How To Set Goals For The Week: A Guide To Weekly Planning

Setting goals is important in general, but setting goals for the week is more important than people give it credit for. Spending just a little bit of time each week to set goals you could reap these rewards:

• Better structure and organization
• Enhanced focus and productivity
• Better work life balance
• Better time management
• personal and professional growth
• reduced stress and anxiety
• increased discipline
• Increased progress

If just a couple minutes per week could give you these benefits, why not do it? Well, it could be that you don’t know where to start, so we’ve put together this guide to help you start setting goals for the week. Let’s dive into it.

Step #1: Choose a Planning Day

Depending on your schedule, you should choose one day per week to sit down for about 30 to 60 minutes and plan out your entire week. For this process you’re going to need something in order to track your goals, either a physical planner or virtual calendar.

Some people work better by writing things down with a pen and paper, while others prefer to have everything on their computer or phone.

Step #2 Write Down Everything You Need To Do

The next step is to write everything down that is on your mind. Write down all the tasks, projects, and goals that you need to accomplish for the week. Doing this will clear mental clutter, which is a serious issue for a lot of people including myself.

Doing this also creates a visual representation, which can motivate you to complete the tasks.

It’s easy to just forget about things when they’re cluttered within your mind, but when you write it all down, it encourages accountability, increasing the chances that it will actually get done.

Step #3 Review The Previous Week

Before you actually set the goals for the week, you want to review your previous week. This will do a couple things for you. It will:

• Lets you see what you did good so you could continue doing it
• Lets you see what you did wrong, so you could learn from it and not make the same mistake again.
• It also promotes better planning as you’ll have a more accurate idea of how much time each task takes
• Help you find the tasks that you didn’t get to get done the previous week so you could add it to your goals for that next week.
• Help with work-life balance by allowing you to evaluate how you allocated time to personal, professional, and other activities.

Step #4 It’s Time to Set Your Weekly Goals

After you clear your mind and review the previous week, it’s time to set your weekly goals. Most people only think about setting goals in terms of work, but you should set goals in terms of work, relationships, exercise, and more. Here are some examples of goals to set for the week.

Work

• Complete 3 blog posts that week
• Create 2 YouTube Videos
• Learn a New Skill Relevant To Your Work

Relationships

• Plan to spend time with your significant other
• Call a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while
• Reconnect with a friend
• Bring your kid or kids to the park

Exercise

• Complete 10 miles for the week
• Strength Train Every Single Body Part By The End Of The week

Personal Development

• Read 100 pages by the end of the week
• Dedicate time to learn a new language

Financial

• Create a Weekly Budget
• Take some time to go over your expenses and budget

Health And Well-Being

• Practice Meditation 10 minutes daily
• Set a goal to limit screen time

Leisure and hobbies

• Dedicate time to a hobby, like painting, writing, or playing an instrument.
• Explore a local attraction or event you’ve never been to.
• Join a club or group that shares your interests.
• Attend a cultural or artistic event, like a concert or art exhibit.

All this stuff could seem like a lot, but imagine wanting to accomplish all of these things and not planning for the week? This will set you up for failure. Now that you have all your goals written out, the next step is very important.

Step #4 Set Up Time Blocking

You’re probably wondering how you could find the time for all of those things we mentioned above. It may seem like you don’t have enough time in the day, but with time blocking you will. So what exactly is time blocking? It’s a specific time where you devote your attention to a certain task.

You want to treat each time block as if they’re important appointments, almost like a doctor’s appointment. You need to be serious in sticking to each time block, and you want to make sure that no distractions are present. We are going to use the example above (all the goals), in order to set up a time blocking schedule.

Time Blocking Example

Time Block	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
6:00 – 7:00 AM	Meditation	Meditation	Meditation	Meditation	Meditation
7:00 – 8:00 AM	Exercise	Exercise	Exercise	Exercise	Exercise
8:00 – 9:00 AM	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast	Breakfast
9:00 – 12:00 PM	Blog Post 1	Blog Post 2	Blog Post 3	YouTube Video 1	YouTube Video 2
12:00 – 1:00 PM	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
1:00 – 2:00 PM	New Skill	New Skill	New Skill	New Skill	New Skill
2:00 – 4:00 PM	Work Tasks	Work Tasks	Work Tasks	Work Tasks	Work Tasks
4:00 – 5:00 PM	Reading	Reading	Reading	Reading	Reading	Reading	Reading
5:00 – 6:00 PM	Language	Language	Language	Language	Language
6:00 – 7:00 PM	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner
7:00 – 8:00 PM	Budget & Expenses	Family Call	Hobby	Leisure	Limit Screen Time	Date with Significant Other	Park with Kids
8:00 – 9:00 PM	Reconnect with Friend	Cultural Event	Club or Group	Art Exhibit	Concert	Local Attraction	Leisure
9:00 – 10:00 PM	Relaxation	Relaxation	Relaxation	Relaxation	Relaxation	Relaxation	Relaxation

This chart is just an example, and you could make it a little bit better based on your preferences. But as you can see, you have more time throughout your day than you think. By writing all this down, you may realize that you spend way too much time doing things you shouldn’t be doing. For this process it’s important that you know how to set realistic goals, this way your schedule is realistic.

Step #5 Be Mindful Of Which Tasks You Prioritize First

The morning time is when you have the most mental energy. Obviously, as the day goes by, that mental energy dwindles. You want to make sure you prioritize the hardest & more important tasks first. This way you’re doing the best work possible for that task.

Step #6 Repeat

The very last step of the process is to repeat. If you’re consistent in doing these steps, you’ll be able to constantly sharpen up your process and continuously get better at everything you do. You’ll start to notice that with each new week things will get easier and faster. Here are some things you may realize when you do this consistently:

• Increased Discipline: Discipline increases with action. By taking these steps and sticking to your schedule, you’ll start to get better and better at staying disciplined.
• Increase Confidence: Confidence comes with doing what you say you’re going to do. If you have things cluttered in the back of your head and you continuously put them off, your confidence will never grow. You may even not think you’re capable of doing anything important over time because of this.
• Higher quality work: Obviously with consistency comes better work. The more you do the tasks you need to do, the better you will get.
• Reduced Stress: A lot of people think stress comes from having too much on your plate. That could be considered true, however, putting things off is actually responsible for the majority of stress people face daily. So if you’re consistently doing what you need to do, then that means less stress in your life.