4 quick steps towards weekly calm and joy

Goodbye, Sunday scaries!

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One of the beautiful gifts of my work is interviewing people for my Edit Your Life podcast; I always glean insights and tactical wisdom through these conversations. In April, I chatted with the wonderful Sarah Hart-Unger for an episode that went live last week: Creating Tactical + Restorative Routines. (And for more from Sarah, check out her website The SHU Box.)

Sarah said two things about routines that struck me, and sent me into action mode. First, she talked about how regular planning touchpoints are key to creating routines:

“I think it's so important to solidify your routines around planning. Have a designated time each week when you think through your next week, as well as time every single day to think through the day ahead.”

Second, she talked about the beauty of visioning what an ideal week could look like:

“Cultivate a time awareness of what your current routines look like so that you can then make tweaks. My favorite exercises are an ideal-week exercise or a time audit. For an ideal-week exercise, fill out a fake weekly planner with everything you have to do during the week and include space for where ideally you'd want your life routines to be, whether that's morning, lunchtime, or bedtime routines. Writing these things out can be incredibly helpful.”

Not long after we recorded I sat down to figure out how to incorporate planning touchpoints because right now, I have the gift of being in a very abundant place with my consulting work—with many different moving pieces and priorities any given week—and I want to retain hold of the positive, grounded habits I have developed as I have explored radical rest and a new way of being over the past 12 months. On a day-to-day basis I have had moments of feeling like I’m struggling to hold all the pieces—that I am so focused on the doing and need some planning to help me stay grounded and see the bigger picture, even if it’s just a one-week advanced runway.

Here is what I implemented. The great news is that none of this is difficult and it resulted in an immediate reorientation towards calm and joy!

1. Set up planning reminders

My first quick step was to set up three recurring reminders to plan: every Friday at the weekly (1) and weekend (2) levels, then every morning (3) for a daily review. You can do this in whatever your preferred system is, but I am an avid Todoist user, which is a lifesaver given the number of different projects I’m working on, the volume of tasks, and the recurring nature of many tasks. (Below is an embedded player for a short episode on how I use Todoist if you want to learn more.)

2. Do a next week look-ahead

Every Friday I take a few minutes to review top priorities for the upcoming week. I also populate these lists as things come to mind during the week. After toying with a few configurations in Todoist, I decided to set up a project called “📅 THIS WEEK'S PRIORITIES 📅” and under it, nest the upcoming weeks, each as a recurring item for the full week. And then I add subtasks inside each week. Here’s a screenshot I took this past Friday morning, at which point I had completed 13 of 15 weekly priorities (and the last two priorities were fun!).

You can see here that I set up five week’s worth at once (with emojis for thematic flair LOL). The subtasks include family priorities, client or other professional priorities, podcast production flags, social engagements, and personal/adulting needs. Since on any given day I have a lot of moving pieces, this has been so helpful to give me the big picture view of what I need to prioritize on a given week—and what can wait until a forthcoming week.

This approach also has been helpful in two ways. First, it reality checks me if I have zero social contact planned on a given week, in which case I try to rectify that! And second, if I finish up my day’s tasks early or find myself with an unexpected pocket of time between meetings, I look to this weekly list to see if there is something on the list I can move along.

Goodbye, Sunday scaries!

3. Plan for a delightful weekend

I didn’t do the ideal-week exercise Sarah mentioned, but her comment made me reorient to the importance of being explicit about crafting the life you wish to live, filled with joyful things. Every Friday, part of my planning involves pegging some delightful actions to my “🤟 WEEKEND DELIGHTS 🤟” list so I can be intentional about building in good things, not just tackling household minutia!

4. Do a quick scan each weekday morning

I already had a “🦄 TODAY'S PRIORITIES 🦄” list in Todoist, but that list started to get bloated with things that weren’t actually crucial to do that day. I cleaned up that list, and now I just take 5 minutes every morning to run through my calendar and daily to-do list (which usually has around 25-30 things on it during the weekdays) and move the items that absolutely must get done that day to the Today’s Priorities list. The goal is to just have perhaps 5-8 items on this list so it’s not overwhelming. And one of those items on weekdays is my 30 minute walk/maybe run, which has been huge for my wellbeing.

This has been such a great planning practice to implement! The planning itself doesn’t take much time, I feel less scattered, and—perhaps most crucial—it has helped me experience moments of delight when I realize something great is coming up the following week, and prioritize delight and joy if a week is missing it. Thank you, Sarah, for showing me the way!