Ahhhh, the weekend is near.

Most 9-5 folks get pretty excited to break away from the daily work grind, am I right?

Two weeks back, I wrote to you to share the top 5 reasons to procrastinate. I included a nifty, hand-forged mind map for you.

Many fellow Dojo Members replied back and shared their insights around procrastination. Two themes emerged along with the question for today:

Is it more important to be inspired or be productive?

DOOR #1: GET INSPIRED

DOOR #2: BE PRODUCTIVE

CHOOSE ONE THIS WEEKEND:

Please pick one door to open today. Then pick a few resources to skim through. When you land on the one that speaks to you, commit to reading/watching the resource this weekend.

Then think about how the principle or technique can be tested out next week for you.

Let me know in the comments below which resource you landed on. I am always curious to know what's working for you.

Domo Arigato,
Shane

P.S. If inspiration or productivity is not what you need right now to do better, then what would help you the most?

Reply back with your answer (even if it's brief). I will get back to you with a resource I might have to help you along.

I was out walking with my German Shepherd ("Samurai Claire") this week during a -20C or -4F sunny morning. Whether you are in Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus means freezing cold.

Agree?

I instantly thought of all the extra time it takes to gear up and get ready for a winter walk. The head gear, layers, jacket, big boots, and warm gloves.

It is kind of like what happens when we have major things to accomplish but can't seem to get going very fast.

I was talking with some friends this week and I asked, "If you could only have one, do you prefer snow or cold weather?"

Some said snowfall is harsh to deal with because it slows everything down and is tough to drive in. Others said they can handle the cold and prefer dry roads to drive on.

Let me ask you this:

Has your week felt very busy or slow moving?

Yes you can build momentum this week using one of these options.

Domo Arigato,
Shane

P.S. Need a little mind mapping inspiration? You can see my hand made procrastination mind map here.


P.P.S. Let me know in the comments below if you decide to go for a new journal or 5 year memory book. It will be totally worth it.

Last week's email created interesting conversations about the top 5 reasons why we procrastinate.

Would you believe that the year is about 19% complete as of when you read this?

Some of our members said that they were struggling to think of things that they have accomplished so far. I disagreed with a few folks in that you have accomplished, but you might not remember it all.

Let that sink in for a moment...

You accomplish a lot of things, but many people are not great at noting and celebrating all that you do. The reasons for this could fill a few books.

Let me share with you a simple practice that can help you preserve your memories and keep you motivated to keep on accomplishing many things.

It all started as an idea.

But it didn't happen until last October when I visited my favourite book shop on Vancouver Island.

I had been toying with the idea of keeping a 5 year memory book for some time. Then as I walked into the book shop, there was exactly the version that I had seen on a few shopping sites.

At a $27 sticker price, I bought it without question (see photos below).

I didn't start it until the beginning of February. See where the procrastination idea came from last week?

Some reasons that we don't always start something as massive as a 5 year memory book can be:

As you can see from the photo above, there isn't a ton of space to write a story, just a few highlights.

I am sharing this with you to help you see how such a simple tool can be a springboard to helping you create greater habits, consistency and stoke your creativity that can serve you in other areas of your life.

Reply back with any questions you have that I may be able to help with. Or, let me know if you have a similar habit/tool that you use.

Domo Arigato,
Shane

P.S. If you started a 5 year memory book practice like this, who would you inspire along the way?

I hope you are doing well and have something interesting and fun lined up for the weekend. Remember that you get to define fun and then take the necessary steps to go have the fun that makes sense to you.

It is minus 28 degrees Celsius today here. These cold days help me turn inside and sit is a warm room with a few pens, journal and some great books. I think that is one type of fun.

I was pondering where we are at in the year so far...

...thinking about conversations I have had with different people who for one reason or another felt guilty about not "getting into gear" or "crushing it", or whatever aphorism you come up with.

The reality is that there are five really common, or deadly reasons that cause procrastination at this time of year.

Please see the analog mind map below. In a digital first world, "analog" can be a fancy word for "hand forged".

In case you can't see the reasons to procrastinate mind map, here are the top five reasons you may be wrestling with some procrastination this week:

Here's how you can win big in the week to come:

P.S. Are you a fan of the hand-forged mind map?

Let me know your preference with a quick reply in the comment section below so that I can get a consensus from you and the other Dojo Members.

If you and I were to sit down at this mid-year review point and have a coffee/tea together, I would certainly ask you a few of these questions. Why?

Questions are very powerful conversation starters. The key is to pair the right question with the right context and season that your conversation partner is at. I know at least three of these questions will help springboard you up to a greater level in the next six months. 

You have made it through the first six months of the year. Congratulations.

Now, let's see where you want to go in the remaining six months of this year. This is an incredible time to launch something new, grow something more or turn a new page and forge ahead in a different direction. Which one of those seems most appealing? (This question doesn't count yet)

10 Questions To Boost This Year's Results

Bonus #11: Why do you want this?

Your Turn:

Take some time this week to put pen to paper and answer these helpful mid-year review questions. While you and I might not be able to meet in person and have time to discuss your answers, we can discuss them below in the comments. 

I will review and personally answer your comments, questions and insights below.

I want you to make the remaining half of this year even better than the first half turned out.

Domo Arigato.

Episode Show Notes: Who Should Be Part of Your Weekly Planning?

Episode Show Notes: Return on Your Time

Getting a bigger return on your time.

I want you to just think for a minute to step back, step back for a minute and review your calendar for the last couple of weeks. We want to encourage you to look at where are the gaps in your calendar when you look back in the week? What I do is time blocking. I put in all the different things and in my week that I need to do.

But one of the secrets is, I actually go back and I edit those time blocks after the events. If I said something was going to take an hour and it actually took 90 minutes, I actually extend that time block in my calendar. I have a historical record of going through my calendar and looking where I won and where maybe I had some cracks in the week or where some emergencies happened or some opportunities came up that I didn't plan for.

Look for those gaps in your week and then ask yourself, what were you doing in those gaps?

What created the gaps?

That's how you can actually create a better return on your time.

Are you at the top of the mountain?

Have you been on top of your game this week?

How are things flowing effortlessly and going really great for you?

Then it's time to accelerate. We've reached the acceleration question which is, where can you amplify or invest some time this week into building greater progress?

How can you just stop and pause today and say for the next two to three days this week, where can I just add a little extra in?

Where can I do another couple of inches worth of productivity?

How can you gain a little bit more progress?

Where can you leverage your time, talent and energy of your team or the people that you work with?

That's how you can amplify your progress this week.

Has this week not gone as planned so far?

Maybe you're in a valley.

Have you hit a low point?

Maybe you've had some discouraging news.

Have you felt defeated by the enormity of the project that you're working on?

That's okay.

Now is the time to push over your domino of productivity to get a better return on your time.

We want you to push over that next domino of productivity.

You should ask this question to yourself every day for the next two to three days.

What three things can you do tomorrow morning?

These are three things that you're going to do tomorrow morning before you check your email. Three things before you communicate with another human being on the face of this planet.

What three things can you get done?

Episode Show Notes: You Need These Elements To Be Productive

You want a better weekly plan?

That's why you're here listening to a show called This Week's Plan, right.

What do you include in your weekly plan?

What goes into your weekly plan?

What are the elements that you need to be productive this upcoming week?

There are a few key core elements that goes into a powerful weekly plan and I look forward to sharing that with you in today's episode. The one thing that I want to share with you is that you can get this all done in under an hour so that it doesn't exhaust you. The process of planning out your week shouldn't exhaust you.

Welcome to This Week's Plan, where we help you transform possibility into reality. We help you accomplish the right things each week so you can enjoy a more balanced life, both personally and professionally. Join in as we share real world battle tested strategies and techniques to help you center your focus, accelerate your results and improve your momentum to avoid being overwhelmed. This isn't just about making it through the week, it's about fitting in all the right things. Here's the host of This Week's Plan Shane Fielder.

Thank you for joining us in today's episode. I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Samurai Innovation. The eight no fail planning methods course. This is a course that's normally for sale, but it's being offered to you today with a complimentary pass.

Yes, Samurai Innovation is going to purchase the course for you. All you need to do is go to no fail plans. Dotcom. You will get access to this awesome course. There is one of the eight no fail plans that is going to work for you and can be an uplifter and can be the next thing that up levels your productivity and your efficiency and you'll have more fun in the process. Go check that out and we'll dive into today's episode.

Today's episode we're talking about how do we build a weekly plan.

What are the elements to an effective and productive weekly plan?

We really want to focus on these elements, and I want to ensure that while it may seem like there's a lot of the elements, this can actually be put together in a skinny process of 15, 20 minutes, or you can lengthen it out to 45 to 90 minutes.

It all depends on you, depends on your preferences, depends on your time availability. Are you a methodical person and you really like the finer details or are you a high level person? You just want some big rocks in the bucket and you really want to know where you're going to go. So my recommendation as we get into it today is to grab a pen and paper and write down these elements, because I guarantee you one or two of them may be a little foggy or they might not be existent in your current plan, you may never have done them.

Second is to pick a time goal.

So start with a thirty minute 45 or 60 or 90 minute time goal that you're going to work on putting in your calendar. And that's going to be the time you're going to follow this process. You're going to get great results in building out a strong, impenetrable weekly plan that will work for you.

What are the elements to be productive, or the ingredients that go into a successful weekly plan?

Let's kick it off with number one, which is to celebrate.

I've been saying for years, “celebrate, don't denigrate.”

There's too much denigration. There's too much putting yourself down. There's too much complaining about other people. There's so much of that toxicity that is in our society and has been for a long time. It's not a new thing, but it has been in our society for a long time. The denigration of you and your efforts really isn't going to get you any further.

What is the value of beating yourself up for being human?

We all have a high level of ambition. You're here right now with me at This Week's Plan because you are a person of quality. You are a person that has high levels of ambition and you want to go places and you want to do things. OK, now that we've cleared that out of the way, let's get into the human experience of what happens when your ambition is greater than your capability.

What happens when your ambition is greater than the time available?

What happens when your ambition is interrupted by constraints, distractions and diversions?

What happens when your ambition gets eroded by just low energy discouragement, defeat, feeling delayed on things?

These are all parts of the emotional and mental and physical and spiritual human existence that we all work and live through. I'm not going to allow you to create an excuse for intentional slacking off. That's not part of This Week's Plan or Samurai Innovation or any of the people that I work with.

I don't think that's you. It's probably for some people that you know in your world, but it's not you. We want to make sure we are celebrating momentum. We're celebrating progress.

I've said before that incremental progress done imperfectly over time always yields monumental results. The two key components are incremental progress over time, consistency over time, and doing it imperfectly. All of those things count now when you don't give yourself enough credit for the great things that you've accomplished, you don't you don't really see the great things.

You don't see the momentum that's been generated and everything starts small to become big. The key to this is what things did you do in the last week that you can celebrate?

Did you start a new project?

Did you get to the next milestone of a project?

Did you pick up the next piece and move the project forward in some incremental fashion?

Did you collaborate with a few people that need to be on the project and you're collaborating?

Did you just identify three things that you had to get done last week and you actually got those three things done?

Might have been gritty and ugly. Maybe it wasn't phenomenal. It doesn't matter. We want to celebrate all the touch points of progress that you had a hand in last week.

Celebration is often the number one missing thing that I go to work on with my clients, because a lot of people like you and I are so forward focused. We get something done and we don't ever take the time to stop and say, "Wow, that was really great."

Actually, that's going to open a door. That's really great. I got a sales proposal off. That's really great. I created a template, a standard operating procedure that's going to streamline my business and make it more productive and efficient. These are all assets that you're building. These are all great things that you can celebrate that you did and you always celebrate the input, never celebrate the output. Let me say that again.

Always celebrate the inputs or the things that you can control. Celebrate the things you can put into the equation.

You can celebrate the output.

But I think it's more powerful when you start celebrating the inputs because guess what happens?

You're focusing on the things that you can control.

You're focusing on the things that you can move the needle forward on. And then what happens, happens. I mean, there's a hundred different reasons why things happen for the positive. There's a hundred different reasons why things can happen or go sideways for the negative.

The next element for your weekly review, is the review.

We want to look back at the last week.

Now, I'm going to encourage you to start two ways.

Start number one at a high level. Start off just looking at the overall week from a total week perspective, what were the results that you accomplished?

What were specific outcomes?

How did you feel about the week?

Rate it on a 10 scale, so one would be abysmal, terrible, horrible. You wish you stayed in bed all week. Ten is you're on top of the world and you should be on every news channel and get interviewed because you've nailed the secrets to success and you're just on fire.

In between that one to ten, how was your last week?

How do you feel about that?

This should be a fairly easy thing that you can just click your fingers and say, oh, it was a seven or a six or last week was horrible at a three. I  got some bad news and things didn't go my way. Great.

Now we go for the plus one, which is if you had a let's say you had a five.

What would it have taken to get you to a six?

What would have been those two or three things that you could have done differently, better or more of or just done at all to get you to that six or get to the eight or the nine?

That right there, my friend, is information and its data. With that information and data, we can measure it. We can think about it, analyze it, and we can create a plan to include it in your go forward plan.

The second part that you need to think about is breaking down each day, do the review of each day.

And what I want you to be doing is looking in your calendar and what your calendar should be showing you is where did you perform?

Did you have two or three hours of time blocked into your calendar for deep work?

You actually spent the time and the outcome was you realized three hours wasn't enough. I'm only halfway through. Now you know that you maybe need another three or four hours. Great.

You can plan that for the next week. You also can realize. that two to three hours was ample. But I realized that I missed the mark on something. I need an extra half an hour. I need to collaborate with somebody or I need to delegate it to somebody to move something forward. Or maybe you realize that you didn't put enough of something in there.

Maybe you didn't put enough relaxation and recreation time in there. If you were burning the candle at both ends a few days last week because there is a client driven deadline, you had something to do, an emergency happened. I know that all too well. I live the same human experience as you.

Go through day by day and ask what happened?

Did somebody phone you and you got derailed?

Did you turn on the news channel and two hours later you got sucked into what was happening of the news of the day?

It's all possible, but it's all learning.

That takes us to the third category, which is the learning phase.

Where were those pluses and minuses for last week?

Where did you experience a plus?

Where did you have an aha moment?

Were you on top of the mountain?

Or were you in the valley?

What tripped you up?

What made you stumble?

How did you fall?

Where did you get a skinned knee?

What experience took longer than you wanted?

What cost more time and energy?

How did somebody fail you?

How did somebody succeed for you.?

Who's the winners on your team?

Who's the people that are struggling right now?

These are all learning questions that we want to ask. At the end of the day, where did you succeed and where did you fall short?

Write that down point or bullet point form.

It doesn't have to be a long document. Just write that down.

The next point is the decision phase.

We always want to decide on the right things. Typically, at this point, people say, yeah, so it's all about prioritization and tell me what the right way to prioritize is. Shane, do you use the one, two, three method, the ABC method, or use the categorization method? I just stop people. Just get quiet for a minute and ask yourself.

At the end of this upcoming week, what are five right things that you want to accomplish?

What are five things that if you accomplish them, your world would be right, work would be great, home would be awesome, and you would feel very balanced?

You want to feel very much in control and in harmony with your environment. Things would be right. Let's start there. What are those right things? Because This Week's Plan is all about fitting in the right things.

Now, we can give priority to the right things.

How much time and energy does those right things require?

Who has to be involved in helping you make those right things happen?

Where do those right things need to happen?

Is it online digitally from the comfort of your laptop?

Does it have to be you being at an office somewhere?

Does it have to be you jumping in an airplane and travelling to a client location?

How and where do all those things have to happen?

You can't do everything, but you can always do the right things. We always have enough time for the right things. By default, a lot of people will fit in things into their calendars. When we look back in this reviewing, learning and decision phase, we can admit to watching twelve hours of TV. Was it productive TV?

Did it help move you forward?

The reality is somebody will say that they needed to escape because they were really stressed out or tired.

I didn't have the mental energy. OK, well those are all the learning things that we bring in from the learning phase and say, well, how do we create the right space in place for you to be productive?

How do we make sure you have a positive, energetic, satisfied week going forward?

It's a matter of choices and boundaries.

 It's really what it comes down to. Decide today what choices you want to make for this next week and then decide what are the boundaries that you need to install to protect those things.

You've just got rid of all the ABC lists and Microsoft task list and trying to just bring it into this focus for now and you already will know what are those right things for you to accomplish next week?

The next phase is writing it down, recording an action plan and setting some goals.

Clocks and calendars is the last element you need to be productive.

You live your life with clocks and calendars. We're all given twenty four hours in a day. We all have seven days a week. Twenty four hours goes to a clock, seven days a week goes on a calendar. It's very simple.

That's the constraints. Now you get to go back to the decision phase we just talked about and choose.

How are you going to spend that 24 hours?

What is your optimal ideal day?

Would you like to get six or eight hours of sleep?

I just recently bought a unique alarm clock that a client recommended to me. It's one of those clocks that has a wake up light. It's a wake up light alarm clock.

Basically, what it does is that it starts bringing light into the room 20 or 40 or 60 minutes before your alarm goes off and it mimics creating a sunrise. You have a feeling of a natural amount of light coming into your room in a natural progression. And then that there's a lot of science behind the fact that that helps wake you up. Where I live here in Calgary, Canada, it's dark season right now.

We have a lot of darkness. Currently, we have about 15 hours a day roughly of dark time.

But here's what I learned.

What's interesting is it has a going to sleep function that mimics a sunset. It plays campfire nature sounds. The light is like an orange amber level of a campfire. The clock claims it puts you to sleep with a 10 minute timer.

And I've been shocked in the last couple of weeks of using it, how many times I'm not asleep within ten minutes. I realized, yes, it actually takes 10 to 20 minutes to go to sleep. I realize, if I want six or seven hours of quality sleep, I actually have to add on that going to sleep phase. I also have to add on the waking up phase and guess what?

It's made my going to sleep and my getting up time more productive because I'm more realistic of what I need. I'm getting a better quality of sleep and now I have more energy in the middle of the day when it is really daylight hours. I'm actually doing work tasks and meeting with people and creating great things like This Week's Plan podcast.

There's all sorts of ways that a clock and a calendar can really help us. And there's all sorts of tools out there.

What you need is a place and a space that your plan can consistently live at.

I grew up in the Franklin Covey system and it was a great system and there's a lot of amazing things to that system. If that's your system, great.

There's a hundred different paper planners out there. Go get one of those. If you're in the digital calendar, whether using Outlook or Gmail or a hundred other things, just dedicate yourself to that and live by that.

I make sure that when I'm going through my day and I'm looking and saying it's one o'clock on the clock, but what's on the calendar at one o'clock. Aha. The research piece or I have a meeting.

I can tell you three times this last week, if I didn't do that, I would have been tripped up.

Three times this last week. I had some interruptions, we had some personal family things that were going on and I had to come back to that.

What time is it?

What's happening on the calendar?

What time is it?

What's happening on the calendar?

That saved me three times in this last week. I was then able to move some stuff around. I was able to keep moving momentum forward and creating greater levels of progress to what I need to accomplish. And I want the same thing for you.

The Moment of truth.

In Aikido, we have something called the moment of truth. That's when the sensei calls two students on the mat. The sensei calls out a specific technique and somebody has to strike a certain way and somebody has to execute the defensive technique, otherwise somebody gets hit.

The moment of truth is to see if student who's defending can execute the technique correctly as per the sensei's request.

Here's your moment of truth.

Which element do you need next to be even more productive?

Let's start with one.

Which one element missing from your current repertoire, process or planning method?

It could be celebration. That could be a game changer for you. Decision time deciding what are those right things? Could be the shift, could be the next level up for you.

Maybe just concretely writing it down, putting it into your calendar. Maybe that's the elevator button that takes you from the second floor to the fifth floor, like right away.

I want you to identify that one element. Don't try and say, Shane, all I've been doing is element three and five and I'll do all the rest. You're going to explode your mind.

What one element, one or two steps earlier in the cycle are you not doing?  Pick that one to add in. Then, just add one new one every week. Try it out over the next four weeks. I want you to send me an email to tell me your results because you are going to be positively surprised by what happens and transforms for you.

Do you want a bonus element to help you be more productive?

Today's question comes from Noreen. 

She's a local Calgarian. She's a really great friend of mine. We love her to pieces and she sent in a really great question.

Her question is, "After you've defined your weekly plan, what are your recommended next steps? I try and break down my bigger goals into daily tasks for the week and then block out my calendar accordingly. But then what else has to happen?"

I hope this whole episode is the answer to your question.

If you have any other questions based on things that I may not have answered today, then send me an email and for everybody else go back and listen to today, because here's the thing. Weekly planning shouldn't be this thing with a hundred different rules. And you have to check off all these boxes. The goal of doing weekly planning is to make you more productive. It is to help you take control by taking control of your time in your schedule.

Take control of the clock and the calendar.

We've talked in the last few weeks about things like the automatic yes, the automatic no. How do you deal with other people's requests? If you missed that, go back and look for that in This Week's Plan.

There's a lot of different things that happen as we go forward. We're going to be looking at how do we integrate your weekly plan with people and things that are happening and events that take place.

Thank you Noreen for that great question. I hope I've already solved that and answered that for you. If not, just let me know.

Remember, this season is all about season one foundational basic elements and  basic core techniques that you need to create a weekly plan based on the proven processes that I use with my clients.

Next episode, we're going to be covering who should be part of your weekly plan.

It's great that you create a weekly plan, but now who has to be a part of that? And how do we integrate the people in your life into your weekly plan?

I know that that is going to be moving into the area of delegation and leadership. It's going to be highly productive and highly profitable for you. I'll look forward to seeing you next week. But make sure you forge ahead this week with the courage to add at least one of those elements into your weekly plan.

I want you to have an optimal weekly plan that works for you. Send me an email, Shane@SamuraiInnovation.com. I will personally respond. Try me out and I look forward to responding to you. I'm excited to be on this journey with you.

Domo Arigato.

Episode Show Notes: Create Your Automatic Yes and Automatic No

What do you do when that person walks up to you or group of people and they corner you and they ask you to make a commitment or an on the spot decision, what do you do?

Can you say no with a smile on your face?

Would you confidently say, “No thanks, I'm busy,  I can't do it”?

Today's episode, we're going to break that myth that you can't say no and that you can say no with a smile on your face.

Do you want to learn how to pass the delegation test?

Want to finally protect your time so that you get more time to yourself to work on the things that are important to you?

Stop being walked on and taken advantage of by others who try and delegate and foist their priorities onto you and have you help them.

This typically happens because we have weaker boundaries than we should.

We can't make a firm decline, we can't say no with a smile on her face. What's the solution?

The solution to all of this is to create an automatic yes and an automatic no.

What is an automatic yes and an automatic no?

It's a concept that I developed a long time ago and it's been proven with my clients to help them have a firm no with a smile on their face. It stems from having a strong, solid plan. It's iron solid. It's impenetrable. You can't break through it.

When you know what your weekly plan is all about, it gives you the ability to have an automatic yes and an automatic no. There's this delegation filter that I talked about earlier. What happens there is people come up to you and they think, I'm going to ask Shane to take over the weekly report this week because I don't want to do it.

They rush up to you in the hallway, they phone you, or they text you and they ask if you can you do the report this week?

If you don't have a strong weekly plan, you will say, "sure, okay." Then you walk away and do the facepalm thing.

You ask, "why did I agree to that? I already have ten things going on this week."

I can't do the weekly report. That's somebody else's job. But I said yes and that's what happens to good people all the time. Enough is enough. Let's build a stronger weekly plan, put more emphasis on your weekly plan.

That's what this whole show is about to help you fit in the right things into your weekly plan. When somebody comes to you and says, "John, I need you to fill out the weekly report on Thursday, can you take that over for me?"

You with an automatic no by saying, "No, I can't."

What?

You startle them. I can't do it on Thursday because I'm committed to working on the X, Y, Z project. I can't do it on Friday either because I've already been committed to the ABC project and I've got meetings with Bob and Mary.

If you would need me to do it this week, can you go talk to Bob and Mary and determine who needs me more? I'm happy to do something, but there's only one Shane. I can only be in one place at a time.

Put it back on them to be a collaborator.

Ninety-five percent of the time when somebody says or asks you the question, "Can you help me do this?" and you come back with a very firm, knowledgeable, "No, I can't." with a smile on your face, they believe you.

But if you second guess your decisions, they're all over you. They're pressuring you. The key to an automatic yes or an automatic no is to know your plan.

Your weekly plan also helps you say yes more often to because you can say, "Yes, absolutely, I can go to the concert on Thursday night. Yes, absolutely, I'd love to join the team meeting on Thursday morning."

That would be great. I'm excited. I've been wanting to work on that project. Yes. I'd love to do that kind of work. I've been looking to expand my skills and services. I'd love to join you in that kind of a project. And it opens doors of opportunity and it closes the door shut on the stuff that's just time wasting.

This is my excitement for you.

Time to accelerate your week with an automatic no.

Has your week been awesome so far?

Let's not waste that awesome energy. Let's not waste the power of awesome on  fizzling out this week. Let's push down the gas pedal and get something remarkable accomplished.

The question for you right now is:

What will you do at the end of this week to celebrate a big accomplishment?

Sometimes you don't accomplish big things because you don't have a celebration lined up. I can tell you I told you in the last episode of This Week's Plan when I was talking about analog and digital stuff, I talked about fountain pens. I use fountain pens to mark big projects.

Every time I complete a big project, I go out and commemorate it by buying a fountain pen. Sometimes it's a twenty or thirty dollar fountain pen. Sometimes it's a little more expensive a pen depending on the project I believe in celebrating.

Your big accomplishment for the week could have been finishing off a report. It could have been getting to the next milestone in the project so that the projects on time and you don't have to celebrate with big retail purchases, but you can go and celebrate with a latte out.

You can celebrate by taking some extra free time on the weekend and just enjoying and binge watching a TV show or doing something with your family or your friends. You can buy yourself a book.

You can celebrate in a hundred different ways that can have a low to no cost value, but it should have some value on the fact that it anchors in the fact that you did something remarkable this week and you accomplished something great.

Has the week been a little less than you expected?

Have you turned left when you should have turned right?

Has something negative come out of the blue or something popped up that  derailed your progress?

Were you caught up in doing busy work or emergency work?

That's okay. It happened. It's in the past.

Let's recalibrate.

Let's get refocused.

Let's focus your energy on pushing over your next domino of productivity.

At this point in the week where we you can still finish strong.

What can you say no to in the next 48 to 72 hours so that you can give an automatic yes to something amazing?

It's our no fail planning methods course. 

Episode Show Notes: Where Should You Do Your Weekly Planning?

Is there a secret place that you should do your weekly planning at, should you do it in a bunker, at a coffee shop in your backyard by yourself with a big group of people?

What, Shane, is the most optimal time and place to do my weekly planning?

And where should it happen?

Welcome back. Previously on Episode five of This Week's Plan. We covered a question that burns and a lot of people's mind.

They ask me all the time, they say, well, when should I be doing my weekly planning?

I mean, when is the best time to do my weekly planning?

So if you miss that, make sure you go back and catch that, because we answered that with five possibilities for you, five possibilities of when you can do your weekly planning.

I share with you my favourite and I share the one that I detest the most, the one that turns me off the most after many years of horrible trial and error. So if you if you need to understand that, go back to that episode. If you want to find out what my favourite and my least favourite is, you'll get that there as well.

And in that episode as well, I also encourage you to try out a social experiment and see how it goes for you.

Where is the best place to plan my week?

Where should I be planning my week out?

I got you covered today. We have three possible answers.

The first is clocks and calendars.

Everything happens in clocks and calendars.

Number two, we're going to talk about the digital landscape and digital planners and where you should be planning in there.

And number three, we're going to cover the analog old school style planners. Yes, people still write with ink on paper. It is true.

First question for you, though, is vanilla or sundae?

Are you a vanilla ice cream type of person? You just love to sit down with a bowl of vanilla ice cream and just enjoy it and savor it. Or are you a sun kind of person where you want three or four different types of ice cream and toppings and whipped cream and you just load it up with anything possible that would fit in the bowl?

The answer to that's going to tell you:

Are you a person of variety or a person of consistency?

That is going to give us a clue to answering where you should be doing your weekly planning?

The physical place of where you should do your weekly planning largely depends on you.

You can do it at your desk. You can do it at a coffee shop. You can do it in an airplane. You can do it on the back of an envelope or a napkin. You can get all high tech and fancy. The key out of all of those options is to make the space work for you.

I'll say that again, make the space work for you.

Let's dive into number one; clocks and calendars.

Let's all agree for a minute that all productivity, all personal professional effectiveness comes down to clocks and calendars. There's nothing you do in this world that isn't found in a clock or in a calendar. Think about it. The unit of time in a specific block or for a duration of time exists in a clock that clock measures five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, three hours. And it just keeps going on and on.

And we are all blessed with the same equivalency of twenty four hours a day on this earth.

The second unit of time is in a place. It's the place that something happens. A specific container a day, a half day, a week, a month, a quarter, a year. We're really familiar with that. Now, the big challenge is that some people feel that this is a constrictive and restrictive process. They want to be free.

They want to wake up in the morning and do my day as I want. That's one way to live. And that works for some people that have the luxury of that.

Other people need containers. They need spaces and places to be productive, to be highly effective, to be creative and to actually get something done that's worthwhile.

The power goes to the person who makes sense of all of this.

The power goes to the person who in advance says, I intend to do this, I want to create this, I want to solve this and goes out and accomplishes it.

You'll probably end up in this situation running into more scarcity of time. If that's the case for you, it typically means that you have to prioritize differently and you have to become a better negotiator of clocks and calendars.

It's really what it comes down to. But when you do that, my friend, you will gain new levels of freedom.

That is really exciting because then you will be able to feel free that on a Thursday afternoon you want your afternoon to go a certain way. You want to stop working at a certain. You want to go play, you want to work out, you want to go somewhere, and that freedom will be given to the person that effectively manages and understands the dimensions of clocks and calendars.

Number two is our digital places and our digital spaces.

What I want you to think about today is keeping everything in one to three digital places.

You may say that is incredibly tough. I have slack, Base Camp, Asana, Trello boards, Outlook, or Gmail. I use 10 different note programs. I carry a binder full or a bag full of notes around with me all the time.

How on earth are you proposing that I do this? I'm going to tell you that my digital places is Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft OneNote.

That's it.

Now I'll tack on a bonus. I have my email, my calendar and then I have my capture device for my notes, which is largely Microsoft Onenote. It's simple and it's effective.

I never use the tasks function in Outlook. I stopped using this about eight or nine years ago because I realized that that was just plain silly. If you want to know why I think that, send me an email and I will be happy to have that conversation with you.

But it really is because our brain processes things in a certain way and we have to understand how our brain moves through things in a logical order. And tasks don't easily fit into clocks and calendars because a task is just a little line and a little computer program somewhere, and it sits in the back of your brain and it irritates your brain.

Clocks and calendars is where your brain makes perfect sense of things and says, Great, I know that at one o'clock on Thursday afternoon I will be doing the X, Y, Z thing. I know on Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. it's time to do the one, two, three thing.

Your brain loves that. You love that. Other people love that because it creates dependability. The big thing about digital places is that it's there to clear your mind. The goal of this process is to clear your mind, free it up, get all the junk out of it, get all the nominal stuff out of it.

We want to free our mind for big tasks. We want to create space in our mind for deep work. To really settle in. To do the work of thinking, creating, problem solving, and analyzing. That's what your brain is made for. It's not made to hold 37 things that you got to do five years from now.

The wins are made and accomplished and gained by not storing stuff in your head and by actually using your brain for what it was designed to do.

It's the idea to action planner.

I have a bonus thing that I use called the idea to action planner. It's a simple Microsoft Excel tool that I had custom built for us and our Dojo Members to help make this weekly planning process better and easier each day.

That's where I put a lot of my work ideas when my brain says, I want to do the sales thing or I want to do this thing for my dojo members. Also, include personal initiatives. That gives my mind a lot of peace of mind and it gives me clarity.

And it also gives me space to then go and use my mind for the things like right now creating an episode of This Week's Plan for you. OK, so that link will be in the description for you wherever you're catching me.

Number three is go analog.

Go old school.

Yes. Grab your fountain pens, grab your pencil and paper, or whatever works for you. I'm a fountain pen guy. I love fountain pens. They're my favourite because it just tells my brain that when a fountain pen is pulled out and it's put on paper something serious and something important is about to happen. And I get excited about that.

Have you ever had a professional 90 minute deep tissue massage?

Where the massage therapist just turned you inside out and and you almost felt more pain coming out of it than you did going into it.

But in the next 24 to 48 hours, man, your muscles felt amazing. If you haven't had that, go try one sometime in the future.

But if you have, you know what I'm talking about. And the reason why we do those deep tissue massages is to release those hard knots in the muscles, and the lactic acid build up. It allows fresh blood to come in and cleanse out those areas and then flush those areas out so that the muscles and ligaments can be more productive and be stronger going forward.

How often do you massage your brain?

I'm not saying massaging your head, I'm saying your brain and writing with a pencil, a pen, a writing instrument in your hand on paper. To me, that's the equivalent of massaging my brain. It's where free form thinking can happen. It's where ideas can happen by scribbling.

I've had a lot of great ideas happen to me just by by creating shapes and lines and figures on the page. While I'm thinking through something, my brain's saying, yes, we're actively engaged. If I'm clickety clacking and I'm tapping it out on a keyboard, it might be a data transfer from my brain to the device digitally. But that analog old school pen to paper has some magical properties that helps your brain. I mind map.

I'm a huge mind mapper. I really encourage you if you're not a mind mapper to go try it.

People ask me what's the best mind mapping software?

I have a list and I'm happy to give that to people. But I don't use mind mapping software. I use actual hard core mind maps and I do my weekly plans on own map. I do a weekly plan on a tiny half sheet of paper because I know if it goes past that, if the map has to be bigger than that, certain size of paper is too much for the week for me.

And then I take that and I transfer that on. I'll get into that later on in season one here. But what you want to be thinking about is building a bridge.

You want to build a bridge between the analog properties and your digital properties.

What I want you to do is pick a digital or an analog place.Have everything together where you start your planning. It's all about clocks and calendars. When I do my planning, I have my email  and calendar open along with my notes. Those are the three things that need to be in the room.

Do what you can to stay consistent when you do your weekly planning.

If the physical place matters to you, then that's important. So some people say, oh, I do better planning at the office. Great. Go to the office, sit at your desk, close the door, turn on some jazz music, classical music, heavy metal, whatever fills your boat and then whatever sets the environment for you that you can be creative and you can think and get into a flow. Set up that environment.

Other people say, I need distraction. I need to be sitting in a coffee shop. I need to be somewhere where there's external white noise because that helps me think better. Great. Go find that environment, put yourself in there and then go back to last week's episode and pick which day when you're going to actually do the weekly planning because that consistency is the key.

Next is the don't list.

Don't ignore communication with others.

Meaning if you do all your planning in an old school traditional paper analog planner, then you do have to build a bridge to the digital world. You do have to make sure that in today's world we live in a linked world. My calendar is online, you can access my calendar. All I have to do is give you the URL. You can go to my calendar and find out all the times that I'm free.

But that means that I have to go into my calendar and block off times that I'm working on projects so that I don't accidentally get a meeting from Bob or Mary saying, "I want to meet you Thursday at 10 a.m." And guess what?

Thursday at 10am is in my paper planner to work on This Week's Plan podcast recording. Now that creates a conflict and that's not great. And we're going to talk about that next week a little bit more about why those conflicts can really affect you.

If you're in an analog planner and you're going to move to a digital planner, all you have to do is just go create the blocks in the digital calendar so that those blocks are protected that match up and sync up with your analog calendar.

Now, it might take an extra five or ten minutes step in your weekly weekly plan, but it's worth it. And you can't ignore that.

Don't lose critical information.

Make sure that if you're carrying around critical stuff in your notebook. The next two tools that I use that are really important is the scanner and the camera. There's stuff that if I'm working on it in a paper format and it's loose or it's even maybe even in my notebook, I might take a picture as a backup for a reference point, or I might scan something through that good old printer scanner sitting in my office.

And so that that automatically then emails to me or it automatically dumps it into my one note or wherever I want it to be digitally. And I now know that I have a backup.

So that's an important strategy.

At the end of the day, please, please don't make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Simplicity is the winner.

Simplicity is the gateway to to consistency.

Consistency is the gateway to stacking up more points and more wins so that you accomplish more.

Here at This Week's Plan, we're all about fitting in the right things into this upcoming week.

I want to remind you of an awesome opportunity we have created something here at Samurai Innovation called the No Fail Planning Methods program.

It's a course and I'm going to give you eight no fail planning methods that will compliment your weekly planning.

It will make you a stronger, better, more productive person, a productive professional who wins more.

It's complimentary. It's on the house. Make sure to claim your access by visiting NoFailPlans.com.

Activation time, my friend.

Where do you feel most creative and productive?

Where is that physical place you feel most creative, more productive, is it that coffee shop or is it in the library or is it in a silent room or a special bunker or hideaway location? Plan there. Plan consistently.

I introduced you to the idea of a bridge between the digital and the analog world. Build that bridge this week.

What part of your bridge is missing?

Don't wait three weeks to fix it. Fix it this weekend so that you get the win.  You get the gain. You get the benefit and growth. Fix that this weekend and set up an online notepad or sync up your online notes. Just because I use Outlook and Onenote doesn't mean you need to use those tools.

Today's question comes to you from Mariana who is a local Calgarian.

She's a local Dojo Member. I'm always excited to meet local folks. Mariana asked me, "My biggest challenge is related to prioritization. How do I decide what to work on in my limited time available?"

It's a great question that comes up all the time. Mariana says, "If I work on one thing, I feel guilty about not doing something else on my priority list."

Mariana, I want you to think about today's episode.

We've talked about clocks and calendars. My challenge to you is to take everything that you want to do and just assign it to the clock and calendar.

Does it have a duration of time? Does it have a place that it needs to be done? It's a simple question, but it will really cut through a lot of the confusion.

If somebody wants you to be in the same place at two times now, we have to negotiate. We have to figure out a way to say, "Listen Bob. You want me at 10:00 a.m. Sharon wants me at 10 a.m. We've got to do something here. I can't be in two places at one time."

You have to be bold enough to be able to go negotiate that. A lot of people miss the prioritization because prioritization is not a set it and forget it thing.

It's not that you just do it once and then it's it's item number seven for the rest of the week or the month or the quarter.  That prioritization will shift. When you get when you get into a flexible state of mind where you realize that those priorities are always evolving, shifting and changing, then it just becomes a lot easier to understand that negotiation is part of the game.

And then knowing where your clocks and calendars everything sits, that will help you out better.

Coming up next week, we're going to ask you what do you include in your weekly plan? We're going to start getting into the recipes and the ingredient list of a great weekly plan. You will learn what should be in there and how do you do all that. Be on the lookout for that next episode of This Week's Plan.

Forge ahead this week with the confidence to scale your tools down a little bit. Build a stronger bridge between your digital world and your analog world. It will serve you better.

You will be become more productive. You will then be able to help the people around you become more productive. You will push over a lot of dominos of productivity.

I'm excited to be with you on this journey.

Domo Arigato.