I find it rather surprising how easily a week can slip away from me. One day, it’s the start of a fresh week; I’m full of energy and excited to get things done. After getting pulled in too many directions for a few days — suddenly it’s the end of the week, and maybe I’ve handled my notifications and made it through the tasks I wrote down, but I don’t feel like I’ve really moved forward anything bigger than that.

This is a trap I used to fall into a lot, especially as I’m someone who loves to use my task list as a place for reminders, but then I can work from those reminders without necessarily connecting them to bigger goals or strategy.

Being able to do weekly planning is one of the small systems that has helped me move with a lot more intention at work and in my life, because a week is just enough of a unit of time to think slightly bigger picture.

The small ritual of weekly planning has had enormous benefit for me and has now stood the test of time through many busy seasons, moves, and big projects. I also combine my weekly planning with reflecting on the previous week, which has helped keep me honest about what I’m actually able to achieve in a week, where I’ve been getting stuck, and where my week could improve.

Taking these few moments to plan going into any given week really has helped me in all of the big areas that matter to me: making progress towards my goals, being realistic about what I’m going to achieve in a given period, and then I also have this sense of purpose and calm each week because I have a plan for how I’ll be taking a step forward and not getting stuck in a cycle of simply answering notifications rather than doing work that matters.

This post goes deeper into this system and includes new commentary on where I’ve used AI (and where I haven’t). You can also grab my weekly planning template by subscribing to my newsletter.

First, note that weekly planning doesn’t need to be a huge time investment

Had I been rigid about needing 30 to 45 minutes every weekend to do my weekly planning, I wouldn’t still be doing it. Weekly planning would certainly have fallen to the side during one of my busier seasons, and I wouldn’t have benefited from the consistency that has made it easier to keep planning and setting priorities every week.

The way I use this system is that I can scale how much time I spend on it as needed depending both on how much time I want to spend planning and how much time my real life is allowing me to spend on this.

Some weekends, I’ve spent as little as 5 minutes on weekly planning — a feat that is probably only possible because I’ve practiced so much. Still, even in the early days I tried not to spend too much time planning because I don’t have the time to spend. I’m a mom of two young kids; I have my own hobbies and interests; I drop my kids off at separate spots each day and different activities; I’ve joked that I moonlight as an Uber driver when I’m not at work.

For this system to work for me, it needed to be actually valuable, something I could do quickly and something I could do on my phone. This system is all three:

• Valuable: at a base level, this system is setting up my week so that I don’t need to confirm each day whether I’m working on the right thing; I’ve already done that work.
• Quick: if I am doing this manually, I have sections I can fill out, or if I’m running an AI workflow, I just simply run the workflow and then check it.
• Mobile-friendly: because there are times when I am just in the thick of it on the weekends with my kids, and I don’t have time to grab my laptop even for 5 minutes (a sentence that might not feel honest to non-parents, but just trust me).

The planning stages: How I plan every week

Here are the stages I follow to plan every week: reflect → gather → plan. Let’s get into each of them.

Reflect

Reflection is one of those tools that, when you are actually investing time in doing it, there is always growth. Never have I regretted taking time to slow down and reflect before I move forward.

Start by reflecting on the previous week

A week is a big enough unit of time to learn from, so grab what worked and what didn’t and bring it into the next week. Before I get into the next week, I take a minute to go over how the previous week went. I do this by:

• Looking over my priorities for last week: are they finished, moving to next week, or have they changed?
• Taking a few minutes to reflect on what went well, where there was room for improvement, and what I would like to do differently last week.
• Possibly most importantly, I take my voice notes from throughout the week and use AI to process them and look for patterns, and help me analyze the previous week. This step is optional and relies on you journaling via voice notes throughout the week, but if you are a verbal processor, I highly recommend it.

→ Read: Using voice notes and AI for personal growth

I wouldn’t add too much AI to this step

Above I mentioned that I use AI to process my voice notes, and that has been really powerful for me. But for the other two prompts around whether I moved my priorities forward and what went well and what could have been improved, it makes the most sense to me to let my brain take the moment to process and grow from that experience, rather than trying to run a script.

Gather

This next step is about getting the right context, tasks, and priorities into one place. This is like making sure that you’ve collected all of the dishes from around your house before you load the dishwasher, so you don’t turn around and find that one dirty pot on the stovetop once you have everything in your dishwasher all organized.

Collect: tasks, projects, priorities, goals

At this stage, I start opening tabs and making lists (my kind of fun!). This is also an excellent place for AI to assist because AI can be wonderful at grabbing context. Here are the places you or your agents should be able to quickly review:

• Your task list
• Project documents
• Your email
• Meeting notes
• Your calendar
• Goals for the year
• Any other resources that point to your priorities

What you’re looking for are things that need to get done during your week, or priorities that have come up in meeting notes that aren’t yet projects, or even goals that haven’t made enough progress just yet. This is a very context-focused stage, and so the clearer that you already are with yourself on your goals and priorities, the easier it is going to be to check everything and ensure you have all the right information (or dishes).

For me, this stage looks like:

• Opening up Todoist on a weekly view
• Opening up my annual goals to check my progress
• Running a scheduled task with Claude to capture tasks from any meetings to Todoist
• Running a scheduled task with Claude to scan my email for anything critical
• Looking at my calendar for upcoming meetings

This step is about getting a bigger picture and ensuring I’m still working towards my overarching goals, and it would take me a lot longer if I hadn’t already taken the time to outline work priorities periodically and set my goals for the year. For reference, here’s my goal-setting framework.

Plan

This is where we are going to see if all of your dishes fit in the dishwasher (a week). Because it totally depends on the week for me. Sometimes by ambition gets the better of me and I want to achieve much more than is practically possible in a given week — this is why it’s helpful to start with a reflection, to bring me back to earth on what last week looked like. It’s safe to assume that this week might look similar.

Workload: we need to be intentional and realistic

The idea with planning for the week is setting ourselves up for having this smooth week where we are clear on priorities and making progress on the right things. The only way to get there is to not try and do absolutely everything that comes to mind, but to be focused.

For your workload, do you have your tasks spaced out for the week in a way that’s realistic? I like to look at my to-do list alongside my calendar and ensure they line up. I’ll often catch that I’ve scheduled everything for Monday for some reason, but then if I’m spending Monday in meetings, that’s not going to happen, so I need to move my tasks around.

Progress: set the priorities you want to move forward

A week is a great unit of time for making progress, but it requires you being clear on your priorities for the week, and I like for that to live outside of my to-do list. My priorities for the week are the three-ish things that I really want to make progress on because I know that they are meaningful in moving me forward in work or life.

I currently set priorities in Notion where I add a new database item for each week, and then have three sections (work, personal, side-projects) with priorities per section. However, I’ve also done this in a notebook that I’ve left on my desk in the past. Digital systems are better suited to my habits and personality, but either could work.

Goals: align with your goals

This is where the higher-level connection comes in, because it can be so easy to set annual goals and then not check in on them. But on a weekly basis, if you can quickly ask yourself whether what you’re doing is connected to your longer-term goals — you’ll be much more likely to make progress on those goals.

What day of the week to do weekly planning on

I’ve always done my weekly planning on Sundays, but when I’ve posted about this online, I’ve heard a wide range from Fridays to Mondays.

Some people prefer to end the week by planning the next week, others prefer to start the week by planning, and still others, like me, would like to hit the ground running on Monday. So I do my planning on Sundays during some quiet time or nap times for the kids or in the evening after they’ve gone to bed.

Ultimately, what matters is that you feel set up for a period of time. Maybe you work from Wednesdays to Saturdays so you want to do your planning on Tuesdays — whatever works best for you!

Done is better than perfect

For planning, this is a task some of us could really do forever, but this needs to be functional, not perfect. Weekly planning is not about optimizing everything. It is about entering the week with fewer illusions, or rather, with a plan where you’ll put the dishes in your dishwasher.

This one change in choosing to take an intentional moment to plan for the week ahead has turned into a cherished ritual for me. Not only do I feel calmer and more intentional, but I also know I am moving towards what I want to achieve in work and in life. I hope it can do the same for you!