Most of us have a thousand things running through our head of things we need to do and places we need to go. You may feel like you are living in chaos with no light at the end. You don’t feel confident you have it together, you feel like you are taking it hour by hour or even minute by minute. You feel stressed out. You have big goals you want to achieve, but the thought of it just makes you want to crawl back into bed.
Does this sound like you?
This is where a Sunday planning technique comes in. It sets you up for success and makes you feel less overwhelmed. It takes 30-60 minutes of your day that you won’t believe how much better you feel.
Here’s what you do:
- Review your calendar of what meetings, appointments, events that are going on this week. Do you need to prep for meetings and who’s taking the kids/when?
- Meal plan – based on what’s going on each night & even the weather. If it’s nice, you might want to grill out. If it’s going to be rainy, maybe plan a casserole. If you have a busy night maybe plan a crockpot meal that you can start before work or make it a leftover night. Maybe you plan a night of getting take out. This planning helps so when you get home, it’s not another decision of what are we having for dinner or do we have the ingredients. Bonus to plan/meal prep your breakfast & lunches.
- Write down all the things that you want to accomplish this week. You can make 2 lists – 1 for work and 1 for home. Think about how much time each item will take. Breakdown the tasks to 1 hour or less increments. I call this my brain dump. Notice I said “want” and not “must” so don’t get overwhelmed. The whole point is to just get it out of your head.
- Prioritize the list you just wrote. Either do a A, B, C or even you can number them. It’s however your mind works bests to prioritize. Not everything can be an A or B. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority.
- Review each day to determine how many hours are “open” to get the stuff done off the list. Again, you can separate work and home.
- Then it’s just a plug and chug. Start with your highest priority items and plug them into your calendar starting with Monday. Make sure to give yourself some time for flexibility as life will happen so don’t plan every minute of everyday. Don’t forget to put some “me time” in there to enjoy life. Note: you will more than likely not fit everything on your list in the calendar. THAT IS THE POINT! You want to work on the most important things first. Stop working on those low priority items..they can wait.
At the end of the week, you will feel accomplished and be amazed at how much you got done. Each day you will have the plan so you aren’t scrambling each day to figure it out.
Taking that 60 minutes each Sunday will make the difference between living a life of chaos/overwhelmed to confident and relaxed.