Should I Revise My Weekly Plan if Things Change?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:06.200 | All right, we got a next question here from Daniel.

00:00:09.200 | Daniel asks, when your schedule gets thrown off considerably,

00:00:16.800 | such as losing a full day or two unexpectedly,

00:00:19.600 | do you revise your weekly plan throughout the week?

00:00:24.000 | Yes.

00:00:25.820 | Short answer, yes.

00:00:28.840 | When your plan gets messed up, fix it.

00:00:30.400 | Now, you're used to me saying this for daily time block planning.

00:00:34.440 | That's baked into my time block planning philosophy,

00:00:38.080 | is that you're building a plan for the hours of your day in advance.

00:00:42.320 | But it's just your best guess on what's gonna work.

00:00:45.680 | And then when it gets knocked off, when you get knocked off that schedule,

00:00:48.960 | you adjust the plan for the time that remains next time you have a chance.

00:00:52.240 | It's why if you use my time block planner,

00:00:56.000 | you will see there's multiple columns for your time block plan.

00:00:59.240 | Those columns are there for only one reason, updating your daily plan.

00:01:04.120 | Do the same thing with your weekly plan.

00:01:06.400 | Okay, it got knocked off.

00:01:08.720 | There was an emergency.

00:01:09.640 | All of Wednesday we had to deal with a client emergency.

00:01:11.760 | Okay, that's fine.

00:01:12.680 | That's part of your job, is like how do you deal with emergencies?

00:01:15.120 | You don't get gold stars for sticking to a plan.

00:01:18.200 | You get gold stars for actually doing your work well.

00:01:19.760 | So next time you get a chance, and it might not be until Thursday morning.

00:01:23.240 | Or maybe Thursday afternoon,

00:01:24.240 | because you have a lot of meetings Thursday morning.

00:01:26.480 | You sit down and say, okay, given the time I have less than a week,

00:01:29.120 | how do I wanna update my weekly plan?

00:01:30.480 | And you know what, if we're gonna start moving up the ladder of timescales here,

00:01:35.360 | do the same thing with your quarterly plan.

00:01:37.000 | Those get knocked off all the time.

00:01:40.800 | A giant project falls on your plate.

00:01:43.040 | Oh, this is what I'm doing this fall now.

00:01:46.080 | I had this more optional project I had planned to work on at the beginning

00:01:49.000 | of the fall.

00:01:49.520 | I should probably update this quarterly plan to reflect

00:01:51.760 | this is the new thing I'm doing.

00:01:54.120 | I think that's fine.

00:01:55.120 | Or you had a vision for a plan and it's not going well.

00:01:59.840 | Okay, update it.

00:02:01.840 | This happened to me, I was working on a book proposal.

00:02:06.000 | I've been talking about some of these books on the podcast,

00:02:08.080 | what I've been working on.

00:02:09.080 | I was working on a book proposal over the summer.

00:02:11.320 | I wanted to finish it in the summer before my schedule got busier for the fall.

00:02:16.600 | And that was my plan for that particular quarter.

00:02:19.160 | But as I got into it, I realized, you know,

00:02:20.920 | I'm not ready yet to pull together these threads.

00:02:23.200 | This is going to take more thinking and reading and grinding,

00:02:27.680 | cognitive grinding that I'm going to have time to finish in the summer.

00:02:30.560 | So I updated that plan.

00:02:31.560 | Okay, that's no longer what I'm trying to do by the end of the summer.

00:02:34.520 | Going to do that by the end of the fall.

00:02:36.000 | So at all scales, you make the best plan you can.

00:02:40.280 | When you get knocked off, you fix it when you next have some

00:02:44.120 | breathing room to do so.

00:02:45.120 | Remember, the goal here is always intention.

00:02:50.080 | Do I have some intention with how I'm tackling the time that's coming up next?

00:02:56.080 | It is the tackling of time with intention as compared to tackling time

00:03:00.840 | haphazardly or reactively that creates all the big gains when it comes to work.

00:03:07.640 | Not sticking to a plan, but always doing your best to have a plan for

00:03:15.600 | the time that remains.

00:03:16.320 | That's where the big wins happen.

00:03:17.400 | So Daniel, don't worry about fixing your weekly plan.

00:03:20.400 | Do it when you get a chance.

00:03:21.320 | And you know what? If your schedule blows up on Friday,

00:03:23.000 | then maybe you never get around to fixing it.

00:03:24.280 | That's fine.

00:03:24.800 | You're just doing your best to have intention.

00:03:27.160 | [MUSIC]

Should I Revise My Weekly Plan if Things Change?

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