Five Steps to a Weekly Plan

A weekly plan is key to business organizing.  If you want to be organized at work a weekly plan is a must.  So is the process of reviewing your prior weeks’ plans.  I will share with you an effective five step plan to do just that.

Step One:  Read over your mission or purpose statement.  Don’t have a mission statement?  It’s time to get one.  If you don’t know where to begin there are several online tools available to you to aid in writing a mission statement for your business.  They aren’t going to produce a final mission statement for you, but they will help you to get started and form an effective one.  Your purpose or mission statement should represent your values, vision, and purpose.  With such important ideas to convey don’t expect to write it in ten minutes.  You can spend several weeks continuing to refine your statement until it feels right for you.

After you review your mission statement, or create one, you should consider several questions during your weekly planning session.  “What’s most important to you this week?”  “What do you value most this week?”  

Step Two:  Business organizing means you need to always be evaluating and learning.  Keep asking yourself questions.  Look back on the past week’s projects decide if you are still really committed to a project.  You won’t want to make the same mistakes again.  So brainstorm about what went well, and what didn’t.  Are you starting this week’s plan by looking at an uncompleted list of items from the previous week?  What got in the way of you accomplishing what you wanted this past week?   And if you did run into roadblocks, what did you learn and what are you going to do different this next week? 

Step Three:  Gather, process and review everything.  Look around pick up all of your loose papers, notes, receipts, or files that you have lying around.  Everything goes into your in-tray.  Clear out your in-tray using the FAST System, in other words, File it, Act on it, Schedule it, or Toss it. 

Step Four:  Identify your weekly goal, or choices, in writing.  You should come up with three important results you want to realize in the upcoming week.  Goals can surround different things.  They can be focus areas or scheduled activities.   If you are going to choose a focus area consider honing a skill like reflective listening.  A scheduled activity looks more like, I will work on my filing system four times for 30 minutes at a time.

Your goals should be based on and stay in line with your mission statement and personal vision.  You’re organizing your business so you want to have an important focus.  That’s different than a pressing urgent goal.   Goals are things you are choosing to do.  You shouldn’t feel pushed or forced into your goals.  Listen to your self-speak are you saying things like “I have to…” or “I should…”   We all have multiple areas of our life that are important to us whether it is our business and personal or fun time and community activities.  Your goals should work to bring the areas you find important in your life into balance.   Do your goals reflect these things?  If they don’t you may need to go back to step one, start with your mission statement.

Step Five:  When it comes time to make choices you must show integrity.  Things change and your schedule needs to be flexible.  When you need to make adjustments, reschedule.  When you decide what is important to you it may mean you need to say no to something.  When it comes to your  business organizing you need to stay in control.