How to Do More in a Week than Most Do in a Month

if you often feel like your weeks just run away from you and there are so many things in your business that you would like to do or know you even should be doing but don't get round to doing then this video is for you today I'd like to share something with you that I've been using in my own business for the past five or six years which means that I get more done in a week than most people do in a month now that's not a humble brag and this definitely isn't some kind of productivity hack video this is a simple system that I've been using and that we teach our clients to make sure that you actually get time working on your business I call it the weekly planner

and it's a really simple system that just allows you to prioritize your week and make sure that you're focusing on the things that are actually going to move the needle in your business so it's part of a bigger system that we use to help agencies really grow and scale systematically so I'll talk you through

the creative life planning system quickly first and I'm just going to move my head up here a little bit so I'm not blocking anything so when we're working with agency owners the first thing that we want to know is like what is the ultimate Vision or what is the end game and this can be a varied amount of time but usually 10 years into the future is a good time frame we really want to think about what's the ultimate Vision what's the long game do you want to sell your business um be working a certain amount of hours per week what does life and business look like in a decade's time and this is really just a guiding Compass it's the thing that allows people to get out of bed in the morning and to maintain that level of motivation then what we want to do is look at Milestones so we take that ultimate vision and break that down into one three and five year Milestones now this is just how we do it again this is a guide this is a system this isn't a prescription so you can do it however you like to do it but ultimately we need some milestones and our Milestones are our map now I've used

the dots intentionally map is an acronym and it stands for measurable accountable and Purpose Driven the difference between the vision and the Milestones is the vision is ultimately where we're going and it can be a little bit intangible the Milestones on the map are measurable uh things that we can actually take in our business and say whether we achieve them or not as an example rather than saying I

want to learn Spanish you might say I want to have a 5-minute conversation with a local in Spanish by the end of 2024 that's a measurable goal then you need to get some accountability well maybe you book a ticket to Spain or maybe you have a friend that speaks Spanish and you tell them that that's your goal and you put a little bit of money as a bet can you hold that conversation or not and then the third thing is you have to have a purpose reason why that thing is important to you if you don't have a big enough driver to actually learn another language you're probably never going to learn it so maybe you organize to host a workshop out there or maybe you um have that level of accountability where you know you're going to have to do something where if you can't speak Spanish it's going to be quite painful for you or something that you don't want as an outcome so that's how we create milestones and then

we look at those Milestones like learning uh Spanish learning to have a conversation in 5 minute conversation in Spanish and we break these down into projects right so what are the things that are actually going to get us there so you know the first project might be around how we're actually going to learn so project number one might be deciding um how we're going to learn the Spanish are we going to get a teacher use an app like what's going to be the method and there's going to be steps in that right maybe researching what's the best way to learn Spanish um it might be reading a book and deciding whether that's how you actually learn testing a few things out then another project might be um actually getting good at the grammar or the pronunciation so there's going to be kind of elements or kind of big rocks as we sometimes call them that make up these milestones and then

finally there's going to be rituals that you do on a daily and weekly basis and in the context of Spanish this would be simple things like practice right practice speaking Spanish every day spend five minutes on the app every day and so this whole system applies to business and it's the whole system that we use to run our business but also the system we use to help our clients who are small creative agencies cuz if

you're anything like me and you've got a creative brain it tends to be a little bit scatty people talk about add or whatever really for me it's just distracting being distracted by shiny new objects being distracted by things that feel creative and fun and often they're not the things that are going to move the needle in our business so right now we're going to be focused on this bottom layer here this is where the uh if I just get a highlighter this is kind of where the weekly planner sits it's the things that are going to allow us to make sure that we take these goals up here and projects and make them tangible so the first thing that I will always do is I will always brain dump and a brain dump is simply the process of going through and emptying out my entire brain onto a page everything that I think I need to do or everything that I need to think about and it could be related to clients our website or our social it could be related to personal it's just really about getting all of those things out of our head down onto paper this works for a few reasons number one it means that we don't forget anything but number two our conscious brain or our prefrontal cortex more specifically isn't very good at storing lots of information and it makes us feel like we're overwhelmed very quickly it's often it's been cited why phone numbers are the length that they are cuz that's about the maximum amount of digits that we can remember in our kind of um prefrontal cortex that kind of part of our brain that processes things so that's the kind of reason why this is so important and it just really clears up that Ram I like to think about our brain as a little bit like a computer and you have Ram that random access memory um that's the shortterm memory where we try and store things and if everything up there we are going to fail miserably so the first thing we do is going we're going to brain dump get everything down onto paper there's a system that I learned

when I was studying NLP called chunking and what chunking is about is it's about taking things that live in the same category and making them all part of one so you might have a bunch of things related to clients websites and your brain dump might look something like this and it might feel like you've got a million and one things that you have to do but if you can find a way to group these into say these this is all related to clients uh our website this is all related to personal stuff picking up the kids all of that kind of stuff then what happens is your brain finds that more manageable because you're chunking up so it kind of sits within those bits of information that it can remember and so we kind of then just like chunk things together and that makes us feel a little bit more um organized so I'm talking through this as

I go but we have actually got a notion template for this exact system so you can click the link in the video below and grab a notion template and this will make way more sense I'm going to run through that um in a second but this will make way more sense for you so that's the first thing we do we brain dump then what we want to think about is

those longer term goals those projects those 12mon goals and this is actually from a book called The one thing but this is where we really want to think about leverage like how are we going to leverage those things that we've written down or maybe this is actually unrelated quite often I find that all the stuff I've written down here is really just the noise the stuff going on other people's priorities but the thing that's actually going to move the needle in our business for us personally is something totally different and so what I'll do is I'll go

back and I'll look at this original plan I'll really take some time to just look at our goals what do we really want to achieve this year what are some of the major projects that we're working on internally to get to that thing and then I'll ask myself these kind of questions what one thing if I completed it would make the other redundant I. E what's the one thing that if I did this would probably like mean we don't even need to update our website or probably do this thing for clients so that's like one question that we can ask ourselves the other thing is like what's just the one thing that if I completed it this week would move me exponentially closer to our 12-month goals so that's why it's so important to spend time looking at these goals and these milestones and figuring out what projects we're prioritizing because there's probably one or two things in there that are the highest leverage tasks and then the other thing to just ask yourself is you know if I got to the end of this week and I'd only achieved one thing what one thing would make me feel really great about the week productive about this week so just spend some time thinking about that right now

and just for context I spend at least an hour a week going through this process and when people hear that sometimes they think that's crazy you spend an hour planning your week but just think about it if you work on the wrong things this week and you were just all action orientated that week could be pretty much worthless right if you're just getting caught in the business and you're just working on things that come to you I. E you're being reactive rather than proactive then that time is essentially wasted so an hour of your time might seem like a lot but if you know you can get two or three really high value tasks done by just having that thinking time at the beginning of your week imagine what that would be like comp compounded week on week imagine what you could achieve in a month so they're the kind of questions that I ask myself if I'm really

struggling to prioritize things figure out what that one thing is I always come back to this concept of the priority Matrix and sometimes I will give the items that I've written down a priority like a b or c But ultimately we're looking for the things that are high impact low effort they're going to be the things that are what I would call our green tasks right they're high impact and low effort then we've got things that are kind of high impact but quite High effort right and these would be things that would be like bigger Longer term projects or we would need to block out time in our calendar to actually do and then the worst kind of task is low impact High effort so this is kind of our Red Zone here don't want to really do any task we just want to get rid of those just eliminate those totally um we don't want anything that takes a lot of energy but it doesn't really have a lot of impact and then obviously things that are low impact um but low effort um sometimes there are things that just have to happen in the business so again that's kind of our orange so we obviously want to focus on as many green tasks as possible Tim Ferris talks about

this quite a lot he talks about elimination delegation and automation so eliminating these red tasks just not doing them at all how many of these kind of low effort low impact tasks can we automate and how many of these higher effort higher impact tasks can we delegate and then we're just left as the buiness business owner with the high impact low effort tasks and when I say low effort I don't mean it's not difficult for me low effort is something that's within my zone of Genius I. E for me recording a video like this is actually quite a lot of low effort these things we've already kind of prepared because we talk about them with our clients so the slides are here and I'm really just sitting here talking to you having a conversation but in terms of impact it can be quite High it might be the difference between someone deciding to work with us or not it might just be the Insight they needed in their business in order to really move the needle and start prioritizing themselves and really start generating the kind of Revenue they want so there's a lot of potential impact for low effort doesn't mean that this isn't hard or I don't put time and energy into it but because it's within what I call my zone of Genius I. E the tasks that feel um like I'm in flow and the tasks that I've spent a long time perfecting that skill it means that it isn't massively effortful for me okay so they're kind of like the high impact Tas so we want to think about those things and then that's how we're going to prioritize our week we're going to have that one thing at the top like if I just did this it would really move the needle and you can have a maximum of three things that you can focus on in your week and I'll tell you how this converts to the notion document in the middle in a minute the last thing is how

we actually schedule these so what you'll find is that you'll find there's lots of different things that come out so the one thing might be you know if I just formed a partnership with this person um and I was able to get in front of their audience that would be massive that would be huge leverage if I was just able to get them to agree this week to um to that partnership or sign that partnership that would be massive but there's probably going to be some elements to that right so there might be um from an admin perspective there might be some contracts that you need to sign from a communication perspective you might need to set up that call or that meeting from a deep work perspective you might need to have to put the sales presentation together um and I've just put this client's bucket because there's going to be a bunch of stuff that fall into actually just serving your clients but the reason I do this I learned this from um a book called Deep work by Cal newort and in that book he talks about the science of task switching and there's a lot of research that suggests our brain isn't good at task switching and every time we switch a task it's almost like resetting our brain and we have to start from scratch I. E there's no momentum um and it actually creates a lot of cognitive load on our brain so the T the part of our brain that we use to do calls and communicate with people is different to the type of the part of our brain we use to do our deep work present to build the presentation or in your case it might be to do the animation or to design the thing or whatever it is right and so it's really important that we schedule this time based on our energy and our Focus rather than just what we think is important and so this

is where time blocking comes in you might have heard about this before but you can see this calendar looks crazy but really what's just happening this isn't my calendar by the way I've taken this as a screenshot um and what this person has done here is they've really kind of got this morning Focus time so this would be their deep work and then they you see here that they've got meetings here in the afternoon on most days so they know that most of their meetings that they have they're better off around lunchtime or just after lunch they know maybe that's when they communicate best that's when they've got the most energy or that's when they feel most like talking to people maybe they don't in the morning right cuz they've got this kind of personal time and this focused time so again this is not a prescription it doesn't have to be this prescriptive but this way you're ensuring that your time blocks are within these kind of categories if you the way I imagine it is like your brain is kind of resonating at different frequencies and you need different levels of concentration to do calls than you need to do deep work and you've probably had this experience yourself you probably be working on something really just getting into the flow and then someone comes in or the phone rings or an email pops up or a slack notification and you get interrupted and you start communicating and then you try and get back into that flow and it's not quite the same feeling and the reason for that is because you've switched into a different gear in your brain a different way that your brain operates right and we all take these things for granted we all take talking and writing and doing all these different things for granted but if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective they are evolutionary skills and they're things that we have to learn to do when we're younger to read and write um and using our imagination we didn't have to learn to do that was just something that our brain did automatically so that creativity that deep work is using a different part of your brain than reading or writing or kind of responding to emails so it's really important that we segregate that and for me personally I actually just put my phone on airplane mode and I close everything down so if I'm in deep work and I'm designing something or I'm recording something like this then I can't be disturbed so that's kind of the principles of the weekly planner and that's how I do it and time block this out and what I want to share with you briefly is just the notion

template that I've linked to in the video down below so I can actually talk you through how um I plan my week and how this actually works in reality okay so this is the weekly planner and you can download a copy of this with the link below I've got some instructions here which just tells you to start by capturing all the things that are on your mind so that goes back to this um the first thing that we talked about here which is the brain dump right getting everything out of your head and so I do this on a notion document because I like to share it with my team and I like everyone to be able to see it kind of give their two cents on what's important this week and I will literally just get everything down that I can think of sometimes the way I categorize this I just do it um by adding another title here so I could just you know type something like uh personal don't worry this is all my personal stuff hey this is stuff relating to clients this is stuff related to um our website or whatever project it is and just brain dump everything first and then kind of move things around and categorize it and that's where our chunking comes in then I'll ask this question like what is the one thing that we really want to achieve and again this comes back to this kind of crucial question and I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough spending time really thinking about where is The Leverage here what are the things that we're really going to focus our time and our energy on and sometimes our money because we're actually paying other people to do these things as well and this is again Rel in relation to our business like if we did this one thing in our business right now what is the thing that would really catapult us towards that 12month goal or that 12-month vision and then I would just basically these questions are to help me justify and I might do this with my team I might just do it on my own but I have to explain like how will this one thing actually move me closer to my goals right so for example something that we did recently I'll give you some examples as we go along something we did recently as we launched a workshop so um I might say something like have 10 uh paying members to our next Workshop right if we just had that as an outcome if that was the one thing that we achieved this week i' be really happy how will it move Us close to our goal as well you know it will allow us to test a new acquisition strategy as an example that's not how you spell acquisition um then why have I chosen this is number one goal it's just like more justification more um sense checking that this thing is the right thing to be focusing on and then underneath here I'll just put actions I've just I've got I've kind of given some examples here so you can edit these and I've shown in red in um Amber and in yellow I've just kind of done these in terms of like a bit of a priority but you don't have to do this again very much recommendation very much of framework rather than a prescription but I'll just I'll type everything down here that I can think of so you know may be like send email to database might be like um get uh send offer to Partners all the things sorry I can't type today it's cuz I'm trying to talk and type at the same time um send offers to Partners Etc and then I might just drag that and be like well that's a communication thing right so that's going to live down here replace that uh that email thing is more of an admin thing although I've got to write the email so maybe that's an action that goes into deep work and I'll just put this all down it just helps so much CU When I block out deep work in my diary and I look at this one thing and I think right I'm going to do some deep work this morning what am I going to do well what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on that email to the database cuz I know if I send that out it's going to be massive so if I can spend half an hour 90 minutes writing that email and it's a really great email and it gets people to sign up or building the landing page or whatever it is then that's going to be Mass massive leverage right so it's worth my time and I'm going to block it out and I know I'm going to do it here so I don't just get up open my email and then all of a sudden I've got a bunch of client requests or I've got something that crops up and before I know it I'm being sucked off into somebody else's priorities and my day just starts totally randomly based on somebody else's priorities I'm being intentional with how I spend my time I know this is difficult right I know it's difficult when you've got client demands when you got bills to pay when you got teams to feed but it's so important if you can make this mindset shift it's absolutely massive and it will change the trajectory of your business and so we just repeat this um so we then have the second thing if there's something else we want to achieve this week and the third thing uh and then at the end of the week we just have a little recap did we achieve these things if not why not if we did how do we do that and how can we replicate that next week what did we learn so we very much believe in our

team and our business and I very much believe that there is no such thing as failure and I know that sounds so cliche but there's only two outcomes that you can get from running your business right or trying these things you either win I you get the outcome you want or you learn something like we tried all these things and it didn't work great well we just narrow down a bunch of ways that don't work to try and achieve this outcome or we tried to achieve this outcome but we got sucked into all these other priorities okay great well now we know that that's a danger or that's a thing so as long as you're learning so every single week at the end of the week we ask our team what were your wins and what we learned and we do this for our clients as well and it's really important because sometimes you don't appreciate how much closer you're moving to your goals you don't even appreciate what you've achieved over a week or a month because you're so busy working your business you're not taking that time to look back and reflect so hopefully this video was valuable for you that was our week planner just a little insight into how I organize my week run my business and how we help creative agencies and creative Studios to go from disorganized running around everybody else's priorities to actually focusing on themselves focusing on the things that are going to move the needle and actually building the business that they want to build rather than continually building their client

business don't forget if you want a copy of the week planner you can click the link below until next time my name is mattum I'll see you soon