How To Actually USE Your Planner System (instead of letting it collect dust)
If you haven't touched your planner in days, if not weeks or months, or you have a stack of partially used planners gathering dust somewhere in your office, this for you. By the end of this video, you'll know how to start and keep using your planner, so it starts working for you and not the other way around.
Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.
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Keeping your planner up-to-date and current is so important that I host a weekly reset inside my coaching membership just for that purpose. Now it's your turn to understand why routine is often the missing link in planner systems and how to create the perfect planning routine for you.
First, let's break down why planners and task management systems are important.
And please stick with me because this is an important point and is crucial for motivating yourself to do the thing I'm going to teach you how to do in this video. Calendars, agendas, planners, task management systems, time management systems, project management systems are all simply ways of storing important information outside of your brain so that... And this is the key part, so that the information you need appears in front of you or is easily accessible when you need it.
Like David Allen talks about in his book, "Getting Things Done," the human brain is pretty awful at storing information. What the human brain excels at is using information to do cool things.
Like I talked about in this post, if you don't keep whatever planning system you use accurate and up-to-date so you can trust it, you're going to struggle with overwhelm, procrastination, poor or non-existent productivity, and maybe even burnout. No matter which planning system you use, keeping your system consistently up-to-date and accurate is crucial. And how do you do that? By building a planning routine.
Here's a fun question. If your planner were a person, how long have you left them on read? (chuckles) Let me know in the comments below.
In order to have a successful planning routine that keeps your system up-to-date and trustworthy, you need to establish at least three habits.
Daily Check-In’s
Weekly Check-In’s
Monthly Check-In’s
This is a great place to start so that's what we're going to talk about today. But once you've mastered these three habits, you can add quarterly and annual check-ins to stay on top of your longer-term goals.
Regardless of whether it's a daily, weekly, or monthly check-in, the point of a check-in is to sit down with your planning system, whichever one you use and works for you, and engage with it and make sure it's up-to-date. And the easiest way to do that is to start with a combination of daily, weekly, and monthly check-ins.
Let's start by talking about the monthly check-ins 'cause it can be helpful to work backwards. So when you check-in with your planner every month, you review the past month and you plan for the upcoming month, and you wanna pick approximately three priorities for the month ahead. And then each week, you do a similar thing. You review the past week and you plan for the upcoming week, and you pick three priorities for that week that are ideally sub-priorities of your month-long priorities. And then you rinse and repeat that daily.
Every day, you check-in to your system, you see what your goals are for the month, for the week, and then you decide on your three priorities for that day. And ideally with the daily check-ins, you're checking in in the morning and you're checking in in the evening. So you're checking in, you're checking out.
Those three habits will do so much to keep your system up-to-date and that's what helps you trust it. Because a planning system is pointless if you don't trust it, and that's usually why planners start gathering dust.
When life happens and you fall behind on keeping your planning system up-to-date, more often than not, we get into this mindset that, "Oh, it's okay. "I'll get back to it." But that's the problem, we never get back to it, right? So, yes, there are certain life emergencies, shit hits the fan in such a way that you can't touch your planning system for a day or two, if not longer. I understand that those happen.
The key is to get back as soon as possible and get it back up-to-date, so it can be trustworthy again. Because more often than not what happens is we have that life emergency and then we don't get our system back up-to-date, therefore, we can't trust it; therefore, we can't use it; therefore; we don't use it. And we are left having to trust our minds to hold everything we need to know. And like I said before, like David Allen talks about, our brains are terrible at storing information. We need an external place to store important information so we can access it if and when we need it easily.
So that's a really simple way of talking about monthly, weekly, and daily check-ins is those three priorities for each one, right? But you can do a more in-depth reflection and planning process, and that's what I guide my clients through in my coaching program. Currently, I host a weekly reset twice a week so that people in different time zones can participate in at least one. And I actually have two different weekly reset worksheets for my clients, depending on what their circumstances are at that time. One is for if they're super overwhelmed and the other is if things are going okay. It's just same old, same old. Keep on chugging. Just keep swimming.
But providing that external accountability so my clients continue to do their weekly check-ins every week is so important. You may think this is a frivolous video, but this is something that is so important I build it into my coaching program. And they love it. So do it.
Now you know exactly how to establish a planning routine so you can actually use your planning system and keep it consistently up-to-date, accurate, and most importantly, trustworthy. If you're worried about following through on building this habit, however, I highly recommend checking out my free masterclass, where I teach you three mindset shifts in one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.
If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back in two weeks with another video. See you then. Bye!
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