Moving from task to task each day leaves little room to be strategic about the big picture of our lives. Jam-packed days turn into hectic weeks. Busy months become a whirlwind year. If you're lucky, you happen to make incremental progress towards your goals.
You gain an objective view of the week: a weekly review forces you to practice intention by taking time to pause and reflect as you consider what you did versus what you planned to do.
You become proactive in planning: a weekly review isn’t only a retrospective, but a prospective too. It lets you run through the upcoming Monday to Friday proactively.
We recently caught up with productivity expert Laura Vanderkam to snag her tips for a better planner. From how to plan out your week to the types of tasks that belong on your calendar, you'll want to devour this organizational advice.
Acquiring organizational skills, as in getting better at planning, can take a while. While finding the appropriate agenda is essential, making a habit out of using it is just as important.
Personal productivity is not about all-round efficiency, and it is wrong to think about your input as that of a machine in a factory unit.
This is further complicated by our mistaken assumption that being in demand means that we are doing a splendid job.
We blur our all boundaries between our work and personal life and every minute of the day is to be kept busy as we rush to attend every meeting, cross out every task from the to-do list or to answer every email that we get.
Our brain starts to favour small tasks that give a false impression of productivity (woohoo! I just sent out fifty emails!) while we neglect the large, complex but meaningful tasks.