I’ve been doing a weekly planning session for the last five or so years. It is one of the most helpful things I do to organize my life, keep myself physically healthy, and moving forward.

This process has become even more valuable to me since having a child, as I am now responsible for a lot more and time is more scarce.

In this post, I’ll describe what I do, why it’s useful, and how I do it.

What I do

I have a recurring task on in my todo list app Things 3 which looks like this:

Things 3 - Weekly Planning Sessions

The task shows up every Saturday automatically and contains everything I need to do to plan my week.

I have only a few rules I follow about this list:

  • Keep it as short as possible.
  • All of the tasks should be high value.

Because this process is a checklist, I simply:

  1. Open my todo list app on Saturday
  2. Pick one of the tasks and work it to completion
  3. Repeat step until all tasks are done

I really like keeping these items in an app because if I get interrupted (which happens a lot with a toddler!), I just come back it later and pick up where I left off.

Why you should do this

Planning your week in advance is the best part of this. It allows you to continuously fulfill on that which is important to me.

When you have a big, busy life, you will absolutely start to drop the ball on important stuff (e.g., working out, doctors appointments, hitting your Return to Office numbers, etc.) if you don’t do some sort of advanced scheduling of your time.

It is more difficult to find time to go to the gym when you have a child and both you and your spouse work. By planning my workouts for the week as part of this process, I have been very consistent in my workouts for many years now because it makes it so much easier to workout during the week.

I no longer have to ask “should I workout today?”. I already know what days I should workout and the type of workout I’m doing.

Tip: Keep a physical inbox

If you aren’t keeping a physical inbox, you should. Whenever you get something physical which you need to deal with (e.g., medical bills, paper manuals, small random crap you need to organize), just toss it in your inbox.

Then deal with it all once a week during your weekly review.

This removes much of the urgency around dealing with mail immediately as it comes in because you have a set time and place you will process it.

Tip: Look for schedule conflicts (especially if you’re a parent and share a car)

I also use this time to look at the upcoming week and see if my wife and I have any schedule conflicts

Questions I ask myself:

  • Did we double book ourselves?
  • Do we both need the car at the same time?
  • Does the schedule make sense?

This catches schedule conflicts before they are a crisis so we can fix them.