over to Thursday. So I could go through here and pick something from this list that I could then add to that day. So I have to be very realistic with this just because generally I don't ever complete everything on my task list for the week. Like it's very rare. And I don't think we should like expect ourselves or hold ourselves to that high standard as long as we are looking through and saying we are getting the most important things done. That's what counts. This is how we want our week to go, of course. But if it doesn't go that way, we have to give that grace to ourselves and be willing to pivot and adjust and be okay with it. So it's very rare that I go into that master task list section and add something, but it's there just in case it really is a light week and I have time to add it. So that is my weekly planning routine in a nutshell. It's review, reset, and ready. And then looking at my week. And then when I pull up my Notion dashboard on Monday, I can come up here and I can see exactly what I have to do for today and check them off when those are complete. So I hope this was helpful for you to just be able to see how this all works. I have gone back and forth as to whether I want to offer a free template for this. It's only because it's so personalized and customized, kind of like my personal dashboard. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the basic structure that you can download, and I will put a link in the description below. And then I'm going to put placeholders for the types of databases that you want and how you want them to be filtered. Because I don't want to just give you all these databases that are above and beyond and extra as to what maybe you already have. I hope you already have a Master Task List database. If you don't, I will give you a link to that free download below as well. But that's going to show you how to embed that database in that section and what to filter it to. And then you can feel free to customize and change this weekly planning page according to how you want to see it. So I hope that will be helpful for you and at least get you started so you don't feel like you have to open up a page in Notion and start completely from scratch. If you have any specific questions about what you saw in this setup or need me to explain something a little bit in more detail, let me know in the comments below. I can't wait to connect with you there, and I will see you in the next video.