Habit: Review Weekly
Doing weekly reviews is a “ninja level” habit. It takes time to build up to this, but you are ready if you have nailed the key habit of daily planning. If you can implement this as a habit in your life, you will greatly increase your feeling of being in control.
Doing a weekly review means that you pick your head up out of the daily details and think about the upcoming week and maybe a week or two beyond. This can give you perspective on any changes to your priorities.
THIS WEEK FOLDER
DailyBalance encourages you to make a rough plan for your week using the built-in folders in the Master List. If you haven’t already, read about the folders in the habit Organize & Prioritize your Master List.
This “plan for the week” is done by keeping your This Week folders populated only with the tasks and projects that you expect to do some work on in the coming week. When you do this, you will have a very easy time planning each day since you’ve decided up front what is important for the week.
As the week goes, changes will happen. You’ll get some things done and some other new priorities will pop up. Some tasks might become less urgent and some projects might turn out to be bigger than expected. That’s fine. DailyBalance is flexible and can help you deal with those changes as they come.
But, at the start of the next week, your This Week folder might be a mess. You will want to take some time to manage those items. In addition, you should take a pass through the things in your Upcoming folder to decide if they are candidates for the new week.
Doing a review at the beginning of the week is the best practice to keep things running smoothly. Without doing this review, your This Week folder will grow disorganized and daily planning will be more difficult. You’ll start to lose that in control feeling.
Habit: Make a Plan & Block Out Everything Else
The concept of blocking out what you decided not to do is something that influences features all over DailyBalance.
This is a generally agreed upon best practice for maintaining focus. A good example is the advice not to check your email often during the day. The problem with opening it often is that emails may catch your idea and send you down a path you didn’t intend.
PLAN YOUR DAY, BLOCK OUT YOUR MASTER LIST
The idea with daily planning is that you make a plan by choosing the sub-set of tasks that you’ll work on today. These are added to your Day Planner. You shouldn’t have much need to go back into your Master List once your plan is set. Sticking to your Day Planner will keep you focused. Once you go back into your Master List, you may see things that will distract you and take you off course.
You made the decisions up front when you planned your day. So, block out our Master List until the next day and stay on track. Trust that you will go through your Master List and re-evaluate priorities the next day when you plan your day.
MASTER LIST FOLDERS
The built-in folders in the Master List are another example of how to employ this habit. If you do a weekly review in DailyBalance, you will populate your This Week folder with your goals for the week. Once that is done, there is seldom reason to be browsing through your Upcoming and Someday folders. These folders exist so that you can decide “not now” on tasks and projects and move them out of sight. Read about the Weekly Review habit to learn more.